Reconstructing Crimmigration: Tracing Anti-Blackness Within the American Immigration Regime

• In Event: The Relationship Between Systemic Racism and Crime or Criminalization

Abstract

This project aims to complicate contemporary crimmigration literature by positioning historical and recent immigration laws, policies, practices, and discursive strategies within the broader project of anti-Blackness in the United States. Drawing on the ideas of Joel Williamson (1980) and Jared Sexton (2008), I explore the politics of immigration through the notion that the United States responds to the real or perceived threat of Black liberation by reimposing the one-drop rule. Accordingly, I highlight how the emergence of federal immigration legislation during the era of Reconstruction clarifies its intertwined relationship with the carceral state today. By drawing out this history, this presentation will detail the intimate connections between the politics of immigration and anti-Blackness. In doing so, I seek to demonstrate that the American immigration agenda is always already linked to the nation’s desire to contain blackness. Such an argument ultimately aims to shed light on crimmigration within a historical conjecture defined by mass incarceration, colorblindness, and globalized migration. Embedded within this project are broader implications for the practice of statecraft in the face of racial crisis. With this in mind, I hope to spur new ways of thinking about the relationship between the state, race, immigration, and crime.

Author

• Nicolas Howard, Old Dominion University