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Iniuria Migrandi: Criminalization of Immigrants and the Basic Principles of the Criminal Law

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Abstract

In this paper I am specifically concerned with a normative assessment, from the perspective of a principled criminal law theory, of norms criminalizing illegal immigration. The overarching question I will dwell on is one specifically regarding the way of using criminal law which is implied in the enactment of such kinds of norms. My thesis will essentially be that it constitutes a veritable abuse of criminal law. In two senses at least: first, in the sense that by criminalizing illegal immigration criminal law puts a ban on (certain categories of) persons, rather than on their actions/omissions, in a way in which a principled criminal law should not do; and—second—in the sense that the criminalization of illegal immigrants represents a perversion of the criminal law, being a case in which criminal norms are (unjustifiably) used as means to attain extrapenal aims.

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Notes

  1. E.g., among EU member states, illegal entry or sojourn is also criminalized in France (d’Ambrosio 2010), Germany (Ziegler in Guild and Minderhoud 2006), and the UK (Kostakopoulou in Guild and Minderhoud 2006). In Spain it is made into an administrative offense (Gortázar Rotaeche in Guild and Minderhoud 2006).

  2. On ‘foreignness’ as one of the ‘stereotypes of persecution’, Girard 1986[1982], Ch. 2. On the ‘classical sociological theme of fear of the stranger’, Aas 2007, Ch. 2.

  3. EU citizens, nationals of visa exempt third-countries, and—but this is an exception tending today to be merely theoretical rather than practically relevant (Gibney 2004; Valluy 2009; Rastello 2010)—asylum seekers and refugees.

  4. The great bulk of the relevant regulation is to be found in Decreto Legislativo no. 286/1998, the Italian “Consolidated Law on Immigration” (henceforth: CLI). An act that, since its first enactment, has been strongly and repeatedly modified both by subsequent laws and by the Italian constitutional court’s judgements. In what follows, however, I will essentially refer to its current shape.

  5. In this case, the judge acquits the defendant without going into the merits of the charge: the defendant is absolved, not because s/he is found ‘not guilty’, but because some circumstances occur due to which the state loses interest in prosecuting and trying him/her.

  6. In cases in which immigrants cannot be confined in a CIE (for instance, because of a lack of beds), or, even though confined, could not have been identified or coercively expelled, they will be ordered by the local police chief (questore) to voluntarily and autonomously abandon the state’s territory (art. 14.5-bis CLI). (If violated, this order will result in a crime, made punishable with a fine: art. 14.5-ter CLI).

  7. For a general overview of the EU law on migration, see Boeles et al. 2009 (part. 397 ff).

  8. Regulation (EC) No 562/2006, OJEU, 13.4.2006, L. 105.

  9. Directive 2008/115/EC, OJEU, 24.12.2008, L. 348 (on which see Viganò and Masera 2010).

  10. See ECJ (Grand Chamber), C-329/11, Achughbabian, 6.12.2011, at par. 28. See also C-61/11, El Dridi, 28.4.2011, and more recently C-430/11, Sagor, 6.12.2012.

