Crimmigration and Human Rights in Contexts of Confinement

Abstract

Over the past decade, the term ‘crimmigration’ has gained traction in academic debates about migration control, border practices, and penality. In denoting crimmigration trends, scholars have primarily focussed on the ‘criminalisation’ of immigrants and migration control. What has largely escaped attention, however, is the ‘immigrationisation’ of crime control. This chapter draws attention to both of these developments by looking at the crimmigration elements of prisons and immigration detention facilities. It argues that crimmigration is a much broader development than the mere employment of criminal justice for immigration control purposes and vice versa. Rather, ‘crimmigration’ should be reconceptualised as an umbrella term for various developments by which changing membership conceptions are implemented. It comprises not only the targeting of ‘non-citizens’ through the expansion of criminal grounds for deportation and the regulation of migration through immigration-related criminal grounds, but also the simultaneous targeting of ‘sub-citizens’ whose membership entitlements are increasingly being depleted through criminal justice mechanisms and who are consequently disenfranchised, alienated, and ultimately expulsed in a fashion closely resembling immigration control. The chapter turns specifically to Australia’s offshore processing arrangements with Nauru in order to illustrate how crimmigration may operate both explicitly through penal infrastructures and implicitly through inter alia discourse and complex governance structures. In turn, the chapter addresses the potentially challenging implications of crimmigration for accountability under international human rights law.

This chapter is an edited version of a chapter drawn from a forthcoming PhD dissertation (Leiden Law School), titled ‘Human Rights Elephants in an Era of Globalisation: Commodification, Crimmigration, and Human Rights in Confinement’.