Immigration Detention as Social Defence: Policing ‘Dangerous Mobility’ in Italy

Abstract

Drawing on an empirical study, this article explores the role of immigration detention in Italy by analysing the way a specific rhetoric of ‘dangerousness’ has developed and is being used within the framework of immigration enforcement policies. Our argument is that immigration detention has been transformed into an instrument of crime prevention and ‘social defence’, and that this transformation is fuelled by the central position that the legal categories of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’ have assumed in the regulation of the return procedure. The article contends that immigration law enforcement agencies can make use of immigration detention as a flexible control tool to manage what are perceived as the most problematic populations in urban areas, thus practising a policy of selective enforcement that while not explicitly built along racial and ethnic lines, clearly discriminates among migrants according to their ‘social marginality’ or supposed ‘social dangerousness’.

Bureaucracies Under Judicial Control? Relational Discretion in the Implementation of Immigration Detention in Swiss Cantons

“…Decision-makers' interdependent relationships with these actors vary from one canton to another but directly shape the workload of immigration bureaucracies and the way they use their discretion regarding immigration detention. This implies that, while initially aimed at enforcing removals, cantonal use of immigration detention is also marked by other rationales (see C. Achermann, 2021), such as reducing expenses or fighting criminality, mixing both punitive (sanctioning illegality of stay) and preventive (crime control) logic (Campesi, 2020;Campesi & Fabini, 2019;Rezzonico, 2020).…”

Beyond the ‘Criminalisation’ of Immigrants: Critical Criminology and the Modern Deportation Regime

“…Southern European countries like Spain and Italy developed repressive structures of immigration enforcement and deportation policy at the turn of the century, as they grappled with new waves of immigration from the Middle East and North Africa in particular (Calavita 2007; Melossi 2003). Resultant policies of these countries – alongside other countries in the European south, like Greece and Turkey – were made more punitive in the context of overlapping economic and refugee crises in the years that followed (Campesi and Fabini 2020; Cea D'Ancona 2016; Geddes and Scholten 2016). In Poland, the right wing Law and Justice (PiS) party – elected to power in 2015 – has responded to an ongoing influx of refugees with xenophobic rhetoric and exclusionary policies, doubling annual deportations between 2015 and 2018 (Eurostat 2020).…”

Camplessness and the (non-)reception system: the emerging of migrant informality in northern Italy from a human rights perspective

“…The law repealed the status of humanitarian protection in Italy and excluded around 130.000 migrants (until 2020) from the reception system and the protection mechanisms at once, pushing them into informality. This revocation converted them from legal to "illegal" migrants and produced a "growing overlap between illegalized migrants and asylum seekers" in the public perception (Campesi and Fabini 2020;Tondo and Giuffrida 2018). The decree and its massive expulsion of migrants with a legal claim for protection out of the reception system marked not only a radical change in the Italian immigration strategy, it can be as well understood as a prime example for institutional racism (Khrebtan-Hörhager 2019).…”