Governing Immigration Through Crime: A Reader. By Julie A. Dowling and Jonathan Xavier Inda. Stanford University Press, 2013. 320 pp. $29.95 paperback.

Abstract

Governing Immigration Through Crime: A Reader. By Julie A. Dowling and Jonathan Xavier Inda. Stanford University Press, 2013. 320 pp. $29.95 paperback.In Governing Immigration Through Crime, Julie A. Dowling and Jonathan Xavier Inda present an important collection of essays examining different ways in which the lines between immigration control and criminal law enforcement in the United States blurred over the past two decades. As they explain in their introduction, the volume considers how unauthorized migrants have been constructed as subjects who harm the well-being of American citizens and examines a resulting set of practices that criminalized unauthorized (pp. 2, 28). Crime and punishment, they argue, have become the preferred means for the undocumented, thereby rendering unauthorized migrants increasingly subject to regulation and police measures (p. 28).The volume includes abridged versions of previously published essays by scholars of anthropology, communications, criminology, ethnic studies, law, political science, sociology and urban planning. These contributions are organized into five thematic sections, each introduced by an editors' preface offering context and suggestions for additional reading. The first set of chapters lays out overarching legal and conceptual perspectives on the apparent convergence between the norms and practices of immigration regulation, criminal law, and (especially since 2001) national security. The next three sections examine this convergence vis-a-vis three categories of immigration control developments: the fortification of the U.S.-Mexico border, the expansion of interior immigration enforcement, and the resulting emergence of a regime of mass deportation and immigration detention. The overall tenor of the volume is decidedly critical of these trends. While all of these initiatives continue to garner considerable political support-and technology has enabled the efficient development of more pervasive forms of immigration control and surveillance (Kalhan 2014)-the volume does not include any contributions that seek to justify or embrace these developments. The final section highlights the sometimes neglected ways in which unauthorized migrants and their allies actively protested, challenged, and resisted this increasingly punitive immigration control regime.Given the editors' framing, it might seem ironic that the volume addresses only in passing the most direct manifestation of what it might mean, on their terms, to govern immigration through crime-namely, the direct use of criminal institutions as mechanisms of immigration control. As Dowling and Inda observe (pp. 16-17), the number of federal criminal prosecutions for migration-related offenses has skyrocketed in recent years, and as a result, federal prosecutors now bring criminal charges for more migration-related offenses than all other categories of combined (Meissner et al. 2013: 93-94). In addition, some states and localities now aggressively prosecute criminal laws, such as human trafficking and identity theft offenses, in a manner motivated by immigration control objectives or that targets conduct associated with migration (Eagly 2010).However, while Dowling and Inda conceptualize governing immigration through as involving practices that make and the institutional context in which efforts to guide the conduct of immigrants take place (p. 2), the volume does not narrowly address crime or punishment as formal legal categories. Rather, the collection aims to highlight more broadly the various ways in which immigration control practices increasingly draw on norms and mechanisms traditionally associated with the criminal law. Indeed, with the volume's title, Dowling and Inda self-consciously echo the work of Jonathan Simon, who has explained how political actors utilized the category of to legitimate interventions that other motivations in a variety of domains and how, as a result, the technologies, discourses, and metaphors of and criminal justice been prominently deployed to address social problems across an ever-widening array of institutional settings (Simon 2007: 4-5). …