Stories about migrant crime are actually about excluding immigrants and asylum seekers

A Harris-Walz campaign ad touts the vice president’s record of “fighting violent crime.” The spot calls Harris “tougher” than Trump, “a border state prosecutor (who) busted drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling guns and drugs” into the United States. At the Democratic National Convention, speakers called for “securing” the country and accused Trump of blocking a bipartisan bill that would have further militarized the southern border. When Harris took the stage, she honored her immigrant mother, who was just 19 “when she crossed the world alone,” while also calling for stricter immigration and asylum enforcement. The vice president insisted that “we can create an earned path to citizenship — and secure our border.” Harris’ speech begs the question: What does it mean to “earn” citizenship? And if some can earn it, who can’t? Who is excluded from participating? Historically, the answer has been “the criminal migrant.”

But as A. Naomi Paik explains in her book Forbidden, Walls, Incursions, Sanctuary“What constitutes crime changes over time and varies from place to place.” Paik shows that the southern border was largely unregulated for the first century of American history. Over time, racist and eugenic fears and capitalist demands for a disposable labor force (among other reasons) contributed to the construction of the criminal (and therefore excludable) migrant—a category that is both racialized and gendered. At various times, this category has included anarchists, “heathens,” sex workers, polygamists, as well as queers, the mentally ill, and the illiterate. And beginning in the 1970s and ’80s with the War on Drugs, this category exploded and began to encompass ever more people.

For the first time, in 1986, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act authorized the deportation of immigrants accused of drug offenses. A decade later, Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which created the “aggravated felony,” a category of crimes that carries serious consequences—including deportation—for noncitizens. Aggravated felonies include offenses such as shoplifting, filing a false tax return, and failing to appear in court.

In her book From deportation to prisonPatrisia Macías-Rojas traces this “punitive turn in immigration,” showing how the U.S. government adopted the “racially blind” language of civil rights to criminalize migrants, holding them accountable for their law-breaking behavior. While it was the state that decided these transgressions now merited deportation, migrants were portrayed as inherent deviants and criminals.

Some of the rhetoric we hear today about migrant criminals originated with Marielitos, the name given to the 125,000 Cubans who arrived from the port of Mariel in 1980. As Kristina Shull wrote in Detention empireDuring this period, politicians and the media accused Fidel Castro of emptying prisons and psychiatric institutions and releasing “undesirables” into the United States. Marielitos—30-50% of whom were Afro-Cubans—were linked to infectious disease, sexual deviance, and criminal behavior. Shull further wrote that Marielitos dogged politicians on both sides of the spectrum who “embraced narratives about the urgent need to contain the threat of foreign—racialized, queer, and deviant—bodies.”