Arresting (non)Citizenship: The Policing Migration Nexus of Nationality, Race and Criminalization
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619850800 |
| Author | Alpa Parmar |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
850800TCR0010.1177/1362480619850800Theoretical CriminologyParmar
research-article2019
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2020, Vol. 24(1) 28 –49
Arresting (non)Citizenship:
© The Author(s) 2019
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The Policing Migration Nexus
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619850800
DOI: 10.1177/1362480619850800
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of Nationality, Race and
Criminalization
Alpa Parmar
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
In this article I examine ‘Operation Nexus’, a collaborative initiative between the police
and immigration enforcement in the UK, and its impact on foreign national and minority
ethnic suspects of offending. I explain how strategic policing aims to manage migration
around notions such as ‘high harm’ offenders, target those who appear ‘foreign’ as
well as visible ethnic minority suspects, the latter of which may hold citizenship in
the UK. The consequences of Operation Nexus are therefore wider than its stated
aim because it legitimizes racial profiling by the police and has negative consequences
on notions of belonging for racialized foreign nationals and citizens albeit in different
ways. By presenting empirical research with those who implement Operation Nexus as
well as those who experience it, I elucidate how the policing of migration revives and
extends colonial premises that connect nationality, race and criminalization within the
expanding and merging realm of contemporary criminal justice and migration control. I
draw on Lerman and Weaver’s thesis that when contemporary criminal justice policies
disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities, they create an unequal group
of people that are exiled within their own society and disenfranchised from public
institutions such as the police.
Keywords
Citizenship, colonial, criminalization, high harm, immigration enforcement, Operation
Nexus, policing migration, race
Corresponding author:
Alpa Parmar, University of Oxford, St Cross Building, Oxford, OX1 3UL, UK.
Email: alpa.parmar@crim.ox.ac.uk
Parmar
29
Introduction
Responsibility for managing migration has increasingly enlisted the police and other
actors to work collaboratively in the UK. The enforcement of border control has shifted
from ports of entry to the interior of the UK and extends responsibility to both state and
non-state actors (Aliverti, 2015; Yuval-Davis et al., 2018). As part of this development,
‘Operation Nexus’ (Nexus)—a joint initiative between the police and immigration
enforcement implemented across the UK—represents both a symbolic and actual change
in how foreign nationals and ethnic minority citizens suspected of an offence are treated
by the police.
In the following article, I begin by discussing the background to Nexus and the ques-
tions that have been raised in relation to the policy over recent years. Second, I describe
the methodology adopted for the research. Moving on from this part, third, I discuss the
thematic findings including (1) ‘high harm’ and the impact of Nexus in day-to-day polic-
ing and (2) the relevance of police custody data briefings and the messages they convey
and about foreignness and offending. Here I contextualize the links between nationality,
racial difference, stereotypes of criminality and evasiveness as a continuation of British
colonial genealogies. The final section of the article discusses foreign national and visi-
ble ethnic minorities’ experience of collaboration between the police and immigration. I
connect the thematic findings of the research with broader questions about how police
responsibility for migration impacts on the perception and relationship with democracy
and citizenship that both recent migrants and previous migrants who are now settled
develop. I draw on Lerman and Weaver’s (2014) framework in Arresting Citizenship
which explains how contact with the criminal justice system can fundamentally recast
the relationship between (non)citizens and the state. Criminal justice interaction, accord-
ing to their thesis, organizes racial knowledge in new ways that socialize racial minori-
ties about how to behave when in contact with criminal justice or state institutions.
Contact with the police and/or immigration brings to mind a powerful script: that if you
are a racial minority you are likely to be mistreated at the hands of the state.
