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Policing Transversal Borders

Sharon Pickering and Leanne Weber

in The Borders of Punishment: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Exclusion

This chapter begins with a discussion of border control and transversal borders. It then examines how Australian immigration authorities have become more police-like under pressure to secure borders. ... More

This chapter begins with a discussion of border control and transversal borders. It then examines how Australian immigration authorities have become more police-like under pressure to secure borders. It argues that Australian police are increasingly occupied in migration policing roles and that other government and non-government agencies are being drawn into wider migration policing networks. In each context, border policing developments at both the external and internal borders are considered.Less

Policing Australia’s Borders: New Terrains of Sovereign Practice

Anne McNevin

in Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political

This chapter focuses on the highly restrictive and punitive treatment of asylum seekers adopted in Austrialia in recent years. Why has so much effort gone into border policing in this context? It is ... More

This chapter focuses on the highly restrictive and punitive treatment of asylum seekers adopted in Austrialia in recent years. Why has so much effort gone into border policing in this context? It is argued that policing Australia's borders has served to reinvigorate a particular notion of citizenship and national identity made vulnerable amidst anxieties about Australia's neoliberal trajectory. Border policing creates for domestic consumption an image of a state in control: a state with the power and will to defend its sovereign borders in spite of its integration with global governance regimes that defend the right to asylum. This image is precisely the opposite of the one generated by decades of neoliberal reform. In the latter case, painful structural adjustments have been justified as being the result of integration with global governance structures against whose liberalizing drive there is no rational defense. Thus, even where irregular migrants are not employed as a source of essential labor, border policing remains implicated in strategies to contain opposition to the advance of global capital.Less

Human Trafficking and Border Control in the Global South

Maggy Lee

in The Borders of Punishment: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Exclusion

This chapter examines the dominant human trafficking discourse, norms, logics, and forms of border control that have been extended from countries of destination in the North to countries of origin in ... More

This chapter examines the dominant human trafficking discourse, norms, logics, and forms of border control that have been extended from countries of destination in the North to countries of origin in the South. It addresses the following questions: How does the dominant trafficking discourse become dispersed and institutionalized, especially through international agencies and non-state actors? How can we make sense of the novel alliances and power configurations that international agencies and non-governmental organizations bring into play in border policing in the Asian context? And how can the development of a ‘peripheral vision’ of trafficking and border control inform a truly global criminology of (im)mobility?Less

The Citizen and the Criminal: The Overreach of Immigration Enforcement

Patrisia Macías-Rojas

in From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America

New enforcement targets and deployment of more border patrol to Arizona-Sonora border communities has inadvertently involved agents more directly in local crime control. This is the flip side to the ... More

New enforcement targets and deployment of more border patrol to Arizona-Sonora border communities has inadvertently involved agents more directly in local crime control. This is the flip side to the more familiar scenario of local police and sheriffs who carry out immigration enforcement. This chapter considers the overreach of enforcement priorities and what some refer to as “net widening” in predominantly Latino border communities where border residents, mostly Mexican American citizens and legal permanent residents, are routinely arrested, prosecuted, sentenced, and, in some cases, deported for violations of immigration law.Less

Policing and Security

Steve Peers

in EU Justice and Home Affairs Law: Volume II: EU Criminal Law, Policing, and Civil Law

The effective prevention and investigation of crime, particularly violent crime, is a basic desire in every society. But in this area there is an acute tension between civil liberties and security ... More

The effective prevention and investigation of crime, particularly violent crime, is a basic desire in every society. But in this area there is an acute tension between civil liberties and security objectives. It is obvious that the greater the level of supervision and control of the public, the easier it is to prevent crime and to investigate it more effectively. Yet, even putting aside their cost and practicality, such measures erode the extent of freedom in society. There is as a result a continuing debate over the right balance to be struck between the two objectives. This chapter focuses on law enforcement within the European Union, beginning with an examination of the institutional framework as it has developed over time, an overview of measures adopted, and an examination of the relevant issues of legal competence, territorial scope, human rights, and overlaps with non-JHA EU law. It then analyses in turn EU measures concerning crime prevention, the collection and exchange of data relating to policing, other forms of cooperation between national law enforcement authorities, the operation of Europol (the EU’s law enforcement agency), and cross-border police operations. Finally, it examines the issues of administrative cooperation and EU funding and EU external relations in the field of policing law.Less

Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political

Anne McNevin

in Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political

This chapter establishes the theoretical groundwork for the book as a whole. It asks who irregular migrants are and why this particular designation of status has so much to reveal about contemporary ... More

