Nonviolent Migrants in a Place with Violent Criminal Past: Decriminalization of the Racialized

• In Event: Migration Policies

Abstract

Ethnographic fieldwork reveals that when newcomer migrants unintentionally find themselves face-to-face with local organized crime in their arrival city, they intentionally become agents of nonviolent strategies for evading crime. The bulk of the literature on the (de)criminalization of migrants in Europe has focused on governance and policy at the expense of downplaying migrant agency. While these studies have rightly problematized the criminalization of migrants, they have largely overlooked empirical evidence that migrants engage agentively in resisting and thereby reducing historically rooted, local criminal violence. My in-depth ethnography conducted in one of the major entry points from North Africa to Europe, Palermo (the so-called hub of the Sicilian mafia), challenges the stigma of the “criminal migrant” by documenting an inverse nexus between migration and violence. My ethnography conducted since 2019 reveals one caveat, however. As newcomer African migrants become the catalysts of nonviolent resistance to local crimes, they also become the targets of new forms of racial violence perpetrated by the very local criminal actors they are resisting. By conflating nonviolent irregular migrants with illicit actors and illegality, the EU crimmigration policy strengthens historically rooted local and cross-border organized crime and weakens the very actors actively resisting these crimes—migrants. These understudied dynamics make European member states complicit in the perpetuation of their own violent racist legacies. Bringing disconnected studies conducted in Europe and the US to a conversation, the paper reveals and analyzes the role of migrants in resisting historically rooted crimes.

Author

• Berna Turam, Northeastern University