Scholars have offered various accounts of the forces that have caused the contemporary convergence of immigration enforcement and criminal law enforcement, known as “crimmigration.” This article argues that such accounts are insufficient, either because they have difficulty explaining the concrete practices by which crimmigration regimes operate, or because they explain the intersection of criminal law and immigration law solely from the perspective of the former. Additionally, much crimmigration scholarship has difficulty explaining why crimmigration regimes target populations that are principally undeportable, such as asylum-seekers. To fill these voids, this article conceptualizes crimmigration as a product of what Deleuze has termed the “control society.” Such conceptualization clarifies the objectives underlying crimmigration: namely, handling aggregates of presumably deviant groups and keeping dangerous behavior at an acceptable level. Additionally, it assists in explaining the precise practices by which crimmigration regimes operate, particularly the utilization of flexible and decentralized techniques of power. The objectives and manners of exercising power typical of the control society currently govern both criminal and immigration law, causing the unprecedented cooperation of these two fields. Furthermore, as a product of the control society, crimmigration is primarily a regime of domestic policing and population management, as opposed to a system dedicated to the deportation of undesirable migrants. By applying a methodology of textual analysis to the case study of detention of asylum-seekers in Israel, the article demonstrates the vast impact that the underlying principles of the control society have on the making of crimmigration regimes.

Crimmigration has its breeding ground in dystopian and securitarian narratives. The anti-hero of these narratives is the mass-foreigner, a stereotyped version of the foreigner usually depicted, alternatively or cumulatively, as an enemy or as a parasite of host societies. But not only does crimmigration presuppose such narratives (and the deviant identity of the mass-foreigner, which is connected with them) as a source of legitimation, it also fuels these same narratives by providing them with an official sanction: by merging criminalization and irregularization on a legal level, it heavily contributes to making the social identity of mass-foreigners into a doubly deviant one. The overarching aim of this strategy is that of facilitating the exclusion of unwanted foreigners: first of all, their territorial exclusion (expulsion), but also, as a means to expulsion, their social exclusion (dereliction). This, I argue, deprives crimmigration of authoritative force—authority being inclusive in nature—and reduces it to mere violence.

In the wake of the refugee crisis and the global war on terrorism, many European countries are revising their border control strategies. Despite having signed the Schengen Agreement, as a result of which all forms of internal border control within a large section of Europe have been abolished, many countries are exploring the legal possibilities to monitor cross-border mobility. By focusing on the case of the Netherlands, this article aims to assess one of these possibilities: carrying out so-called Schengen proof spot checks in the 20-km zone around the land borders with Belgium and Germany. In this article we aim to examine whether the Dutch Mobile Security Monitor is exercised justly and fairly. We will assess street-level discretionary decision making by officers of the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, the Dutch border police organization responsible for carrying out the MSM, through the sociolegal lens of the principle of non-misuse of competence also known as détournement de pouvoir . Although the MSM is meant as an instrument of immigration control, based on our extensive qualitative fieldwork this article will show a different picture.