Oceania’s ‘crimmigration creep’: Are deportation and reintegration norms being diffused?

Abstract

The trend of deportation of convicted non-citizens to the Pacific has grown over the last decade, due to increasingly harsh deportation punitive measures placed on non-citizens, known as crimmigration. When further parole-like policies and legislation are placed upon the returnee once they have completed their sentence and have been returned to their country of origin, it is known as ‘crimmigration creep’. ‘Crimmigration creep’ has been seen in the New Zealand Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Act (2015), and appears to be proposed in the similar Samoan Returning Offenders Bill (2019). This article tests the diffusion of ‘crimmigration creep’ to understand how international relations norm diffusion theory can be applied to border criminology concepts. This is done within a norm circulation model, and by testing the normative strength of ‘crimmigration creep’ in Samoa.

Dealing with the ‘Crimmigrant Other’ in the Face of a Global Public Health Threat: A Snapshot of Deportation during COVID-19 in Australia and New Zealand

“…Billings (2019, p. v) claims that Australia is 'at the forefront of crimmigration globally', due to harsh Australian criminal and immigration law enabling large-scale immigration detention and deportation, and prevention of asylum seeker entry by sea. New Zealand too, has been seen to apply crimmigration concepts both in its deportations to Pacific Island states (see McNeill 2021), and in receipt of New Zealanders deported from Australia (see Stanley 2017;McHardy 2021).…”

Past–Present Differential Inclusion: Australia’s Targeted Deportation of Pacific Islanders, 1901 to 2021

“…Pacific Islanders provide a useful case study, as their undesirable otherness in Australia has deep historical, sociocultural and legal roots; however, we acknowledge that this cohort is not the only migrant group subjected to historical differential inclusion that continues in a contemporary form globally. 2 While the harsh consequences of contemporary deportations to Pacific states have been recognised in some studies (McNeill 2021a;Weber and Powell 2018), such examinations of the treatment and removal of Pacific Islanders have not tracked the historical context in which Pacific peoples were deemed undesirable others under Australian immigration policies and practices. Similarly, historical accounts of Pacific labour being exploited to develop the Australian economy have noted aspects of force, deception and unfairness but have failed to draw comprehensive contemporary connections, with limited analysis of seasonal workers.…”