Abstract
Charis E Kubrin, Marjorie S Zatz and Ramiro Martínez (eds), Punishing Immigrants: Policy, Politics and Injustice, New York University Press: New York, 2012; 263 pp. (including index): 9780814749036, $21.60 (pbk), $67.50 (cloth)
With Punishing Immigrants the editors want to move beyond the satisfactorily addressed questions on the connection between immigration and crime in the USA (p. 1). Whereas there is ample empirical evidence on the fact that, unlike what is often portrayed by politicians and perceived by the general public, immigrants are not more crime-prone than non-immigrants, the editors underline the necessity of exploring new questions in the field of immigration control. Punishing Immigrants fully meets this goal: the nine chapters of the book broaden the focus of ongoing scholarly discussions by raising issues relevant to law and society, immigration and refugee policy, and victimization as well as crime.
The chapters of Punishing Immigrants are organized around two central themes or, as the editors put it, two ‘critical areas’: (1) the unanticipated and hidden consequences of immigration policies and practices; (2) the nuanced and layered realities of immigrants’ lives as a result of varying complexities surrounding immigration and crime, law, and victimization. Both themes are situated within the larger context of immigration and social control, with a particular focus on the new modes of control that can be distinguished in the post-9/11 era. The book is recommended for researchers, persons working within the justice system, and policy makers.
Although the editors are not presenting it as such, Punishing Immigrants ties in with the growing body of literature on the process of crimmigration: the increased merger of immigration law and criminal law in both substance and procedure (Aliverti, 2012; Chacón, 2012; Legomsky, 2007; McLeod, 2012; Miller, 2005; Sklansky, 2012; Stumpf, 2006). The volume’s central conversation on the impact of policies and practices driven primarily by immigration control goals provides an important addition to the crimmigration literature by partially filling in some of the existing gaps in the debate.
The crimmigration trend has mostly been studied by Anglo-Saxon scholars applying a predominantly legal-theoretical approach. This approach has provided very important insights with regard to the process of crimmigration and its legal consequences for individual immigrants. Despite many insights and gains made by current literature on crimmigration, more work is needed to tease out and explain this dynamic process. Also, most of the current research has tended to focus on general trends rather than probe divergence and variation; to understand further the public and political drivers of crimmigration, as well as its consequences for communities and society as a whole, it is necessary to engage in a broader debate also including empirical insights from political science, sociology, criminology, psychology, and anthropology (Van der Leun and Van der Woude, 2013). Due to the lack of empirical detail, there is still a major gap between theory and empirical studies in this field: current explanations of the process of crimmigration seem to be too limited. The research presented in Punishing Immigrants offers a great starting point to start closing this gap. By often drawing from unique empirical data, the various contributions to the book not only underline the importance of insights from these fields when it comes to understanding and further theorizing the criminalization of migration in the broadest sense of the word, but they also show that there is still much research ground that needs to be covered in this area.
Whereas the book intends to focus on the two critical areas mentioned above, it is divided into three different sections: (1) new modes of control; (2) consequences for individuals and communities; (3) layered realities. Each section consists of three chapters, with a separate introduction and concluding chapter written by the editors.
Although not identified as a critical area, the first section of the book forms an indispensable foundation for the other two sections. By discussing recent laws and policies designed to control immigrants and immigration more generally, the section provides insight into the federal and local drivers that have led to a nationwide re-visioning of immigration enforcement. In terms of content and focus, this section resonates most closely with the crimmigration literature. In the opening chapter, Welch draws from criminological and sociological literature on moral panics and risk societies to find explanations for the growing public and political concerns about terrorism and immigration. Welch claims that the concerns with regard to these issues have escalated from the stage of a moral panic into feelings of permanent threat and risk. The chapter not only offers an interesting theoretical explanation for the growing need for enhanced control in these two areas, but also provides comparative insight by focusing both on the United States and Australia. Provine, Varsanyi, Lewis, and Decker explore the response of US police leaders to the movement to devolve federal authority to enforce immigration laws at the local level. Within the crimmigration debate, this phenomenon is also known as the domestication of immigration. As the authors show, the growing tendency to make immigration control a shared responsibility between federal and local law enforcement officials seems to put local police officers in a rather awkward position since it can endanger the fragile relationships that are of great value to community policing. The chapter written by Sinema evaluates the infamous case of Arizona, a case that gets a lot of attention throughout the book. Sinema traces the legislative process of anti-immigration legislation in the Copper State and convincingly highlights how anti-immigration legislation in Arizona has not materialized overnight, but rather was carefully crafted and implemented over the course of the years by a coalition of state elected officials and national activists.
