Basically, immigration law and criminal law have merged, he says, often to the detriment of the rights of those seeking to migrate to the U.S. This development has a racial component, according to García Hernández.
“It is not a coincidence that immigration law grew more criminalized just as the U.S. closed off more legal pathways for Mexicans to immigrate legally; we can look at crimmigration from a racialized viewpoint in the present context,” he said. “There are people from Canada, Australia and Western Europe who come here legally and then overstay their visas.
The government formerly had a policy of not using detention except in unusual circumstances or near the Mexican border. By contrast, about 429,000 people were detained pending immigration proceedings in Fiscal Year 2011. Immigration law has likewise increasingly turned to a migrant’s criminal history to decide whether the person is imprisoned or deported. Between 1892 and 1984, for example, about 14,000 people were excluded from the U.S. based on a criminal conviction or narcotics violation, while about 56,000 were deported for those reasons between 1908 and 1980. These numbers, covering nearly a century, pale beside contemporary statistics.
According to García Hernández, there were three forces at play in the 1980s and the 1990s that drove these trends. The number of people deported due to having committed a crime increased because the number of crimes that could result in deportation increased. Congress increased immigration officials’ detention powers and provided them with the money to exert these powers. And the federal government and some states have come to rely on a criminal justice model to control immigration.
'César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández.' Yeah, that sounds like the name of a person who will be totally objective on this topic...
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