Policing the Border(s): The ICE machine, social bulimia and the deportation pipeline in New York City

• In Event: The Criminalization-to-Deportation Pipeline: Processes of Crimmigration Enforcement and Deportation

Abstract

Twenty-seven years after the IIRIRA, New York City has undergone extraordinary challenges to its status as a welcoming refuge to the tired and teeming masses of the globe. In this article, based on recent mixed-methods research, we trace the policing of its migrant communities as the U.S. state has resorted to increasingly punitive measures to regulate the lives of non-citizens regarded as deportable aliens within the rubric of contemporary immigration laws. Findings from the research show that while the city with its long history of immigrant advocacy has in part resisted the exclusionary pressures of the security state, its most criminalized black and migrant communities still produce the highest rates of removal. We argue that NYC, while often held up as a model of immigrant integration is in effect a highly contested socio-political, economic, and cultural space caught between the forces of exclusion and inclusion overdetermined by processes of crimmigration. As migrants become socially constructed along a continuum of “good and bad,” “deserving and undeserving,” they become policed across both internal and external borders. We conclude that such policing processes resonate criminologically with the concept of what Jock Young called “social bulimia,” a major characteristic of late modern capitalistic society.

Authors

• David Brotherton, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

• Sarah Tosh, Rutgers University - Camden