This chapter engages with the scholarship on border control and migration within criminology, assessing its contributions and identifying some of its gaps—particularly concerning a slow engagement with questions of border abolition. Criminologists and sociologists of punishment have long studied the links between migration, crime, and punishment. At the turn of the twentieth century, the arrival of vast numbers of European immigrants to North and South America prompted critical studies on the urban and demographic impacts of migration on crime and disorder. Underpinned by a biological (Lombroso) and social (Chicago School) positivism in vogue at the time (Sozzo 2016, 2017; Valier 2003), such perspectives are still a sturdy epistemological frame through which questions of crime and “disorder” are studied. Meanwhile, scholars of punishment have explored the extended use of territorial exclusion during European modern state formation and colonial expansion (Anderson 2009; Daly 2022). Practices of banishment (through poor laws and resettlement laws, masters and servants laws) sought to immobilize and redistribute “idle” and unemployed populations throughout the realm to discipline the workforce, while the transportation of convicts within imperial centers pursued similar goals (Hay and Craven 2004; Kercher 2003). Such colonial tools of population control have been reinstrumentalized under contemporary conditions as nation-states in the North scale up border control infrastructure to prevent unwanted mobility from their former colonies in the South (Mablyn 2017; El-Enany 2020).
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)