Crimmigrant Nations

Resurgent Nationalism and the Closing of Borders

Robert Koulish, Maartje van der Woude

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780823287505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Immigration Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the distinction between domestic and international is increasingly blurred along with the line between internal and external borders, migrants—particularly people of color—have become emblematic of the hybrid threat both to national security and sovereignty and to safety and order inside the state. From building walls and fences, overcrowding detention facilities, and beefing up border policing and border controls, a new narrative has arrived that has migrants assume the risk for government-sponsored degradation, misery, and death. Crimmigrant Nations examines the parallel rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and right-wing populism in both the United States and Europe to offer an unprecedented look at this issue on an international level.Beginning with the fears and concerns of immigration that predate the election of Trump, the Brexit vote, and the signing and implementation of the Schengen Agreement, Crimmigrant Nations critically analyzes nationalist state policies in countries that have criminalized migrants and categorized them as threats to national security. Highlighting a pressing and perplexing problem facing the Western world in 2020 and beyond, this collection of essays illustrates not only how anti-immigrant sentiments and nationalist discourse are on the rise in various Western liberal democracies, but also how these sentiments are being translated into punitive and cruel policies and practices that contribute to a merger of crime control and migration control with devastating effects for those falling under its reach. Mapping out how these measures are taken, the rationale behind these policies, and who is subjected to exclusion as a result of these measures, Crimmigrant Nations looks beyond the level of the local or the national to the relational dynamics between different actors on different levels and among different institutions.

II

Crimmigration under Trump

4

The Terrorism of Everyday Crime

Juliet P. Stumpf

Two Tales

An asphalt path runs through a grassy swath alongside a quiet waterway in the Netherlands. The day is cloudy, softening the angles of the houses and trees across the water. A dark-haired teenage boy dressed in white approaches a blond boy in blue, who leans on crutches. The dark-haired boy attacks the boy with crutches, hitting and kicking him until he falls to the ground. The violence shocks; it shatters the scene.

What is the state’s role in responding to this incident? Which institutional system, aside from medical services, should deploy to address this violent interaction? Perhaps social services are appropriate: social workers trained in bullying or school officials experienced in violence among school-aged youth. What about the criminal justice system? After all, assault is a crime.

Other government institutions that harness state authority include immigration control agencies and national security forces like the military and anti-terrorism units. These last, however, seem inapposite to a teenage assault.

Now affix a label to the scene: “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches.”¹ Does that label bring the other institutions closer to the scenario? Does it make it a difference if the scene appears in a video stacked with two other anti-Muslim videos and disseminated via Twitter by Britain First, widely held to be an extremist neo-nationalist group.²

There is no reason to believe that immigration agents or national security forces would respond to this scenario. With the introduction, however, of the keywords “Muslim” and “migrant,” these authorities appear in the mind’s eye. They enter the frame.

In fact, the Netherland’s criminal justice system and social services network, but not its immigration or national security forces, responded to the encounter between the youths. Police arrested the attacker and the videographer, and the juvenile justice system took over. Despite the label affixed to the video, the police report never identified the first boy as either Muslim or an immigrant. According to media reports, both the assailant and victim were Dutch, and the Dutch authorities criminally prosecuted and convicted the assailant.³

That trio of anti-Muslim videos might have suffered the instant obscurity of most old tweets, the incident they depicted constituting a small part of a day’s work for the responsible Dutch institutions. However, on November 26, 2017, U.S. president Donald Trump retweeted the videos to his 44 million Twitter followers, provoking a national and international outcry protesting his elevation of anti-Muslim propaganda. Britain First’s characterizations of the videos and its motives in tweeting them became front-page news. News media described the little-known organization as a fringe group that “insists that white Christian civilization is under threat from Muslims.”⁴

Prime Minister Theresa May turned to Twitter to rebuke the American president. Politicians across the international and ideological spectrum joined her condemnation.⁵ In January 2018, President Trump canceled a planned visit to England, and in March 2018 the leaders of Britain First were convicted of hate crimes for harassing Muslims.⁶

The second story has a similar theme despite its different facts:

Interstate 10 runs straight as an arrow through the flatlands of Texas. When it reaches Van Horn it is about fifty kilometers (or thirty miles) north of the border, not far from Big Bend National Park. There, a deep culvert butts up against the highway. Looking down from the edge of the interstate, the cement bottom of the culvert is a steep nine-foot drop.

On the evening of November 19, 2017, two men lay at the bottom of the culvert. They had sustained severe gashes and multiple broken bones. One man did not survive the night. The other awoke with no memory of what had happened. Both were U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents.⁷

Which governmental authority is appropriate for addressing this incident? As before, the criminal justice system took this on. Are there, though, other government institutions that could be viewed as playing a role?

