Managing Crimmigration Through Faith: Immigrant Religious Organizations and the Construction of Neoliberal Citizens

• In Event: Immigrants and the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

This paper examines how undocumented Latino migrants use their faith and religion to manage crimmigration, or the increasing collaboration between local police and immigration enforcement. Based on interviews and two years of ethnographic observations conducted in two Latino Evangelical churches in Fresno, California, this paper analyzes how migrants use religion to position themselves as non-criminals and deserving neoliberal citizens. Under the current immigration regime, undocumented migrants are vulnerable to blocked social mobility, the persistent fear of apprehension and deportation, as well as feelings of instability and self-blame. Criminologists and sociologists have analyzed the effects of punishment and criminal labeling on immigrant communities. An important and less explored area within this scholarship is how criminalization and the threat of apprehension affects individuals in a community, beyond those who come in direct contact with the criminal justice system by being arrested, deported, or incarcerated. By examining how the logics of crimmigration spill over into the outreach efforts of local immigrant religious organizations—in particular, how Evangelical churches encourage migrants to distance themselves from criminality—this paper expands conventional understandings of how the criminal justice system has serious multi-institutional, social, and psychological consequences.

Author

• Melissa Guzman, San Francisco State University