Immigration control, post-Fordism, and less eligibility
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474509357378 |
| Published date | 01 April 2010 |
| Date | 01 April 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Immigration control,
post-Fordism, and less
eligibility
A materialist critique of the criminalization
of immigration across Europe
ALESSANDRO DE GIORGI
San José State University, USA
Abstract
The apparent de-bordering of the western world under the impulse of economic globaliz-
ation has been paralleled by a simultaneous process of re-bordering of late-capitalist
societies against global migrations. This re-bordering is part of a broader punitive turn
in the regulation of migration which has emerged, particularly in the European context,
since the mid-1970s. On the one hand, non-western immigrants are targeted by pro-
hibitionist immigration policies which in fact contribute to the reproduction of their
status of illegality; on the other hand, the systematic use of incarceration (together with
administrative detention and deportation) as the main strategy in the ongoing war
against unauthorized immigration configures a dynamic of hyper-criminalization of
immigrants, whose result is the intensification of their socioeconomic and political
marginality across Europe. Following the materialist criminological approach known as
political economy of punishment, this article suggests that these punitive strategies
should be analyzed against the background of an increasingly flexible and de-regulated
neoliberal economy: in this context, the hyper-criminalization of migrations contributes
to the reproduction of a vulnerable labor force whose insecurity makes it suitable for
the segmented labor markets of post-Fordist economies.
Key Words
borders • criminalization • illegalization • less eligibility • post-Fordism
MIGRATIONS, BORDERS, AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF
PUNISHMENT
In this article I propose a materialist critique of the ‘punitive turn’ against global
migrations that have been taking place across western democracies since the late 1970s.1
147
PUNISHMENT
& SOCIETY
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1462-4745; Vol 12(2): 147–167
DOI: 10.1177/1462474509357378
To this purpose, I will make use of some concepts and ideas forged within the neo-
Marxist criminological perspective known as the ‘political economy of punishment’ (see
Garland, 1990; Howe, 1994; De Giorgi, 2006). Although originally developed with
reference to the functioning of national penal systems and to their role in the regulation
of the domestic labor force, this critical approach offers powerful theoretical tools
to deconstruct the punitive strategies that have shaped the politics of immigration
control across Europe and the USA in the last quarter of the 20th century: increasingly
restrictive immigration laws, militarized borders, growing resort to administrative
detention, systematic deportations, and (specifically in the European context) the
hyper-incarceration of immigrants.
The foundations of the political economy of punishment were laid down by Georg
Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer (1939: 5)2in the early pages of their classic Punishment
and Social Structure:
Every system of production tends to discover punishments which correspond to its pro-
ductive relationships. It is thus necessary to investigate the origin and fate of penal systems,
the use or avoidance of specific punishments, and the intensity of penal practices as they are
determined by social forces, above all by economic and then fiscal forces.
Paving the way to a neo-Marxist critique of punishment whose theoretical maturity
would be reached between the late 1970s and early 1980s (see, for example, Melossi
and Pavarini, 1977/1981; Quinney, 1977; Greenberg, 1981; Platt and Takagi, 1981),
Rusche and Kirchheimer argued that a sociological understanding of the historical and
contemporary trajectories of penal systems and of punitive practices in general should
be informed by a structural analysis of the connections between penal technologies and
the transformations of the economy – in particular, the transition of modern societies
from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist mode of production.
In this perspective, the emergence of what Michel Foucault would define as ‘disci-
plinary’ practices and institutions of confinement replacing the torturous ‘spectacles of
suffering’ staged in the main squares of European cities until the 18th century (see
Spierenburg, 1984), should be reinterpreted in light of the emergence of a capitalist
system of production whose political economy conceived the human body as a resource
to be exploited in the process of production (rather than being wasted in the symbolic
rituals of corporal punishment):
In fact the two processes – the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital – cannot
be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of
men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and
using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful
accelerated the accumulation of capital. (Foucault, 1975/1991: 221)
Thus, modern penal institutions would play a decisive role in the consolidation of
a mode of production based on the factory and grounded in the scientifically managed
exploitation of waged labor (Taylor, 1911/1967). At the outset of the bourgeois
revolution, the ‘great confinement’ of beggars, criminals, prostitutes, and the ‘idle poor’
in workhouses, poorhouses, and houses of correction across Europe (Foucault,
1961/1965) offered a crucial contribution to the transformation of the ‘free and
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