Crimmigration as Population Management in the “Control Society”

Scholars have offered various accounts of the forces that have caused the contemporary convergence of immigration enforcement and criminal law enforcement, known as “crimmigration.” This article argues that such accounts are insufficient, either because they have difficulty explaining the concrete practices by which crimmigration regimes operate, or because they explain the intersection of criminal law and immigration law solely from the perspective of the former. Additionally, much crimmigration scholarship has difficulty explaining why crimmigration regimes target populations that are principally undeportable, such as asylum-seekers. To fill these voids, this article conceptualizes crimmigration as a product of what Deleuze has termed the “control society.” Such conceptualization clarifies the objectives underlying crimmigration: namely, handling aggregates of presumably deviant groups and keeping dangerous behavior at an acceptable level. Additionally, it assists in explaining the precise practices by which crimmigration regimes operate, particularly the utilization of flexible and decentralized techniques of power. The objectives and manners of exercising power typical of the control society currently govern both criminal and immigration law, causing the unprecedented cooperation of these two fields. Furthermore, as a product of the control society, crimmigration is primarily a regime of domestic policing and population management, as opposed to a system dedicated to the deportation of undesirable migrants. By applying a methodology of textual analysis to the case study of detention of asylum-seekers in Israel, the article demonstrates the vast impact that the underlying principles of the control society have on the making of crimmigration regimes.