Racial Criminalization of Migrants in the 21st Century

Salvatore Palidda, Salvatore Palidda

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317072157
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Emigration & Immigration

Over the last two decades in the West, there has been a significant increase in the arrest, imprisonment and detention of migrants. The racial criminalization and victimization of migrants and Roma people has led judicial authorities, local governments, the police, mass media and the general population to perceive migrants and 'gypsies' as responsible for a wide range of offences. Taking into consideration the political and cultural conditions that affect and interconnect societies of emigration and immigration, the contributors examine and compare a range of cases in Europe and the United States. The contributions demonstrate how the persecution of the 'current enemy' is the 'total political fact' of the 21st century in that it ensures consensus and business, or what might be termed the 'crime deal' of today. This provocative book has international appeal and will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policymakers with an interest in migration and social and ethnic control.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Salvatore Palidda

Throughout history, societies have been marked by periods of persecution and violence, at times extreme violence, directed at the ‘outsider’, i.e. the ‘enemy of the time’.1 But how can the intensification of the persecution of Roma people and gypsies, and of the criminalization of immigrants in present-day Europe be explained?

As the contributions collected in this volume show, it is a most elementary mechanism of social control, emerging as being useful, if not indispensable, to the solidity and/or realignment of political cohesion. The latter is in fact nourished by the fear and the insecurity attributed to such an enemy to justify practices of power that blend all sorts of prohibitionism, protectionism and authoritarianism, which also target the weaker segments of the indigenous population. The war against outsiders, against those who are different, may thus be considered one of the ‘total political facts’2 that pervades a society through discourses, rhetoric and practices that consolidate a real or supposed majority. Hence, it will be argued here, in the current racist approach that characterizes the management of societies we can find that there are overlaps with the discourses and practices applied to colonized peoples and the subordinate classes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3 In other terms, the persecution of gypsies and the criminalization of migrants is currently written into a neoliberal/neoconservative political framework based on the asymmetry of power and wealth between actors that are all-powerful, and weak ones who have no rights and/or are reduced to the state of ‘non-persons’.4

The story of the current war against immigration is intertwined with the developments in criminalization that began with the neoconservative revolution in the USA and the UK (Thatcher reached power in 1979, Reagan did so in 1981).5 The success of this revolution continued without interruption even under ‘Democratic’ or ‘social-democratic’ administrations (Clinton, Blair, Jospin, the centre-left in Italy, and even Zapatero in Spain),6 also because the neoconservative discourse (in the Foucauldian acceptation of the term) has ended up phagocytizing a sizeable share of intellectuals and leaders on the left.7 But it is only today that the process emerges more clearly as the shift from government meant to pursue the liberal-democratic myth (as described by Foucault8) to neoliberal management that only pursues the hic et nunc prosperity of the stronger parties. The exacerbation of criminalization, of Giuliani’s ‘zero tolerance’ policies, or of the experiments aimed at the elimination of ‘human surplus’,9 in short, of what Simon (2008) and others term the ‘Crime Deal’, they all reflect a management of society that a priori excludes social recovery, integration or rehabilitation, because it seeks only to ‘maximize’ the profits of those who are in power. Why take care of marginal people, drug addicts, the poor, deviants, and why promote the stable, peaceful and regular integration of immigrants when, today, the growth of profits can be obtained via the erosion of workers’ rights, their inferiorization until they are almost reduced to a condition of neo-slavery, which also means getting rid of them at the first sign of their insubordination, when they pretend to lay claims or are too worn out, and can easily be replaced by other rightless non-persons? The government of the people taking care of its inhabitants to construct a stable, peaceful and well-regulated society in accordance with the norms of a universalistic legal order, up to the point of seeking to make everyone happy,10 has never existed. But, since the early 1970s (i.e. since the end of second post-War new deal or – in French terms – les Trente Glorieuses), the political organization of the wealthy societies of the post-war period had given the impression that it was possible to aim for this prospect through the development of welfare, the softening of sentences, even of repression, democratization, and the pursuit of social balance through prevention, recovery and the widening of political participation.11 The advent of the globalized neoconservative revolution12 routed any such illusions, and humiliated and absorbed the intellectuals and the leaderships that once harboured them. It is hence absolutely natural that there is a rediscovery of government through manipulation of fear and of zero tolerance, which also becomes a source of consensus and profits, further diminishing the capabilities for political action by weaker parties. The careers and business deals undertaken, particularly over these last 20 years by those who have taken advantage of the new management of society (which has nothing to do with pastoral/paternalist or liberal-democratic notions of governmentality) are extraordinary and unprecedented in their proportions.13 The same can be said for its victims, although today there are no longer armies shooting at impoverished crowds: to count the victims, it would be necessary to define new criteria to ‘measure’ the indirect or ‘collateral’, yet deadly, consequences of embargoes, of ‘humanitarian wars’, of prohibitionism against migrations and even of international aid in the event of natural catastrophes.

