Doris Marie Provine, Monica W Varsanyi, Paul G Lewis, and Scott H Decker, Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Author | Robert Koulish |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474517714777 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Barak G (2017) Unchecked Corporate Power: Why the Crimes of Multinational
Corporations are Routinized Away and What We Can Do About It. London:
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Ruggiero V (2013) The Crimes of the Economy: A Criminological Analysis of Economic
Thought. London: Routledge.
Gregg Barak
Eastern Michigan University, MI, USA
Doris Marie Provine, Monica W Varsanyi, Paul G Lewis, and Scott H Decker, Policing
Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago,
2016; 208 pp. (including index): 9780226363189, $25 (pbk)
The book reviewed here provides a new framework for critically analyzing the
federalization of immigration enforcement. It contends with the complexities and
contradictions that adhere to implementing immigration enforcement at the street
level. This perspective plays with the old law and society adage that law on the
books is not the same as law on the streets. Still it is a departure in how many
critical immigration scholars view the relationship between anti-immigrant injustice
and law enforcement. The routinely held view is of the subordination of immi-
grants coinciding with hierarchically imposed enforcement strategies in such fed-
eral legislation as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act
and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, as implemented through the
Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
As a result, most of the literature on immigration enforcement focuses on case law
about immigration statutes or such ICE ACCESS initiatives as Secure
Communities, Priority Enforcement Program, Criminal Alien Program and more.
The book Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines,by
Doris Marie Provine, Monica W Varsanyi, Paul G Lewis, and Scott H Decker,
takes a different perspective. It focuses on a ‘‘multijurisdictional patchwork’’ that
depends in large part on how states and even more importantly local authorities
respond to federal policies and initiatives. The patchwork consists of a multitude of
policies and practices at the state, county and local levels, with each level of policy
informed by both contradictory and overlapping factors. Enforcement practices
are informed by a variety of factors: local institutional interests, politics and eco-
nomics, culture along with individual discretion. Missing is a unified ideological
vision, which the authors describe as, ‘‘a broadly shared sense that immigrants who
have settled in the United States have some moral claim to remain that law and
policy should honor.’’ (p. 154).
Also missing are the integration, predictability and consistency that facilitate a
fair and accountable process and are generically embedded in the rule of law. But
Book reviews 657
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