This article analyses the recent expansion of immigration offences in Britain. Drawing on criminal law scholarship, it considers the reasons for relying on the criminal law in immigration enforcement. On the one hand, criminal law is used symbolically. In this view, the creation of criminal offences may be read as an attempt to appease a sector of the electorate, the media and the Opposition about the 'immigration problem.' By introducing these offences, the government sent a message that the situation is under control. On the other hand, the criminal law serves regulatory functions, offering the UK Border Agency a range of options for dealing with unwanted immigrants. In practice, most immigration offences are rarely enforced. Instead, the criminal law often seems to primarily work as a threat, relied on to enforce compliance with immigration rules. A criminal prosecution is reserved for those foreigners for whom the primary sanction-expulsion-cannot be carried out. In these cases, a criminal prosecution and conviction facilitate administrative proceedings leading to removal. Given that the criminalization of immigration breaches is in stark contrast with a number of criminal law principles, this paper argues that the normative justification of criminal law in immigration matters is weak and it should have no role to play in the enforcement of immigration rules.

full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Publisher statement:This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in British Journal of Criminology following peer review. The version of record is available online at: http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/55/2/215 A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP url' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. As border policing is no longer circumscribed to external borders and increasingly performed inland, in Britain migration work relies on the assistance of a range of unorthodox partners, including the public. The unearthing of the 'community' as a crucial partner to police a myriad of public safety issues, including migration, begs the question of what are the implications of mobilizing citizenship for law enforcement? This paper argues that enlisting the public in migration law enforcement yields important civic by-products: it 'creates' citizens and citizenship. It imparts civic training by instilling a sense of civic responsibility in law and order maintenance, and in doing so it intends to recreate social cohesion across a deeply fragmented society.

In the United Kingdom, as in other jurisdictions, the language of vulnerability and ‘safeguarding’, protection and care is becoming increasingly prevalent, often dovetailing with punitive rationales and practices. Drawing from empirical material collected during a study on police–immigration partnership in everyday policing, the paper analyses how contemporaneous punitive and humanitarian turns in criminal justice are experienced by law enforcement officers doing border work on the ground and considers what implications these have. To what extent does the impetus to protect and care bolster or complicate the exercise of state coercive powers? And what challenges and tensions does it evince? It argues for a more nuanced understanding of the moral pain of border work and its disruptive potentials.

Court interpreters have seldom been featured in studies on the criminal courts. Until recently, cases requiring court interpreters were rare and marginal. The peculiarity and historical rarity of these cases may explain the lack of academic consideration of the work of court interpreters in the criminal justice literature. Rapid demographic changes brought about by mass migration, however, are changing the make-up of criminal justice proceedings, rendering court interpreters key participants and inexorable aides for the everyday running of the criminal justice system. This article examines the increased reliance on interpreters and the nature of their involvement in criminal justice proceedings. It will explore the relationship between interpreters and defendants, on the one hand, and between interpreters, counsels, and judges, on the other. Drawing on empirical data stemming from a research project on foreign national defendants conducted in Birmingham’s criminal courts, we explore issues of trust and reliability underpinning the intervention of court interpreters and the implications of these interventions for the defendant’s case. The use of interpreters aims first and foremost to ensure the defendant’s right to defense. Yet, as we show, their intervention is often propelled or hindered by instrumental, procedural, or logistical reasons, intimately linked to the rapid transformation of the demography of defendants and the privatization of services related to the criminal justice system.