Thus, after the United States (Frampton, Lòpez, Simon, 2008), it appears that the Crime Deal has triumphed also in Europe, with effects that are not yet fully understood by the majority of the autochthonous people but, rather tragically, only by its victims.14

A Europe of States Competing in the Persecution of Gypsies and Immigrants

As shown by the copious data and information provided by the contributions gathered in this volume, since the start of the 1990s European countries have increasingly become more dogged in their persecution of gypsies (see Sigona’s chapter) and immigrants, but also of that portion of indigenous people who are labelled as ‘surplus humanity’, similarly to the rubbish that one no longer knows how to dispose of (it may prove a new opportunity for recycling mafias after the experience with toxic wastes).15

It was more or less at the end of the famous ‘Glorious Thirty Years’16 (the decades of strong post-War growth), and particularly following the so-called oil crisis of 1973–74, that countries which were historical recipients of immigration started adopting policies to ‘stop’ it.17 In reality, immigration into rich countries continued without interruption, while being in some cases still encouraged. The case of the car industry in France is emblematic, in that by persisting in exploiting the O.S. à vie, that is, immigrants whose skill and wage advancement was blocked, it postponed technological innovation and recruited, in particular, Moroccans through imams who were even provided places of worship in factories in order to keep them well separated from the unionized workforce.18 It was at the end of the war in Indochina that rich countries accepted tens of thousands of boat people, whereas today they criminalize asylum seekers (see Valluy in this book, and also Vassallo Paleologo, 2009; Kobelinsky and Makaremi, 2009). Again in the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Portuguese, not yet members of the European Community, migrated to France – but also elsewhere – as did as many from the Maghreb region, Turks, Asians migrated to Germany, Belgium, Holland and other countries. In effect, coinciding with the Fall of the Berlin Wall, an increasingly overt prohibitionist shift began, which also deformed political and humanitarian asylum policy as it had been practised until then in Europe. It seemed almost as if the borders with countries ‘of the South’ were suddenly closed, while slowly borders opened up with the countries of the East; recall that until 1990, citizens of Maghreb countries and other countries from the South were not subject to visa requirements. It was from the start of the 1990s that European police forces started adopting racial profiling as an instrument of customary repression and control and the selection of immigrants,19 informal but nonetheless effective, was primed to favour people coming from Eastern Europe, from Latin America, from the Philippines and some other Asian countries, to the detriment of ‘Arabs’ (this already before 9/11).20 In countries with a long history of immigration, criminalization increasingly took on racist features, striking the children of immigrants first and, almost to a lesser degree, new immigrants. In countries of new immigration, there was an evident, progressive replacement of the autochthonous clients of police forces with foreigners.21 The cases of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece are quite emblematic, and resemble what occurred earlier in the United States and, in part, what is also taking place in European countries where immigration is long-standing. The combination between the near impossibility of regular immigration, and of maintaining resident status for immigrants, and the repressive clampdown targeting them, unfailingly produces an ideal payoff from a neoliberal/neoconservative point of view: on the one hand, the reproduction of irregulars, a labour force which is enslaveable because it has no rights and no possibility of accessing them (almost a sort of ‘post-modern’ cannon fodder); on the other, the easy stigmatization as enemy of the moment to whom responsibility for all the fears, insecurities, economic problems and social malaise caused by neoliberalism itself can be attributed. It is not a process that has been carefully planned by a ‘Big Brother’, but rather, of government through fear that gives rise to a veritable ‘Crime Deal’ in wealthy countries.

However, as we will see in the reports of Amnesty International and other NGOs (see Sigona’s and Trehan’s chapter), in some countries the harassment of gypsies and immigrants is worse than in others (see, in particular, the relationship between the rates of detention of foreigners and nationals). In the United States, Blacks and Latinos are imprisoned far more than WASPs (as if to confirm Huntington’s theory, see Dal Lago’s chapter) and there are now more than 13 million irregulars and a sizeable turnover in this category that has guaranteed the growth of the U.S. economy for at least 25 years.22 Seemingly, there is lesser repressive doggedness in Europe, less imprisonment, less irregulars, but underground economies have developed everywhere, even in countries that deemed themselves immune to it, by exploiting both rightless foreigners or non-people and part of those autochthonous people who are discriminated against, often because they are children of immigrants. Nonetheless, in America and Europe alike, there has been a clear decrease in criminal offences, in spite of the frequent inflation of statistics by police forces and political entrepreneurs of zero tolerance.23 In other terms, if there are more arrests while fewer crimes are being committed, this is only because the powers that be have chosen the criminalization of social problems rather than seeking to solve them, something that is certainly not done by shooting at crowds, massacring marginals and filling up prisons. But the social treatment of society’s ills, worsened by neoliberal development, does not produce profits.24

The prohibitionist logic of ‘Fortress Europe’ may have caused fewer deaths among migrants who have sought to reach European borders than among those who did not leave and starved or died in wars. By now, those who migrate know they are risking their lives, even after setting foot on European soil. The accounts of the living and working conditions of so-called illegals, and the appalling conditions in centres for undocumented migrants or during deportations, constitute an indelible testimony of what European democracy is capable of producing.25 At the same time, the European Union shrouds itself in humanitarian rhetoric and lavishes with generous aid a number of NGOs that do not always make serious efforts to safeguard the fundamental rights of the weak; in fact, many of them end up embroiled in prohibitionist practices, if not in authentic wars against immigration, as happens to journalists, social scientists and other operators who are ‘embedded’ in theatres of war (Pandolfi and Fassin, 2008; Pandolfi, 2002).

However, there is a considerable difference between countries such as Italy, which has exacerbated a set of rules that provoke the growth of irregularity, and others who, in spite of prohibitionism, nonetheless still provide a modicum of certainty to the legal order.

Upstream from this globalized catastrophe of fundamental rights there is, firstly, the asymmetry of power and wealth between strong actors on one side, and immigrants and the indigenous weak on the other. Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine the overcoming of this catastrophe precisely because of this asymmetry: how can immigrants and native workers themselves, who are increasingly pushed towards the condition of rightlessness, conquer bargaining power and capacity for political action? For the time being, one can only observe the unfolding dynamics, particularly at a micro sociological level. Perhaps, immigrants and the precarious and/or rightless workers are starting to experience forms and modes of public action that differ from those of the past. The high number of immigrants who have enlisted in trade unions is rather significant, but it is often a sort of tax that is due in order to have protection from employers and the state, demonstrating the extreme weakness of the condition of the foreign worker.26

The Contents of this Book

The first part of the book includes contributions which neatly a...