This chapter establishes the theoretical groundwork for the book as a whole. It asks who irregular migrants are and why this particular designation of status has so much to reveal about contemporary dynamics of citizenship. It argues that irregular migrants are brought into being in relation to particular constructions of citizenship. In recent decades, this co-constitution reflects a growing crisis of identity against the backdrop of globalization. As migration becomes more hierarchical, we are witnessing the illegalization of certain kinds of migrants as a bulwark against citizens' vulnerabilities. The chapter contends that both border policing against irregular migrants and the strategies employed by irregular migrants to contest their “illegal” status add a crucial dimension to the question of citizenship's future.Less

The Post–Civil Rights Borderland: The Arizona-Sonora Border

Patrisia Macías-Rojas

in From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America

Arizona has played a historic role in national “law and order” policymaking and immigration politics. Today it has some of the highest levels of criminal arrest, prosecution, and sentencing for ... More

Arizona has played a historic role in national “law and order” policymaking and immigration politics. Today it has some of the highest levels of criminal arrest, prosecution, and sentencing for immigration offenses. Yet it is also home to one of the most dynamic border- and immigrant-rights movements in the country. This chapter explores linkages among civil rights, mass incarceration, and immigration enforcement to better explain the local political and economic context in which the Department of Homeland Security has diffused federal criminal enforcement priorities and institutionalized “prosecutorial” approaches to migration that aggressively punish while safeguarding “victims’ rights.”Less

Victims and Culprits: Deportation as a Pipeline to Prison

Patrisia Macías-Rojas

in From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America

The criminal alien mandate requires that border agents direct enforcement resources toward high-priority targets, principally those with a criminal record. Rather than processing apprehended ... More

The criminal alien mandate requires that border agents direct enforcement resources toward high-priority targets, principally those with a criminal record. Rather than processing apprehended undocumented migrants according to explicit “racial” and “national” criteria, agents now distinguish between victims and criminals. Focusing on Border Patrol–migrant interactions, this chapter examines how enforcement priorities rooted in the Criminal Alien Program have transformed apprehension and deportation practices on the border.Less

Westphalian Culture of Border Control: From Maturity to Contestation

in Cultures of Border Control: Schengen and the Evolution of European Frontiers

This chapter discusses the key assumptions and related practices characterizing the Westphalian culture of border control in Europe. It concentrates on the developments in the post-World War II ... More

This chapter discusses the key assumptions and related practices characterizing the Westphalian culture of border control in Europe. It concentrates on the developments in the post-World War II period. The “Westphalian culture of border control” has been inextricably connected with the vicissitudes of the modern state system. The Westphalian territorial principles were formally regarded as fundamental prerequisites for both internal and international peace and stability. The Iron Curtain functioned as a tool of collective defense. It was an imposing figure in Europe's political landscape. The major threats to Westphalia emerging in the three decades after the end of World War II were kept under control. The effects of immigration, “Euro-sclerosis,” terrorism and cross-border police cooperation on the border control domain in Europe are finally elaborated.Less

Ethnography of the State

Alison Mountz

in Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border

This chapter examines the contingent nature of the state’s response to human smuggling. It traces the daily struggles of civil servants charged with policing borders and exposes the political nature ... More

This chapter examines the contingent nature of the state’s response to human smuggling. It traces the daily struggles of civil servants charged with policing borders and exposes the political nature of this work. It shows that the movements of asylum seekers or refugee claimants, despite their decreasing numbers and the increasingly aggressive legal practices to exclude them, often will translate into crisis. The state is performative, and it excels at the performance of crisis in border policing. Such performances increase the vulnerability of those seeking protection, as they often create situations when enough political will amasses to move policy agendas forward. The more visible the arrival of asylum seekers, the greater the crisis, and the greater its potential to advance policy in the name of securitization over protection.Less

A Vigil at the End of the World

Kathryn Abrams

in Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between

An account of a vigil held by undocumented immigrants "at the end of the world," in the Arizona desert on a march to an immigration detention center, reveals how the voicing of emotional anguish ... More

An account of a vigil held by undocumented immigrants "at the end of the world," in the Arizona desert on a march to an immigration detention center, reveals how the voicing of emotional anguish contributes to a politics of bodily extremity used to engage the state. Immigration activists deploy tactics of historical human rights campaigns, like the bodily protests of Gandhi or Cesar Chavez, in order to contest state power. Similarly, the meaning of the vigil is shaped by the willed endurance of the early Christian martyrs and the "sacred suffering" of the enslaved invoked by antebellum abolitionists. Yet its ultimate target is secular: the Department of Homeland Security and, ultimately, the president. The most transformative claim of these activists denies the need for divine intercession: despite their lack of formal status, undocumented immigrants can make their case for redress of grievance directly to the political leaders of the nation.Less