Abstract
The past four decades have witnessed a penal upsurge in U.S. crime control and criminal justice practices that have resulted in mass incarceration. With only 5% of the world population, but having about 25% of its prison population, the United States has become the world leader in incarcerating its citizens. In more recent years, many jurisdictions across the United States have also embarked upon a new journey of governing immigration, which has been characterized by an expansion of punitive measures to govern recent immigration. This includes a heightened level of border patrol, a growing involvement of the criminal justice system in immigration control, and a proliferation of detention and deportation for undocumented immigrants and other immigration offenders. The tendency to criminalize immigration has spawned the establishment of a complex crimmigration apparatus, which enmeshes the immigration system and the criminal justice system (Stumpf, 2006).
The underlying reasons for the unprecedented punitive turn in both crime control and immigration control, or the relationship between mass incarceration and crimmigration, are addressed meticulously and eloquently by Patrisia Macías-Rojas in From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America. She argues that the coupling of two penal institutions—mass incarceration and crimmigration – can be best explained by practical and mundane concerns such as prison space. Initiated by the Criminal Alien Program in the Federal government, the punitive turn in immigration enforcement has been stimulated by the impetus to purge noncitizens from dangerously overcrowded jails and prisons. The so-called prison-bed shortage—a result of hyperincarceration—calls for demands to relieve prison overcrowding, thereby precipitating a punitive turn in immigration enforcement and prompting its criminalization.
As the immigration issue has become an urgent concern to both the public and politicians, Macías-Rojas provides a timely and innovative account for the punitive turn in immigration control, or “the crimmigration crisis.” The book presents a groundbreaking account for why the punitive turn has emerged and operated in the realm of immigration control by bonding its inception and evolution to the emergency conditions posed by mass incarceration (of Black and Latino/a youth) (p. 75). Drawing upon the street-level evidence on border policing and other immigration enforcement practices, Macías-Rojas is skeptical of the rhetorical conflation of immigration with terrorism and national security, forcefully arguing that “the most salient feature of border security is not counterterrorism, but a blend of immigration and crime control that began well before the events of September 11” (p. 8). On the ground level, she observes that a typical day of Border Patrol agents is not checking and impeding chemical weapons, which is the goal claimed in the national security and terrorism campaign and legislation, but “prosecuting illegal entry and reentry or deporting legal permanent residents, with the support of ICE, on criminal grounds” (p. 8). The border enforcement practice has little bearing upon the perceived defense against possible national threat or foreign intrusion; instead, it is an expansion of the domestic crime control net to the domain of immigration.
According to Macías-Rojas, the priority of crime control in the realm of immigration enforcement stems from a swarming prison system in the wake of hyperincarceration, pushing agents of immigration enforcement to target noncitizens with convictions for deportation, and thus freeing up prison beds. Basing her argument on the field research conducted at the Arizona-Sonora borderland, Macías-Rojas asks readers to rethink the link between the harsh, punitive immigration enforcement and its stated and publically held objective of protecting national security and preventing terrorism. She asserts that the rise of punitiveness in immigration control and new immigration regime lies in “the prison-bed crisis” surfacing from the post-civil rights “war on crime.” This view challenges prevailing beliefs that crimmigration has emerged and developed in response to increased terrorism and a perceived threat to national security after 11 September 2001.
This book extends traditional democracy-at-work scholarship on the upswing of crimmigration that suggests the penal control over immigration is a sociolegal project nourished and flourished in the midst of growing anti-immigrant sentiments and ethnoracial confrontation and enmity (Stewart et al., 2015). As Macías-Rojas shows throughout, punitive immigration enforcement is not only about consequences that encumber undocumented immigration or obstructs border crossing. Rather, with symbolic significance and collateral consequences, it operates to diffusely disrupt the settlement of “those who are already living in this country, those who dare to claim rights, and those who are transforming the demographic and political landscape of the United States, many of whom are not ‘foreigners’” (p. 171). This finding again suggests that we need to think beyond the instrumental utility of crimmigration and attend to its social role and cultural significance.
