Digital technology was intended to overcome discrimination and racial prejudice in the subjective and analogic decisions of immigration detention officers in America. It could have erased immigration’s racist legacy of Chinese exclusion and eugenics. Instead, these digital technologies have scaled up punitive biases, elevating the prejudices of the enforcers into criminal science and the outcomes of the immigration process into powerful public images of criminal risks. While mass immigration detention is not a new development, scoring tools are a novel addition to the crimmigration portfolio with far-reaching implications. In a punitive manner similar to deploying intelligence tests intending to exclude feeble-minded immigrants, it adds a scientific veneer to justify subjecting non-criminals to prolonged detention. It also justifies the mass detention of people of color as crimmigrants, a risk label that reproduces tropes of threat and criminality. In the spirit of Asad and Clair (2018), it creates a criminalized racial legal status based on immigration-neutral legal terms.

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Concluding Remarks: The Crimmigration Calculus

  • Robert Koulish,
  • Ernesto Calvo

摘要

Digital technology was intended to overcome discrimination and racial prejudice in the subjective and analogic decisions of immigration detention officers in America. It could have erased immigration’s racist legacy of Chinese exclusion and eugenics. Instead, these digital technologies have scaled up punitive biases, elevating the prejudices of the enforcers into criminal science and the outcomes of the immigration process into powerful public images of criminal risks. While mass immigration detention is not a new development, scoring tools are a novel addition to the crimmigration portfolio with far-reaching implications. In a punitive manner similar to deploying intelligence tests intending to exclude feeble-minded immigrants, it adds a scientific veneer to justify subjecting non-criminals to prolonged detention. It also justifies the mass detention of people of color as crimmigrants, a risk label that reproduces tropes of threat and criminality. In the spirit of Asad and Clair (2018), it creates a criminalized racial legal status based on immigration-neutral legal terms.