9. Banished Yet Undeported: The Constitution of a “Floating Population” of Deportees Within France

Beyond the ‘Criminalisation’ of Immigrants: Critical Criminology and the Modern Deportation Regime

“…Largely affecting Eastern European males, many from long‐demonised Roma populations, the shifts in policy are supported by societal views of Roma migration as a ‘wave’ that requires a ‘crackdown’ (Franko 2019, p.102). In France, ‘the association between immigration and crime became a central theme of the political debate’, undergirding increasingly stringent immigration policy in the country since the early 1990s (Boe 2018, p.189).…”

“…This intertwining is clear in the tropes about migrant criminality dragged out time and time again in support of punitive policy (Brown 2016; Tosh 2019; Učakar 2020; Zatz and Smith 2012); the use of criminal justice personnel and facilities in the enforcement of immigration law (Armenta 2017a; Bourbeau 2019; Provine et al . 2016); and the particularly stringent legal consequences reserved for non‐citizens with criminal records (Boe 2018; Newstead and Frisso 2013; Tosh 2020). In the United States, it is evident in close to 60% of removals involving migrants allegedly convicted of a crime (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement 2020).…”

Institutions of Confinement as Sites of Passage

“…Concerning the prison experiences of foreign nationals specifically, I have argued elsewhere that there are major differences in the prison socializations of firstgeneration undocumented migrants, who had migrated to France and the USA as adults, and the 1.5 generation, who had been socialized in the penalized neighbourhoods of these two metropolises (Boe 2016(Boe , 2018(Boe , 2020. The first experi ences of incarceration of most undocumented migrants were very similar to those, described in the literature, of citizen prisoners who had no previous knowledge of prison.…”

“…By then, he had been detained for five years while fighting his deportation case through legal strategies. Time is as central to the experience of confinement as is space (Boe 2020), and spending all those years in immigration detention had taught Michael to be careful. Fighting back, Michael thought, would bring retaliation from prison officials, but would actually also prevent detainees from fighting their legal cases against deportation, as he told me during an interview in 2007:…”