  11. C-329/11, at par. 45.

  12. The debate on Täterstrafrecht seems to correspond, in the English speaking criminal law doctrines, to the debate on “act requirement” and on the (in)admissibility of so-called “status” or “situational offenses.” (See, e.g., Silber 1967; Dan-Cohen 1972; Glazebrook 1978; Husak 1987, Ch. 4; Id. 2010a; Id. 2011.) Täterstrafrecht, however, is not the same thing as situation responsibility (at least, insofar as we refer to the way in which this last notion has been interpreted in the last decades). While this latter concept only focuses on a situation, or state of affairs, in which the defendant happens (more or less voluntarily) to find him- or herself, the former—as I shall try to show shortly—is specifically concerned, instead, with the stigmatization of certain persons in virtue of their (alleged) belonging to a given, stereo-typed, category. In a way, the problem of Täterstrafrecht begins where that of situation responsibility ends: this latter concept raises questions of voluntariness and blameworthiness, of fair attribution of responsibility for the occurrence of a given state of affairs; the former raises instead questions of social stigmatization and discrimination of persons. In sum: while status liability focuses on a person’s being in a certain situation, Täterstrafrecht focuses instead on his/her (allegedly) being a certain type of person. This, obviously, does not mean that the two concepts cannot go hand in hand in specific cases: status offenses may be particularly useful from a Täterstrafrecht perspective, since the criminalization of “being in a certain situation” can be easily used as a way to infer the author’s “being a certain type of person.” Nonetheless, the two remain, at least in principle, different concepts raising different problems for criminal law theory. As a consequence, it cannot be excluded that in certain cases a “non status offense” (that is: an offense whose description revolves around the requirement of an act) can be examples of (spurious) Täterstrafrecht (see infra, Sect. 3.2.1).

  13. A meaning connected to the idea of a better individualization of criminal responsibility. See also infra, notes 21 and 25.

  14. Even if in what follows I am contrasting Tatstrafrecht and Täterstrafrecht as two opposite ideal-types basically corresponding, respectively, to a liberal and an anti-liberal and authoritarian criminal law model, this does not mean that in fact these two models do not coexist. On the contrary, in the real life of legal and political systems, the achievement of liberal or authoritarian inspirations only comes in degrees, so that even the most liberal systems nurture illiberal norms; and when it comes to criminal law, this means that even systems generally inspired by the Tatstrafrecht model will more or less frequently host norms and practices inspired by the opposite Täterstrafrecht model. Which is exactly what happens, as I will try to show, with the way in which many Western, liberal, regimes actually deal with illegal immigration.

  15. See also Werle 1988, 2866, for a review of the criminal law conceptions (including, of course, Täterstrafrecht orientation) underlying the Nazi draft of a German criminal code in 1936, and Freisler 1936, 516–7, suggesting the ‘techniques’ according to which—in Freisler’s own view—the special part of a Nazi criminal code should have been drafted (criminal norms should have been revolving, ‘as frequently as possible,’ directly on the ‘description of Tätertypen instead of types of actions’).

  16. Such norms were basically founded on the presumption that, since idles and vagrants were lacking “legal”, “official”, “regular” means of support, they had to be committing crimes (notably, against other persons’ goods and property) in order to support themselves. See, e.g., Lacey 1953, 1206, 1217 ff.; Perkins 1958, 250f.; Sherry 1960, 564; Corso 1979, 263 ff., 278; Dubber 2005, 130 ff.

  17. See, e.g., Dubber 2001: possession offenses have ‘replaced vagrancy as the sweep offense of choice. […] Backed by a wide range of penalties, they can remove undesirables for extended periods of time, even for life’ (836).

  18. First introduced with Decreto-legge no. 92/2008, but then nullified by the Italian constitutional court (Decision no. 249/2010).

  19. But many other examples might be easily gleaned here and there in our legal systems—from nineteenth century norms against “habitual offenders” to contemporary norms dealing with “dangerous offenders” (I owe this suggestion to Lucia Zedner).

  20. “Stereotypes” are schemas through which people organize their knowledge, beliefs and expectations about social groups (Hamilton and Troiler 1986, 133): they are ‘abstract knowledge structures linking a social group to a set of traits or behavioral characteristics’ (Hamilton and Sherman 1994, 3).

  21. It is not by accident, therefore, that Nazi criminal theorists were strongly critical of Franz von Liszt’s account and of the “individualizing turn” he advocated for criminal law—a turn which, in their view, would have meant a weakening and an excessive humanization of criminal law itself. See, e.g., Dahm and Schaffstein 1933, 14 ff; Wolf 1935, 550–1 (‘The Tätertypus is totally anti-individualistic, completely contrary to Franz von Liszt’s […] naturalistic theory of crime.’).