Further, Macías-Rojas draws attention to the undeniable role of racial and ethnic antagonism and tension in contouring the crimmigration field in the post-civil rights era. Due to a remarkable disproportion of Blacks and Hispanics ensnared in mass incarceration and crimmigration, it is impossible to eschew the impact of race and ethnicity on the build-up of penal regimes. She argues “the post-civil rights crackdown on crime particularly targeted African Americans through disparate sentencing and fueled a need to pull noncitizens out of regular prisons in order to create space for newly criminalized people of color” (p. 3). Taken together, Macías-Rojas contends that the punitive turn in immigration enforcement, the implication of the criminal justice system into immigration control, the mass detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants (largely Hispanic), and the increasing provision of incarceration for immigration violations, are, at heart, derived from “post-civil rights challenges to the racially imbued edifice of citizenship and the legacy of unresolved struggles over the coexistence of slavery and democracy” (p. 171).
Notably, this book draws upon extended, rich ethnographical and historical data to weave a novel story to explain the rise of punitive immigration control. This research strategy enables Macías-Rojas to unfold the developmental trajectory of the crimmigration regime, while situating the pathway within both its historical context and the ground-level interactions among enforcement officers, immigrants, community residents, and immigrant-rights activists. Impressively, through undertaking years of meticulous participant observation, Macías-Rojas unveils a vivid and elaborate depiction of activities and a description of conversations among various actors in the field of immigration enforcement and border management. In the meantime, probing broader and developmental contexts of the current immigration enforcement patterns, she immersed herself in enormous amounts of historical data located piecemeal in museum archives, legislation recordings, and media reports. It is the juxtaposition of ethnographic data and archival evidence about legal changes and practices associated with immigration, which provides peculiar and distinctive insights into the underlying purpose and cause of the punitive turn in immigration enforcement and its connection to mass incarceration.
This book has some limitations that scholars of crimmigration may attempt to tackle. First, although it attends to the important role of mandates from the federal government in transforming local immigration enforcement practices on the border, this book hardly addresses the recursive effect of local enforcement practices on federal immigration policy, especially whether efforts against the punitive enforcement by local immigrant-rights advocates and activists succeeds in altering immigration policymaking at the federal level and, if so, in what ways it makes a difference (Campbell and Schoenfeld, 2013).
Second, this book focuses largely on the cooperative dimension of immigration enforcement agencies, local police departments, organizations of migrants’ advocacy, and the more (pp. 80–106). It seems, in terms of their functioning and impact, that there is an analogy between, and an infusion of, systems of immigration enforcement system and criminal justice. The two may compete against each other as each claims the ownership of “immigration enforcement.” Future research may explore the potential competitive facet of inter-agency/organization relationships, and interactions in the field of immigration governance and control (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992).
Third, in both the first and the last chapters, Macías-Rojas mentions that the underlying force leading to the punitive turn in immigration enforcement lies in the tension and contradiction between racial hierarchy and democracy. Nevertheless, she does not convincingly explain how power dynamics of racial relations in the post-civil rights era induce and uphold the crimmigration regime, especially during the policymaking process. She devotes a great deal of energy to developing a compelling narrative and, subsequently, neglects presenting an in-depth analysis of, and a theoretically based inquiry into, the ways those concepts of race, the penal state, citizenship, and democracy are refracted and refined in her observation.
These limitations aside, Macías-Rojas contributes to the research on crimmigration in particular, and punishment in general, by shedding light upon the emergence and evolvement of the punitive turn in immigration enforcement and the linkage between crimmigration and mass incarceration. She also highlights how two seemingly distinctive penal mechanisms may share some temporal or social relevance and reference. In that respect, this book is a must read for scholars of crimmigration and sociology of punishment as well as for other sociolegal scholars, political scientists, policymakers, community leaders, and activists who seek to understand penal control over immigration and the racial politics lying beneath this punitive turn.