Abstract
The past few decades have witnessed a harshening of borders among migrant-receiving countries around the world. This shift has been characterized by the increased intertwining of systems of migration and criminal justice, often undergirded by a stated need to root out non-citizen “criminals”. Scholars have examined the mechanisms and impacts of these developments in various contexts—perhaps most extensively in the United States, the country with the highest rates of incarceration and deportation in the world. Katja Franko’s The Crimmigrant Other is a fine contribution to this growing body of literature, with a rich and nuanced account of the everyday workings and rationalizations that allow for the increasingly punitive treatment of migrants in Europe—at both national and supra-national levels. Drawing on document analysis, observation, and interviews conducted from 2011 to 2017, Franko analyzes Norway’s unlikely rise to becoming a top deporter among European countries, as well as the evolution of Frontex from EU border control enabler to crime control agency—depicting the rise of “bordered penality” even in European contexts ostensibly concerned with humanitarianism. She proposes the figure of the “crimmigrant other” as a constitutive tool that justifies the punitive border control of rich countries in an increasingly unequal world.
Weaving together legal and political developments, official statements and directives, and interviews with police and practitioners, Franko’s empirical contribution provides the basis for astute theoretical analysis that delves to the heart of belonging and membership—concepts made increasingly tenuous in late-modern society. The figure of the crimmigrant other is posited as a “symbol of justified social exclusion” that turns “issues of global privilege into issues of morality” (p. 19). This is particularly valuable in the national and supra-national contexts examined by Franko, where entrenched societal values around humanitarianism are confronted by policies with qualitatively inhumane outcomes—such as imprisonment and banishment for crimes of poverty, exportation of detained individuals to countries known for human rights abuses, and “deterrence”-based strategies of border enforcement that allow for untold numbers of migrant deaths. By framing migration control around a need to protect citizens (and “good migrants”) from the crimes of the villainous crimmigrant other, governments and enforcement agencies obscure the inherently problematic nature of borders in a hyper-unequal, post-colonial world.
In Norway, the crimmigrant other is personified by “mobile property offenders”, a category of rulebreaker for which penalties have increased over the past several years, largely affecting Eastern European males, many from long-demonized Roma populations. Supported by societal views of Roma migration as a “wave” that requires a “crackdown” (p. 102), Norway has seen a rapid intertwining of criminal and immigration enforcement over the past decade both procedurally and culturally—producing what Franko refers to as a “deportation machine” (p. 88). Often associated with nationalist politics and retributive penal cultures like those of the USA under the Trump administration, such developments appear out of place in Norway, a welfare state known for its humanitarian penal culture. Yet Franko demonstrates how the specter of the crimmigrant other has effectively revitalized the country’s criminal justice system, raising migration enforcement to a central place of focus for police work. In primary accounts presented by Franko, officers express ambivalence about duties such as waking migrant families in the middle of the night to detain them for deportation, as well as the effects of intensified immigration enforcement on community trust in the police. Yet for many, doubts are assuaged by beliefs that those being deported are chiefly culturally incorrigible criminals eager to suckle from the “honey pot” of Norway’s welfare state. In this way, the aggressive policing of economic and national borders is framed as the necessary protection of affluence and welfare provisions for citizens. The state’s humanitarian mission, and the belongness of its citizens, are reaffirmed.
In the case of Frontex—the European Border and Coast Guard Agency established in 2004 to coordinate border control efforts among EU members states—the crimmigrant other is embodied in the human smuggler. This ideal type—rhetorically connected to organized crime—largely denotes men from the global South paid to assist migrants in their attempted journeys to Europe through the Mediterranean Sea. While migrant death in the Mediterranean—“arguably the most fatal border in the world” (p. 144)—is irrevocably related to aggressive border enforcement by the EU and its member nations, Franko describes how blame is effectively outsourced to the valuable scapegoat of the crimmigrant other. With organized criminal smugglers held responsible for migrant death, Frontex’s ramped up border enforcement is justified. The aim of dispelling smugglers is even made humanitarian—as a way of protecting innocent “good migrants” from these dangerous predators—a twisted leap that somehow casts bordered penality as the humane response to modern migration. The deployment of Frontex to confront the common enemy of the criminal immigrant also serves to further crystalize the solidarity of EU member states and the importance of this supra-national citizenship. Like those with police in Norway, interviews with Frontex agents reveal moral ambiguity; yet this discomfort is lessened by the belief that one is “fighting crime” rather than simply maintaining the boundaries of vastly unequal global social order.
While useful as a concept, some scholars have worried that uncritical use of the term “crimmigration” may unintentionally support negative (and unfounded) stereotypes linking migration with crime. Franko avoids this pitfall by emphasizing not only the socially constructed character of the “crimmigrant other”, but also of the transgressions this folk devil is accused of. Despite long histories of migration and mobility among many of the cultures and regions on which the enforcement of these transgressions is enforced, Franko explains how “illicit (often newly) acts done by migrants for survival provide an almost inexhaustible resource for the production of deportability and alienage” (p. 166), allowing northern penal states to construct “a world where large numbers are illegal” (p. 124). Franko emphasizes citizenship as the key factor in creating this divide, by officially enhancing existing criminal enforcement and penalties for migrants. Yet the central importance of citizenship is made less convincing without more discussion of racial and ethnic inequality, which are largely deemed outside the breadth of the book. While Franko refers to the post-colonial context in which today’s bordered penality occurs, more discussion of how this history and the racial imaginaries it entailed continue to shape migration and images of the “crimmigrant other” would be welcome. Rather than discounting the importance of race, the contemporary treatment of groups like the Roma people in Norway—officially deemed “white” but othered all the same—would seem to present an opportunity for further investigation into the complex ways that race, culture, and borders interact.
Despite this, The Crimmigrant Other is a timely and insightful contribution to the field. Franko draws on rich empirical findings to demonstrate the rationalization of punitive border control within existing humanitarian frameworks. Findings support her main theoretical argument, that the image of immigrant as criminal moves migration from a question of inequality to a question of morality—a switch that justifies retributive strategies of migration management and reinforces the belonginess of citizens. In this way, through the inferred immorality of the migrant, the problematic nature of citizenship in a deeply stratified world is obscured.