For some time, the mobility of the global poor has been framed as a national security problem and policy priority for governments and inter-governmental institutions across the world (D’Appollonia and Reich, 2008; Guild, 2003; Huysmans, 2006). In this context, the police have been routinely tasked with detecting unwanted foreigners and routing them out of the country (Armenta, 2017; Weber, 2013) or, as Giulia Fabini (2017) explained in the case of Italy, with managing ‘illegality’. Increasingly, the policing of the border occurs inland and migration controls are becoming ingrained in ‘homeland policing’ (Gundhus and Aas, 2016; Weber and Bowling, 2004)

Aliverti, Ana J.

English

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     warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications      Manuscript version: Author’s Accepted Manuscript The version presented in WRAP is the author’s accepted manuscript and may differ from the published version or Version of Record.  Persistent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/134405                               How to cite: Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information.  If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.  Copyright and reuse: The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work by researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions.   Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available.  Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way.  Publisher’s statement: Please refer to the repository item page, publisher’s statement section, for further information.  For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: wrap@warwick.ac.uk.  Introduction. Special issue for Theoretical Criminology ‘Policing, Migration and National Identity’  Guest editor: Ana Aliverti, Warwick Law School, University of Warwick  For some time, the mobility of the global poor has been framed as a national security problem and policy priority for governments and inter-governmental institutions across the world (Guild 2003, Huysmans 2006, D'Appollonia and Reich 2008). In this context, the police have been routinely tasked with detecting unwanted foreigners and routing them out of the country (Weber 2013, Armenta 2017) or, as Giulia Fabini explained in the case of Italy, with managing ‘illegality’ (Fabini 2017). Increasingly, the policing of the border occurs inland and migration controls are becoming ingrained in ‘homeland policing’ (Weber and Bowling 2004, Aas and Gundhus 2016).   In the United States, the Secure Communities programme aims at systematically checking the immigration status of everyone arrested by the local police, whose biometric information is then transmitted to the federal immigration agency, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While the programme’s primary justification is crime prevention and community safety, the local police’s role in it consists of exchanging information on arrestees with ICE to facilitate their removal (Cox and Miles 2013, Stumpf 2015). In Britain, aided by an ever expanding web of co-operators, including teachers, university lecturers, doctors and nurses, landlords, employers and the public (Aliverti 2015, Bowling and Westenra 2018), the police have taken up migration control duties as part of their daily job. Partnering with immigration staff, police officers in regional forces across the country routinely trace people’s right to be in the country as they are instructed to identify ‘removal opportunities’ of foreigners who are deemed as public nuisances or security threats due to their incivility or criminal behaviour. According to a report by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (Vine 2014, 3), since 2012 when police and immigration partnership was formalized under the remit of ‘Operation Nexus’, the number of identification of foreign nationals in custody suites and police-instigated removals surged. Further afield in countries such as Australia and Italy, where the police have historically retained migration control powers along with crime prevention ones, the police have recently started to use them more systematically. Against the backdrop of an increased politicization and racialization of migration from poorer neighbouring countries, police ID checks are increasingly used to prove migration status and disproportionately fall on ‘suspicious populations’ (Melossi 2000, Weber 2011).   Papers in this special issue explore the role of the police in border work . By revisiting debates on the relationship between police and national identity, authors reflect on the police’s role in creating social and global order in the context of fluid and globalized national communities (also Fassin 2011). Policing scholars have long demonstrated how the police through daily, mundane interactions with civilians communicate whether they belong or not, and create social difference and hierarchies (Loader 1997, 2006, Bradford 2014, Bradford 2016). When, why and who gets stopped and searched, questioned, handcuffed and arrested is shaped by collective images and ideas about suspiciousness and otherness (Harkin 2015). Loader and Mulcahy thus explain that police work, ‘whether oriented to maintaining order, controlling crime, or any other stated objective of policing [is] always at the same time cultural work…, an authoritative means of allocating risk and blame, of affirming lines of affiliation and exclusion, of constituting the boundaries and identity of cultural and political community’ (Loader and Mulcahy 2003, 304). Policing is, on this view, a vehicle for mediating belonging. Similarly, Vanessa Barker notes that ‘The police are creative agents in [the production of difference]. They do not simply reflect already given social relations but contribute to the production of those relations’ (Barker 2016, 212).   