  22. And with media playing a crucial role (e.g., Gorham 2009).

  23. On the social construction of stereotyped and ‘spoiled identities’ see Goffman 1986[1963].

  24. On ‘dehumanization’ as a form of ‘denial’ of persons, see Cohen 1995, 79 (cited in Young 1999, 112).

  25. This helps draw a neat distinction between Täterstrafrecht approaches and so-called “character theories” of criminal responsibility. (See, e.g., for different versions of the “character approach” to criminal responsibility: von Liszt 1905[1902]; Engisch 1942; Bayles 1982; Lacey 1988, Ch. 2; Huigens 1995; Tadros 2005.) Also character theories—it is true—can be concerned with authors much more than with acts (so that acts are considered relevant only as symptoms of the relevant personality or character). (Lacey 2007, 29.) However, while Täterstrafrecht accounts (in the version I am referring to in this article) are basically uninterested in individuals’ character and personality, character theories, instead, are driven by the—exactly opposite—aim of individualizing criminal responsibility so as to obtain that every person’s criminal responsibility be assessed according to his or her own individual character (and thus that criminal punishment be attuned to individuals’ personality).

  26. From this point of view, Täterstrafrecht’s prevention turns out to be strictly intertwined with (if not, directly, a form of) police prevention, insofar as police power ‘treats offenders as mere sources of danger, to be policed along with other threats, animate and inanimate alike, from rabid dogs to noxious fumes.’ (Dubber 2001, 849, and passim. See also Dubber 2004, 1318 (‘insofar as he [the policed] is an object of police, he is not a person); Dubber 2005, 2013).

  27. ‘Pre-emption stands temporally prior to prevention of proximate harms: it seeks to intervene when the risk of harm is no more than an unspecified threat or propensity as yet uncertain and beyond view. Whereas the preventive turn of the criminal law is triggered in the main by acts “more than merely preparatory” to a specified offence, pre-emption legitimates substantial curtailments of individual liberty at an earlier point in time and, often, without the requirement of mens rea, still less actus reus’ (Zedner 2007b, 1120).

  28. Täterstrafrecht’s prevention is thus, in fact, ‘pre-crime prevention’ (on which concept, see Zedner 2007a. See also Krasmann 2012, 380).

    This very same logic is partly but neatly echoed in some of the most relevant features of so-called “actuarial justice” (characterized by ‘the replacement of a moral and clinical description of the individual with an actuarial language of probabilistic calculations and statistical distributions applied to populations’ and by ‘the recent and rising trend of the penal system to target categories and subpopulations rather than individuals’: Feeley, Simon 1992; Eid. 1994), as well as in the now widely debated category of Feindstrafrecht (or “enemy criminal law”) notoriously elaborated, and to some extent defended, by German criminal law theorist Günther Jakobs (e.g., Jakobs 2004. See also Zedner 2013, for a discussion of Feindstrafrecht in relation to penal law trends on illegal immigration).

  29. Calavita 2005, 155: ‘Immigrants’ stigmata of poverty is every bit as conspicuous and consequential—as racialized—as somatic signs inscribed in bodies, and are at the heart of the social interpretation of those signs. […] It should be pointed out, however, that while somatic distinctions may be neither necessary nor sufficient for racialization to occur […] the sine qua non of immigrant racialization may be their status as members of the third world, their poverty, and their need.’

  30. The widespread idea that (legal and illegal) immigrants commit far more crimes than natives (see already Lombroso 1918, § 31) is hardly backed up by reliable empirical data and their reasonable interpretation (Calavita 2005, 139 ff.; Melossi 2012. Contra, however, Barbagli 2008).

  31. To say it in Girardian terms (Girard 1986[1982], Ch. 3), what is at work here is the social construction of a mythology in which to foreigners’ “physical monstrosity” (i.e., “racialization”; see supra, note 29) the idea of a corresponding “moral monstrosity” is attached.

    Jock Young expresses roughly the same idea by referring to the social process of ‘essentialising’ and ‘demonizing’ illegal immigrants, see Young 1999, 111–2.

