Crisis, capital accumulation, and the ‘Crimmigration’ fix in the aftermath of the global slump

ABSTRACT

In a 2006 article, legal scholar Juliet Stumpf coined the term ‘crimmigration’ intended to reflect the growing convergence between criminal and immigration law in the United States. To date, the robust and insightful debates that have emerged from this intervention are largely centered in legal scholarship and citizenship studies. In this article, I ask what a political economy lens can add to our discussion of crimmigration and argue that, in part, a political economy analysis allows us to parse out important nuances in national crimmigration regimes. Examining the case of settler-colonial Canada, I show how the criminalization of migration has been bound into a broader strategy of carceral expansion as a political-economic response to the financial recession of 2007/08. I argue that the specific means by which prison expansion has taken place, through Public-Private Partnerships, bears significantly on how carcerality has become entrenched in Canadian immigration policy with important implications for those organizing against the criminalization of migration.

KEYWORDS:

• Political economy
• crimmigration
• abolition
• prisons
• public-private partnerships

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Figures drawn from information disclosed by P3 Spectrum and Infrastructure Ontario.

2. https://www.ontario.ca/page/mandate-letter-progress-economic-development-employment-and-infrastructure#section-4

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Evans

Jessica Evans is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University. Her research explores the political economy of prisons with a particular focus on the relationship between prisons, national identity, and capitalism in the settler colony.