Papers in this special issue reflect on how this function of the police, as mediator of national belonging, is put to work in the policing of global mobility and with what implications –institutional, social, global. As borders and crime control blend in contemporary forms of governance, what is the nature of the social and civil order that the police are called to enforce? How are they supposed to enforce that order? And at what costs? Who is the ‘public’ or the ‘community’ in whose name policing is carried out? How do border policing practices shape individual experiences and feelings of belonging? By investigating contemporary border policing practices in different jurisdictions, the contributions shed light on how different societies construct, accommodate and reject difference differently, and how national communities imagine themselves. ‘How a society is policed –Peter Waddington reminded us- depends upon who is policed’ (Waddington 1999, 26). Papers also offer insights on how the police may enable and foster a more plural, non-racialized and inclusionary articulation of national identity, while embracing a notion of security and order which encompasses the collective and is not limited to those replete with social and economic capital.  Aliverti and Parmar explore the rise of immigration enforcement in UK policing by examining the everyday work of ‘Operation Nexus’, a joint initiative designed to identify foreign nationals brought into custody and assess removal opportunities at an early stage in the criminal justice process. My article places this initiative within the broader social context where contemporary policing takes places, characterised by a growing blurriness between licit and illicit, order and disorder, and uncertainty about people’s identities. In this context, I argue, the ‘power of legitimate naming’ (Loader 1997, 3) once bestowed by the police, as a guide for individuals to render the social world intelligible, has been eroded. Immigration enforcement has been brought in to decipher the new geographies of crime and disorder, disentangle identities and extirpate risky outsiders. Yet, at the same time, it lays bare the challenges of asserting authority in a globalised world.   In her piece, Parmar discusses how Nexus has revitalised racial categories and technologies which have a long vintage in British policing, dating back to colonial times. Through a detailed examination of police custody processes, she evidences how the growing involvement of the police in immigration has transformed citizenship into a disciplinary device to classify police suspects while unifying the treatment of racialised groups whose right to belong is questioned. These practices, she argues, have implications beyond policing as the people subject to enhanced checks are misrecognised and rendered perpetually outsiders.   In a different setting, Weber scrutinises how the everyday operation of ‘internal bordering’ impacts on experiences of belonging. She draws on the accounts of young people from migrant background on police encounters in Australia to empirically document the role of police as ‘arbiters and shapers of belonging’. The rich data presented conveys the subtleties in how feelings and experiences of (un)belonging are moulded through mundane interactions with ticket officers, security guards, shopkeepers and the public, and powerfully shows the role of the police in reinforcing or unsettling ‘affective belonging’.   Next, Campesi and Fabini examine how police officers in Italy instrumentalise immigration enforcement for public security and social defence. In their account of immigration detention decisions, they highlight the discursive construction of ‘migrant social dangerousness’ as the main ground for police coercion. This concept, which is often supported by vague references to migrants’ unreliability and marginality, is repeated over and over in police’s decisions and goes often unchallenged. The lax procedural regime that characterises immigration decision-making, they argue, offers an attractive policing tool to govern marginal populations, not so much through deportation but through banishment from urban spaces. Social dangerousness, in its modern guise, revitalises longstanding notions in positivist criminology while reconfiguring the relationship between crime, race and national identity.       Social dangerousness also entails a preventive logic to crime control, which is further explored by Gundhus and Jansen in their article on the use of intelligence in everyday policing in Norway. On the face of it, the appeal to actuarial instruments and sophisticated algorithms to assess and manage ‘migrant-related’ risk and threats diverges from the outmoded language of public defense alluded to by the Italian police. On further examination, however, their lexicons and rationales share striking parallels and illustrate how the construction of danger and risk are contingent upon cultural norms and social hierarchies. Focusing on the growing role of police intelligence analysts, Gundhus and Jansen observe that paradoxically in an effort to reduce uncertainty intelligence-led policing generates more complexity and amplifies anxieties about the unknown by constructing insecure identities as dangerous. In this role, the police are not just preserving social order but actively reconfiguring notions of social order through anticipatory logic.   