Culberson County sheriff Oscar Carrillo investigated, coordinating with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Their first task was to determine whether this was an accident or an attack. The investigators soon confirmed that no shots had been fired. The injuries were the result of some kind of blunt trauma.⁸

But between the start and end of the investigation, this criminal matter became something else. The day after the incident, the National Border Patrol Council, a nongovernmental organization, decried the “ambush” by “undocumented immigrants” who “likely used rocks to bash the agents.”⁹ National leaders added their voices. The same afternoon, Texas senator Ted Cruz called the “attack” a “stark reminder of the ongoing threat that an unsecure border poses to the safety of our communities and those charged with defending them.”¹⁰ Early in the evening, President Trump condemned the incident, describing the injured agent as “brutally beaten”¹¹ and tweeting out a promise to “seek out and bring to justice those responsible.” He ended his tweet with the reminder that the United States “will, and must, build the Wall” on the U.S. southern border with Mexico.¹²

Two weeks of intense investigation followed. On Sunday, November 29, 2017, Sheriff Carrillo told the Dallas Morning News that the agents likely ended up in the culvert as a result of an accident, not an assault.¹³ After 620 interviews, the FBI had found no evidence of an attack or scuffle.¹⁴ The men’s injuries, Carillo reported, were more consistent with a fall than an attack.¹⁵

Considered separately, these two tales—mysterious injuries in Texas, a retweet of anti-Muslim videos—have little in common. One took place in Texas, and the other half a continent and an ocean away. They occurred at different times, involved different conduct by different people, treated different kinds of harm.

What they share is the early and insistent mischaracterization of the facts and a narrative about national security threats rising inside national borders in the form of dangerous migrants. First, the interpretation of the events offered initially was wrong. The initial interpretations were based on assumptions, misunderstandings, and racial and religious bias. In Texas, the rush to judgment of undocumented immigrants beat out the necessarily slower process of investigating the truth. In England and Washington, D.C., Britain First’s characterizations of the videos, retweeted without comment by President Trump, were both inaccurate and intended to inflame anti-Muslim sentiment.

Second, both incidents became platforms for inflaming popular concern about national security. The Texas incident did not occur at the border, but rather fifty kilometers north of it. It took place next to an interior U.S. highway, not a border checkpoint. Yet Senator Ted Cruz’s comments about the Border Patrol incident emphasized that unsecured borders were a threat to American communities. President Trump directly tied the incident to the need for a physical international barrier—a wall—between the United States and Mexico.

Similarly, while President Trump did not comment on the anti-Muslim videos in his retweet, the White House soon clarified his message. Asked about the president’s decision to share the videos with his 44 million followers, White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders made a direct connection with national security. “The threat is real,” she declared, “what the president is talking about, the need for national security and military spending, those are very real things, there’s nothing fake about that.”¹⁶ Her statement drew an explicit connection between the anti-Muslim videos and the national security of the United States.

That there is a gap between the actual acts depicted in each incident and the way they were characterized is not unusual. What is significant is that the message cloaked common criminality as national security. Despite the characterization of these incidents by local, national, and international leaders as symbols and warning signs of threats to national security, there is no terrorist, no terrorist act, terrorist threat, border threat, or border breach in either incident. Although the incidents are draped with a penumbra of threat, none of the allegations and rhetoric surrounding the incidents points to an act of terrorism or intent to commit an act of terrorism or threaten national security.

Instead of terrorist activity or threats against the United States, both incidents appeared to involve actions that are criminal in nature. To be sure, some are serious crimes of violence. An assault on a Border Patrol agent, or a schoolchild, or a teenager, is a serious act with a potentially severe outcome. Each is a criminal act. None, however, are acts of terrorism.

In each incident, initial ambiguity about the facts was met with a narrative about national security. Between the report of the injuries to the Border Patrol agents and the conclusion of the investigation hung a moment of ambiguity and opportunity. That moment of ambiguity opened the opportunity for state and national leaders to make a claim about the character of the incident. Characterizing it as a national security issue, as testament to the need to build up the border, gave the incident political and ideological clout. Similarly, the intriguingly unannotated retweet of the videos, without context, manufactured a moment of ambiguity that the White House filled with the fear of a threat to national security.

These two tales illustrate an approach to regulation of migration that yokes everyday criminality to the pulse-quickening call of national security. This approach shifts the frame from the idea that terrorism arises beyond the border to the notion that national security resides terrifyingly within the everyday, domestic business of criminal justice. These examples of the recharacterization of domestic crime demonstrate the connections currently being forged between criminality and terrorism, national security, immigrants, and the border.

This chapter examines how everyday crime can be imbued with the exceptional areas of border control and securitization. It traces the braiding together of criminality, border control, and national security. The interweaving of these three themes paves the way for new legal frameworks of exclusion that draw on the extraordinary sovereign powers imbued in national security and immigration control institutions. These new legal frameworks are themselves ephemeral, but they leave behind lasting practices and apparatuses of government power.

The chapter begins by tracing the interplay between crime, border control, and securitization and explores the foundational theories that describe how they relate to one another. The second half draws from that foundation to assess the role of these intersections in light of the international growth of neonationalism, which holds as a core principle the restriction of immigration as a means of defining who belongs and who may govern. The chapter argues that this crosshatching of criminality, migration control, and national security creates a powerful tool for promoting the principles of neo-nationalism.

Intersections of Crimmigration, Border Penology, and Enemy Penology

How did criminality, border control, terrorism, and national security come to be interwoven? Here, the chapter outlines the development of crimmigration and analyzes how it draws lines of membership, delineating insiders from outsiders across lines of race and citizenship status. The challenge is to excavate how the crimmigration thesis intersects with the insights of the border penology and enemy penology theories to see how securitization and technologies of border control enlarge the impacts of crimmi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The “Problem” of Migration
• I. Border Criminologies
• II. Crimmigration under Trump
• III. Shoring Up Fortress Europe
• List of Contributors
• Index