Sentencing “Unwanted” Migrants: the Border, Racism, and Narrating Punishability

Abstract

Border criminologists have highlighted how, in recent years, the police, courts and prisons in England and Wales have started to look different, as they have been injected with practices of immigration control. In this article, I suggest that alongside such overt changes, the border might also be permeating the criminal justice system in a more insidious way. Specifically, I examine how the racialized narratives circulated by the British government and media in the current era that stigmatize “unwanted” migrants and legitimize practices of enforcement against them—which we can understand as dominant narratives of bordering—are seeping into sentencing hearings. Drawing on observations conducted in Crown Courts in London, I explore how one of the key racialized narratives of bordering—that of the abusive cheat who manipulates the United Kingdom’s immigration system—is mobilized in the individual narratives delivered by legal professionals during the sentencing process to help construct and negotiate unwanted migrants’ punishability.