My argument builds on Lerman and Weaver’s (2014) claims by applying them to the
British context and outlining what happens when criminal justice agents perform immi-
gration duties. When the police are enlisted to carry out the dual function of delineating
who belongs, alongside suspecting who might be an offender as part of their routine
work, the collateral consequence is that all racialized groups are treated as automati-
cally suspect; both citizens and those lacking citizenship are thought to be offenders and
foreign. The identification of people as foreign, ‘out of place’ or ‘not belonging’ based
on visual cues (e.g. skin colour, somatic features, dress, language, religious dress, lan-
guage proficiency, accent and so on), therefore becomes woven into to the police
responsibility to enforce immigration control. Together with the mandate that the police
have to act on ‘reasonable suspicion’ of those they suspect to be in breach of the law
(whether that be immigration or criminal law), this forges the mutually reinforcing rela-
tionship between non-belonging and suspicion. This process reorganizes racial knowl-
edge among migrants (or foreign national suspects in policing terms) and minority
ethnic citizens in the UK, perforating the relationship between citizenship and identity.
It reshapes minority ethnic citizens’ and new migrants’ relationship with the democratic
30
Theoretical Criminology 24(1)
state, diminishing their sense of—and possibility for—full and equal citizenship. I dis-
cuss the experience of two groups who bear the egregious consequences of Nexus polic-
ing; migrants with insecure immigration status and at risk of removal/deportation from
the UK and ethnic minority citizens in the UK who are suspected of being foreign and
not ‘truly’ British. These two groups are distinct yet as shown in this research both are
subject to the effects of Nexus and its consequences for citizenship and belonging. I
draw on Lerman and Weaver’s (2014) framework because while there is a wealth of UK
scholarship about how policing impacts on notions of belonging and citizenship
(Bradford, 2017; Loader, 2016; Waddington, 1999), less research has revealed in empir-
ical detail how racialized citizens’ relationship with and perceptions of the state are
fundamentally altered by interactions with the police. Lerman and Weaver’s focus on
politics as a lived experience then, allows a frame through which to understand the
negative consequences when racialized and vulnerable people feel denied a voice,
treated as suspect, undervalued and unprotected. In this respect, their approach captures
the scope of policing and criminal justice and in particular the ways in which these
interactions are able to reorganize racial knowledge among (non)citizens.
The theory of race adopted in the article supports the view that visual somatic and
corporeal differences are racialized and promote uneven surveillance of migrants and
minority ethnic groups in society. The findings are contextualized within theories that
suggest that racism is more than the logic of prejudice and that race operates as a contem-
porary project invested in maintaining the structure of a racial (colonial) state (Goldberg,
2002). The ways in which race operates is increasingly silent, implicit, diffuse and denied
(Bonilla Silva, 2015; Goldberg, 1997, 2015) and therefore harder to locate in criminal
justice practices despite having clearly racialized outcomes (Kapoor, 2013; Lerman and
Weaver, 2014).
Policing migration in contemporary Britain: Operation
Nexus
In the UK, the police are often the first point of contact with authority for irregular
migrants trafficked into the country, and/or who have arrived without documents and
were able to pass border controls without questioning. The police are often called to
attend to people who look suspicious or ‘illegal’ and migrants can get caught up with the
police as victims or suspects of a crime. The experience of police custody is brutally
memorable and significant for all those held there (Woof and Skinns, 2017) and is often
where suspected illegal migrants and foreign national offenders are initially placed. The
acrimonious relationship between the police and minority communities in Britain has
been widely stated (Bowling et al., 2008) and police involvement in enforcing migration
control is neither new nor unusual (Gordon, 1985). However, the expanding criminaliza-
tion of migration (Aas and Bosworth, 2013; Stumpf, 2006) and its racializing impacts
(Bosworth et al., 2018) mean that the reach of bordering practices are wider and deeper.
Having the police perform migration control duties including advanced checks on immi-
gration status for foreign national suspects, liaising directly with immigration officers,
requesting enhanced criminal records checks for those suspected of not having the right
Parmar
31
to remain in the UK mean that both migrants and minority ethnic citizens can be seen as
one and the same, and inherently suspect based on their shared visual appearances.
Significantly, the practices designed to control criminalized migrants...
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