Unauthorized Migrants and the (Il)Logic of ''Crime Control'': A Human Rights Perspective on US Federal and Local State Immigration Policies

Immigration control, widely regarded the sovereign right of nation states, has often been pursued at the expense of civil and human rights. More than a century ago, nativists legitimated a punitive approach to immigration control that treated migrants’ rights as secondary by branding millions of newcomers to the United States as a ‘‘dangerous class’’. In many ways, recent policies similarly criminalize immigrants and deploy crime control strategies in response. This article reviews the most significant of these policies at the federal and local state level, including: border security measures, detention and deportation, the 287(g) program, anti-immigrant city ordinances, and the Arizona law (SB1070). Each initiative has been framed as necessary to protect American citizens from serious crime. We focus on four ways in which these policies violate human rights: first, border security measures that result in migrant deaths violate the right to life; second, detention and deportation violate the right to liberty; third, detention and deportation punish unlawful residents as though they were guilty of criminal rather than civil violations of the law, imposing penalties that are arbitrary and disproportionately harsh; and fourth, local state policies to counter illegal immigration encourage racial profiling, a practice that violates the right to freedom from discrimination. Immigration control is widely regarded the sovereign right and responsibility of modern nation states. Historically, however, the strategies used to control immigration have often violated fundamental civil and human rights. In the United States, this reality reflects the racial and class biases that have often tainted immigration policy. More than a century ago, thousands of new immigrants from Europe who were defined as non-White and ⁄ or poor were arrested without ‘‘reasonable cause’’, sentenced to work houses and penitentiaries, and in other ways denied their rights (Adler 1994). These policies were legitimated by defining these immigrants as ‘‘the dangerous classes’’, a threat to public safety and the moral fabric of Anglo American society. According to many scholars and activists, recent efforts to control immigration represent a return to policies that similarly criminalize migrants to this country and use crime control strategies in response (Golash-Boza 2010; Rumbaut and Ewing 2007; Stumpf 2006). This time, the targets are presumably more narrowly defined to include ‘‘only’’ those who are residing in this country illegally. Nonetheless, the strategies pursued by the state to ‘‘crackdown’’ on those guilty of this ‘‘crime’’ have seriously compromised their rights as well as the rights of many legal residents ⁄ citizens of the United States. This article provides a critical review of several policies pursued by both the federal government and local state to control illegal immigration and the human rights concerns generated by these policies. At the federal level, we examine two strategies: first, ‘‘border security’’ measures that are intended to fortify the US–Mexico divide, in particular, making