Abstract
Over the first decade of the twenty-first century, Spain was a popular destination for international migrations. Successive Spanish governments addressed this phenomenon through a set of sovereign measures, such as selective and racially biased policing, detention in internment centers and deportation. Some key aspects of these migration control policies have gradually changed throughout the last two decades. One of them is what may be called the ‘profile’ of the ‘deportable’ migrant. The analysis of the empirical data on the arrest, detention and deportation of migrants provides demographics of the targeted individuals and sheds light on the rationale underlying the migration control apparatus. Specifically, this paper examines the nationalities of individuals affected by the cycle of deportation to grasp the persistence of neocolonial power relations within current bordered penality.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Eurostat data (European Commission 2016), on January 1, 2015 the foreign population rates of those countries were: France, 6.6 percent; UK, 8.4 percent; Italy, 8.2 percent and Greece, 7.6 percent. Nonwhite prison population rate in the UK was in 2014 approximately 25 percent (Institute of Race Relations 2016).
- 2.
In the same vein, at least the cases of Argentina (5.6 percent of foreign prison population at the end of 2014, International Centre for Prison Studies n.d.a), Australia (19.7 percent of foreign-born prison population at midyear 2012, International Centre for Prison Studies n.d.b) and Brazil (0.4 percent of foreign prison population at year-end 2014, International Centre for Prison Studies n.d.c) should be mentioned, since in all of them the percentage of foreign or foreign-born correctional population is similar to or even lower than that of resident foreigners (See Cunneen 2006; Hogg 2001; Monclús Masó and Brandariz García 2015; Wacquant 2003).
- 3.
59 percent of the US male prison population at year-end 2014 were either black (37 percent) or Hispanic (22 percent); in contrast, white accounted just for 32 percent of the male prison population (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2015).
- 4.
In 2000 the foreign population rate in Spain was 2.3 percent and that of foreign-born population was 3.6 percent, while in 2010 they skyrocketed to 12.2 percent and 14.0 percent, respectively. In other words, over the first decade of the century more than 5.13 million foreign-born individuals migrated to Spain (Compiled by authors from data sourced from Instituto Nacional de Estadistica (INE)).
- 5.
‘Southern border’ is the term commonly used in Spain to designate the sea border between southern Spain and Morocco (which are separated by the Mediterranean Sea) and the Canary Islands and Morocco (separated by the Atlantic Ocean), as well as the terrestrial border among Morocco and the North Africa Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.
- 6.
Non-EU nationals accounted for the 15.6 percent of all criminal convictions in Spain in 2015, whereas their drug crimes conviction rate was 30.1 percent (Compiled by authors from data sourced from INE).
- 7.
Spanish colonies in the Americas overall became independent nations or were annexed to other countries during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The 1898 Spanish-American war led to the independence of Cuba and the cession of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam to the USA. In 1956 Spain surrendered the Spanish protectorate in North Morocco to the newborn nation. In 1968 Equatorial Guinea gained independence from Spain, and in 1975 Western Sahara was invaded and seized by Morocco. Since then, only the enclave towns of Ceuta and Melilla remain in North Africa under Spanish sovereignty.
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Fernández Bessa, C., Brandariz García, J.A. (2018). ‘Profiles’ of Deportability: Analyzing Spanish Migration Control Policies from a Neocolonial Perspective. In: Carrington, K., Hogg, R., Scott, J., Sozzo, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65021-0_37
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