Cluster Introduction - Immigrant Outsider, Alien Invader: Immigration Policing Today

Abstract

Immigration policing has become a high-tech, multi-pronged affair financed annually by billions of dollars of personnel and the tools of their trade: prisons, weapons, massive computer databases, and more. The unprecedented scope of today’s policing apparatus stems from familiar policy concerns demonizing immigrants as dangerous outsiders. This introduction to a cluster of essays appearing in the LatCrit XVI symposium issue argues that old fears supported by new technologies should not be reason for despair. On the contrary, the collective efforts of engaged academics, activists, and litigators is reason to be hopeful that in the long-run the rhetoric of immigrant dangerousness will be replaced by policymaking that values immigrants’ full humanity.

Keywords: immigration, crimmigration, policing, race, racism