Immigration Law Research Guide: Crimmigration

This book lays out crimmigration law's contours. It tracks the legal developments that have created crimmigration law and explains the many ways in which the stark line that once appeared to keep criminal law firmly divided from immigration law has melted away. In doing so, it highlights crimmigration law's most salient features: its ability to substantially raise the stakes of criminal prosecutions by dramatically expanding the list of crimes that can result in removal from the United States, its willingness to freely rely on crimes that apply only to migrants, and its vast dependence on detention as a means of policing immigration law. This book is intended to provide readers with a fundamental understanding of this developing area of law. It includes case studies and 'problem scenarios' that place the concepts discussed within each chapter in a real world context in addition to 'practice pointers' designed to give crimmigration lawyers and students of crimmigration law tips and techniques to help them implement the tools into their daily practice.

Winner, 2016 Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association Latino/a Section
The United States currently is deporting more people than ever before: 4 million people have been deported since 1997 -twice as many as all people deported prior to 1996. There is a disturbing pattern in the population deported: 97% of deportees are sent to Latin America or the Caribbean, and 88% are men, many of whom were originally detained through the U.S. criminal justice system. Weaving together hard-hitting critique and moving first-person testimonials, Deported tells the intimate stories of people caught in an immigration law enforcement dragnet that serves the aims of global capitalism. Tanya Golash-Boza uses the stories of 147 of these deportees to explore the racialized and gendered dimensions of mass deportation in the United States, showing how this crisis is embedded in economic restructuring, neoliberal reforms, and the disproportionate criminalization of black and Latino men. In the United States, outsourcing creates service sector jobs and more of a need for the unskilled jobs that attract immigrants looking for new opportunities, but it also leads to deindustrialization, decline in urban communities, and, consequently, heavy policing. Many immigrants are exposed to the same racial profiling and policing as native-born blacks and Latinos. Unlike the native-born, though, when immigrants enter the criminal justice system, deportation is often their only way out. Ultimately, Golash-Boza argues that deportation has become a state strategy of social control, both in the United States and in the many countries that receive deportees.