Beyond the ‘Criminalisation’ of Immigrants: Critical Criminology and the Modern Deportation Regime

Despite a long-standing body of research contradicting stereotypes that link migration with crime, the image of immigrant as criminal has routinely been used to buttress punitive policy across the globe – particularly within the past 30 years. While the United States is the world leader in rates of deportation, recent decades have also seen renewed anti-immigrant sentiment, punitive immigration enforcement, and increased deportation in migrant-receiving countries around the world. Expanding on existing scholarship that disentangles the mechanisms through which migrants are affected by processes otherwise reserved for ‘criminals’, this article demonstrates how the concepts and perspectives of critical criminology are vital to a full understanding of the modern deportation regime. Beyond effects on migrants themselves, I argue that the current deportation regime is harmful for all potential subjects of social control, in its uncritical acceptance and implicit reification of broader societal notions of who and what is ‘criminal’.