State Crimes against Migrants as a Face of Crimmigration: Rethinking the Crime-Migration Nexus

Crimmigration scholarship examines the intersection of criminal law and migration control, and has largely focused on the excessive criminalization of people on the move and solidarity activists. This, however, captures only part of the story: While migration is increasingly criminalized, state-perpetrated crimes against people on the move are rarely penalized in criminal justice systems, despite widespread accounts of border violence and serious harms suffered by migrants at the hands of Western states. This perspective has not yet been thoroughly addressed within the crimmigration debate – a gap that is filled in this paper. Drawing on critical criminology and the concept of ‘criminal selectivity’, this article unveils state-perpetrated crimes against migrants as another face of crimmigration. It illustrates how Western states use criminal law both excessively against migrants and solidarians, and sparingly against public officials, in the pursuit of controlling migration. These interrelated mechanisms – conceptualized as over- and under-criminalization – form two sides of the same coin, and capture the instrumentalization of criminal law in Western migration governance. By unpacking this selective criminalization, the paper contributes to a more holistic crimmigration debate, developing a counter story to the predominant crime-migration nexus by shifting the focus away from migrant criminality towards criminal state conduct. This reframing not only challenges the selective focus of crimmigration scholarship, but also lays the theoretical groundwork for reducing impunity around harmful migration control practices through the application of criminal law.