Race and United States immigration policy: from criminalization to deportation

Despite a longstanding body of research disproving links between migration and crime, the United States has a well-established history of passing legislation based on the pretense of immigrant criminality. While few immigrant groups to the country have remained untouched by such stereotypes, those racialized as Hispanic and Black have borne the brunt of these tropes, which are distinctly shaped by broader white supremacist hierarchies. Reinvigorated in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in response to an influx of asylum seekers from the Caribbean, the racialized image of the “criminal alien” was central to the development of punitive immigration policy throughout the late twentieth century—policy which has contributed to exceptional rates of detention and deportation in the decades since. Drawing from targeted qualitative research on the everyday impacts of the “aggravated felony” category of deportable criminal convictions, as well as more general study of the “criminalization-to-deportation pipeline” of which this category is a part—this chapter examines specific mechanisms of immigration policy and enforcement that result in the severe and unequal punishment of immigrants with criminal records. It elucidates the central role of race in the development of these policies, as well as the reproduction of racial inequality in their implementation. Ultimately, it argues that punitive immigration policy must be addressed intersectionally, as part of the broader systems of racial control in which it is rooted.