The second section of the book further explores the consequences of the criminalization of migration for individuals and communities, the firstly defined critical area. Cruz reviews the current due process protections afforded to noncitizens in criminal proceedings and the impact current practices have on immigrant communities. By analyzing the federal criminal prosecutions of undocumented workers in Postville, and the related experiences of Arizona criminal defense attorneys assisting noncitizen defendants, the author illustrates how feelings of guilt arising from an unlawful status affect the choices and interactions of noncitizens with the criminal courts. The confounding effects of deportation are central to the chapter by Dingeman-Cerda and Bibler Coutin. The authors are able to give a unique insight into the diverse experiences of Salvadoran men who have been deported after living in the USA for many years, by presenting the results of 60 interviews held with Salvadoran deportees. The respondents report how their deportation has inflicted violence upon themselves and their families through the process of removal and stigmatization. Drawing on the concept of social suffering the authors subsequently show how deportation, not only removes ‘unwanted’ others, but also de facto turns US citizens into stateless persons. The last chapter in this second section, ‘Race, land and forced migration in Darfur’ offers an interesting perspective on the aftermath of the Darfur genocide. Rymond-Richmond and Hagan aim to understand the hidden consequences and complexities of surviving a genocidal attack and being forced to take residence in a refugee camp. Although these authors also had access to a unique amount of data—1136 surveys, open-ended questions and interviews with Darfur refugees living in 20 refugee camps—the chapter remains rather descriptive and seems to be lacking theoretical depth, making it one of the weaker contributions to the central narrative of the volume. Nevertheless, the chapter rightfully draws attention to a rather understudied area in which international relations, law, immigration studies, and sociology come together.
The third section of the book explores to what extent the consequences and vulnerabilities that come afore in the second section of the book are structured along gender, racial, and class lines, and the strains they create for individuals and communities. This final section of Punishing Immigrants particularly stands out for its interdisciplinary focus as well as for the innovate nature of the central research questions. Sociologists Vélez and Lyons explore whether the often found negative relationship between recent immigration and neighborhood crime is limited to (or enhanced in) economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. By comparing the relationship between immigration and crime in gateway cities and non-gateway cities, their findings show how only in cities with traditions of immigrant settlement the influx of recent immigrants helps to revitalize the otherwise criminogenic conditions of neighborhood disadvantage. The importance of territorial context is also central to the chapter by Bertoline and Lalla. By identifying territorial economic features influencing the individual choices of immigrants in gaining access to and selecting schools in Italy and by comparing between native Italians, first- and second-generation immigrants, the authors find convincing support for their theoretically grounded assumption that immigration status influences young people in different ways and to different degrees depending on the characteristics of the territory where they live. The last chapter of the third section deals with consequences of hurricane Katrina that have not been discussed so far. Here the authors call attention to the devastating effects of Katrina on the lives of the mostly African American immigrant laborers living in New Orleans who, due to the flooding of their homes, were displaced throughout the USA. As a result, many Latino immigrants moved to New Orleans in order to meet the urgent need for workers to rebuild the city. Based on qualitative fieldwork, the authors show the hardships the Latino immigrants face and how their unique set of vulnerabilities makes them particularly susceptible to victimization in the highly racialized and criminal context of post-Katerina New Orleans.
Migration is par excellence a topic for scholarly research that requires a transnational and interdisciplinary approach. Whereas Punishing Immigrants fully meets this last requirement, the transnational focus could have been more prominent, especially since the editors explicitly claim to ‘interweave US and global patterns, concern and reactions to the movement of people and labor across borders’ (p. 3). Having said this, mentioning the limited transnational scope of the book as a shortcoming feels like undue nitpicking, since the book is of great value to non-US scholars as well.
As in the USA, political and public debates in many European countries also tend to overemphasize only a very narrow aspect of the immigration–crime nexus by only addressing the alleged connection between immigration and crime. Take for instance the case of the Netherlands. During the past decades the debate on immigration and crime has developed into a very one-sided discourse in which the criminal involvement of migrants as well as the presence of large numbers of immigrants residing illegally in the country is emphasized. As a result of this one-sidedness, for a long time, researchers in the Netherlands have primarily focused on researching the high crime figures of certain migrant groups by illustrating the overrepresentation of these groups in crime statistics. Interestingly enough, other questions that are directly tied in with the focus of their research—in the sense that it might shine another light on their results—let alone questions that would broaden the focus beyond the crime–immigration nexus, have been all too easily dismissed. Across the research community the long-term consensus was that studying overrepresentation in crime would be more important than for instance looking into potential police bias or discrimination causing this overrepresentation. Spurred by international and national discussions on racial profiling and reports by NGOs raising concerns about ethnic profiling by the Dutch police (Amnesty International, 2013; OSJI, 2009, 2013) the research agendas seem to have changed. In studying ethnic profiling, attention is paid not only to the question whether it is actually taking place, but even more so to the perception of ethnic profiling and the effects of such perception on the lives of individuals and their communities, as well as on their relations with the criminal justice apparatus as a whole.
In other words, in the Netherlands—as in many other European countries dealing with immigration anxieties and pressures (Barker, 2012)—there seems to be an urge towards opening up the more traditional discussions on immigration by including other disciplinary and national perspectives. Therefore, the publication of Punishing Immigrants seems to be right on time to offer important new insights and research questions for scholars worldwide working in the field of immigration, enabling not only more research into this globally relevant area, but also more comparative research. Perhaps the results of some of these comparative studies could be addressed in a second edition of Punishing Immigrants.