Governing Through Migration Control: Security and Citizenship in Britain

Civic stratification and crime. A comparison of asylum migrants with different legal statuses

“…Likewise, differential access to employment as a result of civic stratification may contribute to differences in informal control. 14 There is a strong current in life course criminology that argues that unemployment attenuates informal social control, which in turn increases criminal activity (cf. [56,57]).…”

“…The second perspective does not attribute a causal role to civic status, but argues that the possible relationship between civic status and crime is due to various forms of social sorting in the allocation of civic statuses, and in the definition of what counts as a crime [9,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. First, in the regulation of international migration there is a tendency to channel migrants who are believed to represent a threat to public safety, including migrants with a known or suspected criminal history, into the lower statuses, while the higher statuses are reserved for migrants who are not believed to pose a risk to society.…”

Beyond the boundaries of home: interdisciplinary approaches

“…In the absence of formal 'criminality' interfacing with the top-down institutional realities of national immigration policy, the spaces where people are detained are replete with razor wire fences, guard dogs, marking imminent threat of state application of force (Bosworth and Guild, 2008). The optics of immigration removal centres highlight the inherent ambigui ty and volatility of immigration policy in action: the ambiguity of an illusory and distant state on an in stitutional level (Abrams, 1988, 82) is concretised by micro-level enforcement actions against individu als (Foucault, 1991).…”

Enduring Uncertainty

“…The process of the criminalisation of immigration in the UK resonates with the transformation of immigration management and control in many liberal democracies (Bosworth 2011;Bosworth and Guild 2008;Ellermann 2009;Gibney 2008). The deportation of foreign-national offenders has become a symbol of both border control and governance in the UK, visible in the adoption and promotion of annual targets for deportations (Bosworth 2011).…”