Finally, Van der Woude’s article zooms out from the national sphere to examine the politics of border controls in its iterations between the local, the national and the supranational. By exploring ‘jurisdictional games’ by national border control bureaucracies, she argues that areas of incomplete EU regulation are exploited or actively created by nation states to retain sovereignty control. An example in point is the permanent border control functions exercised at intra-Schengen border posts which, despite the principle of freedom of movement, are operative in various states. In operating within the space of discretion left by the multilayer governance within Europe, nation states strategically negotiate and calibrate the impact of globalization to preserve national sovereignty and national identity.  Despite the increased involvement of the police in migration control, this aspect of the police’s work remains unexamined. Taken together, this special issue represents the most comprehensive investigation into migration policing undertaken to date. It brings together scholars working on migration policing from criminology, law and sociology, to reflect on how the policing of global mobility is shaping domestic policing and to identify continuities and discontinuities in migration policing across different jurisdictions through detailed, empirically grounded case studies. Contributors benefited from focused discussions and feedback on draft versions of their papers by a specialized and select audience of researchers and practitioners during a British Academy-funded international workshop at the University of Warwick in May 2017. Collectively, the papers transcend disciplines and geographical boundaries, and explore the theoretical and social implications of migration and its control for criminal justice.   Acknowledgement: I am grateful to the British Academy for the financial support provided to organise a two-days symposium at the University of Warwick in May 2017, through its British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (EN140068). I am also grateful to participants (speakers, chairs and audience) for their enthusiasm and intellectual contributions, and to the Theoretical Criminology editors, Mary Bosworth and Simon Cole, for embracing the project and supporting it through the different stages.   References:  AAS, K. F. & GUNDHUS, H. 2016. Global Policing and Mobility: Identity, Territory, Sovereignty. In: LOADER, I., BRADFORD, B., JAUREGUI, B. & STEINBERG, J. (eds.) SAGE Handbook of Global Policing. London: Sage. ALIVERTI, A. 2015. Enlisting the public in the policing of immigration. British Journal of Criminology, 55, 215-230. ARMENTA, A. 2017. Protect, Serve, and Deport. The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement, Los Angeles, University of California Press. BARKER, V. 2016. Policing Difference. In: LOADER, I., BRADFORD, B., JAUREGUI, B. & STEINBERG, J. (eds.) SAGE Handbook of Global Policing. BOWLING, B. & WESTENRA, S. 2018. ‘A really hostile environment’: Adiaphorization, global policing and the crimmigration control system. Theoretical Criminology, 0. BRADFORD, B. 2014. Policing and social identity: procedural justice, inclusion and cooperation between police and public. Policing and Society, 24, 22-43. BRADFORD, B. 2016. The dog that never quite barked: social identity and the persistence of police legitimacy. In: BOSWORTH, M., HOYLE, C. & ZEDNER, L. (eds.) Changing Contours of Criminal Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. COX, A. B. & MILES, T. J. 2013. Policing Immigration. The University of Chicago Law Review, 80, 87-136. D'APPOLLONIA, A. & REICH, S. 2008. The Securitization of Immigration. Multiple Countries, Multiple Dimensions. In: D'APPOLLONIA, A. & REICH, S. (eds.) Immigration, integration, and security: America and Europe in comparative perspectives. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: UPP. FABINI, G. 2017. Managing illegality at the internal border: Governing through ‘differential inclusion’ in Italy. European Journal of Criminology, 14, 46-62. FASSIN, D. 2011. Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries. The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40, 213-226. GUILD, E. 2003. International Terrorism and EU Immigration, Asylum and Borders Policy: The Unexpected Victims of 11 September 2001. European Foreign Affairs Review, 8, 311-346. HARKIN, D. 2015. The police and punishment: Understanding the pains of policing. Theoretical Criminology, 19, 43-58. HUYSMANS, J. 2006. The Politics of Insecurity. Fear, migration and asylum in the EU, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge. LOADER, I. 1997. Policing and the Social: Questions of Symbolic Power. British Journal of Sociology, 48, 1-18. LOADER, I. 2006. Policing, Recognition, and Belonging. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 605, 201-221. LOADER, I. & MULCAHY, A. 2003. Policing and the condition of England. Memory, Politics and Culture, Oxford, Oxford University Press. MELOSSI, D. 2000. The Other in the New Europe: Migrations, Deviance, Social Order. In: GREEN, P. & RUTHERFORD, A. (eds.) Criminal Policy in Transition. Oxford: Hart. STUMPF, J. 2015. D(E)Volving Discretion: Lessons from the Life and Times of Secure Communities. American University Law Review, 64, 1259-1284. VINE, J. 2014. An inspection of Immigration Enforcement activity in London and the West Midlands (‘Operation Nexus’) March – June 2014. London: Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. WADDINGTON, P. 1999. Policing Citizens, London, UCL Press. WEBER, L. 2011. ‘It sounds like they shouldn't be here’: immigration checks on the streets of Sydney. Policing and Society, 21, 456-467. WEBER, L. 2013. Policing Non-Citizens, Abingdon, Routlegde. WEBER, L. & BOWLING, B. 2004. Policing Migration: A Framework for Investigating the Regulation of Global Mobility. Policing &  Society, 14, 195-212.  

Introduction : special issue on ‘policing, migration and national identity’

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Introduction : special issue on ‘policing, migration and national identity’

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