  32. ‘[T]he very fact of their illegal nature is seen as a criminal ‘master status’ which quite falsely indicates their guilt of all other types of crime as obvious and tautologous’ (Young 1999, 112).

    Words have their importance here: to refer to irregular immigrants as “clandestines” (clandestini)—as we usually do in Italian public discourse—subtly but heavily contributes to the idea that these persons are inherently “criminal,” “deviant”: “clandestine” is s/he who conceals her- or himself to authority’s approval and laws (Maneri 2009, 79–80), thus being “ontologically illegal.” See also Dauvergne 2008, 15: ‘The ‘illegality’ of peoples is a new discursive turn in contemporary migration talk. […] People themselves are now ‘illegal’; states are concerned about ‘illegals.’

  33. This is why, for instance, the classic liberal advocates of deterrence (starting, at least, from Cesare Beccaria) claimed that punishment should be, among other things, certain.

  34. The use of expulsion as a substitute for ordinary criminal penalties is not at all a singularity of Italian migration law. See Albrecht 2002, 181–3; Guild Minderhoud 2006; Aas 2007, 87.

  35. Which is true both of Italian and EU law: see supra, Sects. 2.1 and 2.2.

  36. This last caveat is particularly important, because, when it comes to other crimes (such as, most notably, drug crimes), the law seems instead to be particularly eager to put immigrants in the penal systems’ ward. See, e.g., Barbagli 2008; Melossi 2012.

  37. That criminal law, criminal punishment, and criminal process, revolve around ‘public wrongs’ and entail ‘public condemnation’ is a fairly accepted idea among criminal law theorists. Among many others (and on the basis of different general accounts), see, e.g., Hart 1958, sec. II.A.4; Feinberg 1965, 401 ff.; von Hirsch 1993; Duff and Marshall 1998; Duff et al. 2007; Ashworth and Zedner 2008.

    For some useful qualifications, see however Husak 2010b.

  38. The highly controversial claim of legal moralism.

  39. Recall Achughbabian (supra Sect. 2.2), where this point is explicitly made.

  40. See also Albrecht 2002, 181: ‘a combination of administrative and criminal controls on immigration is being established that allows greater flexibility in responding to criminal offences committed by immigrants than does the criminal law alone. Expulsion and deportation are repressive or punitive measures that may be added to (or exchanged for) ordinary criminal penalties. Administrative procedures may replace criminal procedures which makes for administrative convenience but does away with the safeguards emanating from the rule of law.’

  41. It should be noted, by the way, that for criminal stigma to be imposed on persons there is no need to wait that they be actually convicted in criminal trial: the stigmatizing force of criminalization takes effect far before that moment, and frequently continues to operate even when defendants have been acquitted of their charge (Schwartz and Skolnick 1962). In a way, it is intrinsically connected to the very enactment of the relevant criminal norms.

  42. See, e.g., Dauvergne 2008, 139–41; Maas 2010. In Italy, the most recent regularization dates back to July 2012 (Masera 2012).

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Acknowledgments

I have written this article while I was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the “Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime, and Security”, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto. Thanks to Nathanson Centre for financial support. I would also like to thank for comments and encouragement Markus D. Dubber and other participants to the “Criminal Law Science Club” seminar, on Dec. 4, 2012, at the University of Toronto (and in particular Sarah Armstrong, Alan Brudner, and Lindsay Farmer), as well as the participants to the “Nathanson Visiting Fellows Seminar”, on Dec. 10, 2012 (and in particular Angus Grant, William Payne, James Roundell, James Stribopoulos, Francois Tanguay-Renaud). Last but not least, many thanks to Doug Husak, Carlo Ruga Riva, and Lucia Zedner for written comments on a previous version of the article.

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    Alessandro Spena

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Spena, A. Iniuria Migrandi: Criminalization of Immigrants and the Basic Principles of the Criminal Law. Criminal Law, Philosophy 8, 635–657 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-013-9229-6

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