Crimmigration Law is a must-read for law students and practitioners seeking an introduction to the complex legal doctrine and practice challenges at the merger of immigration and criminal law.

This book examines the role of criminal law in the enforcement of immigration controls in the UK, critically analyses the process of formal criminalization of immigration status, and explores whether and how these offences are enforced in practice.

"Criminal prosecutions for immigration offenses have more than doubled over the last two decades, as national debates about immigration and criminal justice reforms became headline topics. What lies behind this unprecedented increase? From Deportation to Prison unpacks how the incarceration of over two million people in the United States gave impetus to a federal immigration initiative--The Criminal Alien Program (CAP)--designed to purge non-citizens from dangerously overcrowded jails and prisons. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, the findings in this book reveal how the Criminal Alien Program quietly set off a punitive turn in immigration enforcement that has fundamentally altered detention, deportation, and criminal prosecutions for immigration offenses. Patrisia Macías-Rojas presents a "street-level" perspective on how this new regime has serious lived implications for the day-to-day actions of Border Patrol agents, local law enforcement, civil and human rights advocates, and for migrants and residents of predominantly Latina/o border communities. From Deportation to Prison presents a thorough and captivating exploration of how mass incarceration and law and order policies of the past forty years have transformed immigration and border enforcement in unexpected and important ways."--Back cover.

This provocative account of our immigration system's long, racist history reveals how it has become the brutal machine that upends the lives of millions of immigrants today. Each year in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people are arrested, imprisoned, and deported, trapped in what leading immigrant rights activist and lawyer Alina Das calls the "deportation machine." The bulk of the arrests target people who have a criminal record -- so-called "criminal aliens" -- the majority of whose offenses are immigration-, drug-, or traffic-related. These individuals are uprooted and banished from their homes, their families, and their communities. Through the stories of those caught in the system, Das traces the ugly history of immigration policy to explain how the U.S. constructed the idea of the "criminal alien," effectively dividing immigrants into the categories "good" and "bad," "deserving" and "undeserving." As Das argues, we need to confront the cruelty of the machine so that we can build an inclusive immigration policy premised on human dignity and break the cycle once and for all.

The perception of the immigrant as criminal or deviant has a long history in the United States, with many groups (e.g., Irish, Italians, Latinos) having been associated with perceived increases in crime and other social problems, although data suggest this is not necessarily the case. This Handbook examines the relationship between immigration and crime by presenting chapters reflecting key issues from both historical and current perspectives. The volume includes a range of topics related to immigration and crime, such as the links between immigration rates and crime rates, nativity and crime, and the social construction of the criminal immigrant, as well as historical and current immigration policy vis-à-vis perceptions of the criminal immigrant. Other topics covered in this volume include theoretical perspectives on immigration and assimilation, sanctuary cities, and immigration in the context of the "war on terror." The Routledge Handbook on Immigration and Crime fills the gap in the literature by offering a volume that includes original empirical work as well as review essays that deliver a complete overview of immigration and crime relying on both historical and contemporary perspectives. It is a key collection for students in immigration courses; scholars and researchers in diverse disciplines including criminal justice, criminology, sociology, demography, law, psychology, and urban studies; and policy makers dealing with immigration and border security concerns.