Migrant Crime Narratives Are Really About Excluding Immigrants and Asylum Seekers
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The figure of the “migrant criminal” haunted the 2024 presidential debate stage between Vice President Harris and Donald Trump. From the very first question posed by ABC News moderator David Muir regarding the state of the economy, Trump painted a picture of a nation under attack. “Millions of people [are] pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums,” he insisted in the opening minutes of Tuesday's debate. According to Trump, these masses steal jobs from hard-working Black and Latinx communities. They are uncivilized and barbaric, feasting on pets and “taking over” buildings and small towns. “They're destroying our country. They're dangerous,” he warned. “And we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast.”
Trump has weaponized the myth of the migrant criminal since his first run for office — notoriously claiming “the Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, [and] rapists.” During his first months in office in 2017, Trump created the Victim of Immigration Crime Engagement Office. And throughout his presidency, he consistently invited relatives of people killed by migrants to State of the Union addresses — using grieving family members as instruments in his political theater, warning the American public that any of us could be the next victim. Trump has built his political career on the threat of migrant criminals, using individual cases of harm to portray all migrants as potentially dangerous, and therefore deserving of removal from the country.
But Trump is not alone in conflating migrants with crime. When asked about immigration during the presidential debate, Vice President Harris also conjured the southern border as an unruly and lawless place where “transnational criminal organizations” traffic in guns, drugs, and people. She reminded Americans, as she likes to do, that she is the only candidate to have prosecuted such criminals. Harris boasted that she supported a bipartisan border security bill that would have expanded Trump-era measures, such as instituting periodic border closures for asylum seekers. The bill would have poured a record-breaking amount of money into the Border Patrol’s and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s budgets, exceeding Trump-era allocations. According to the National Immigrant Justice Center, it would have “decimat[ed] the US asylum system, choking off access to protection for many and rendering the system unfair and punishing for the few who are able to access it.”
Though Republicans tend to use more degrading and dehumanizing language — like Trump calling a migrant who committed murder an “illegal alien animal” — Democrats are increasingly embracing law-and-order politics when it comes to immigration. Earlier this year, for example, New York City Mayor Eric Adams publicly challenged sanctuary city protections that prevent law enforcement from cooperating with ICE. If it were up to him, Adams said, he would allow local police to work with ICE to remove immigrants suspected — not only those convicted — of serious crimes. As district attorney for San Francisco, Harris also supported a 2008 policy that allowed cooperation with ICE by turning over young people arrested for certain crimes, against the recommendation of the city council.
A Harris-Walz campaign advertisement promotes the vice president’s record of “fighting violent crime.” The spot calls Harris “tougher” than Trump, “a border-state prosecutor [who] took on 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 blamed Trump for blocking a bipartisan bill that would have further militarized the southern border. When Harris took the stage, she honored her immigrant mother, who was only 19 “when she crossed the world alone,” while also calling for stricter immigration and asylum controls. The vice president insisted that “we can create an earned pathway to citizenship — and secure our border.” Harris’s speech begs the question: What does it mean to “earn” citizenship? And if some are able to earn it, then who isn’t? Who is locked out of being included? Historically, the answer has been “the criminal migrant.”
But, as A. Naomi Paik explains in her book Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary, “what counts as a crime changes over time and differs from place to place.” Paik shows that for the first century of US history, the southern border was largely unregulated. Over time, racist and eugenicist anxieties 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 different times this category has included anarchists, “heathens,” sex workers, polygamists, as well as queer, mentally ill, and illiterate people. And beginning in the 1970s, and '80s with the War on Drugs, this category exploded and began to ensnare more and more people.
For the first time, in 1986, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act authorized the deportation of migrants charged with drug offenses. A decade later, Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act into law, creating the “aggravated felony,” a category of offenses that carries severe consequences — including deportation — for noncitizens. Aggravated felonies include offenses like shoplifting, filing a false tax return, and failing to appear in court.
In her book From Deportation to Prison, Patrisia Macías-Rojas traces this “punitive turn in immigration,” showing how the US government appropriated the “race-blind” language of civil rights to criminalize migrants, casting them as responsible for their law-breaking behavior. Even though it was the state that decided that these offenses now merited deportation, migrants were painted as inherent deviants and delinquents.
Some of the rhetoric we are hearing now about migrant “criminals” emerged with Marielitos, the name given to the 125,000 Cubans who arrived in 1980 from the Port of Mariel. As Kristina Shull wrote in Detention Empire, during this period, politicians and the media accused Fidel Castro of emptying prisons and mental institutions and releasing “undesirables” into the United States. Marielitos — between 30-50% of whom were Afro-Cubans — were linked with contagious diseases, sexual deviance, and criminal behavior. Shull wrote further, Marielitos haunted politicians on both sides of the spectrum who embraced “narratives surrounding the urgent need to contain the threat of foreign — racialized, queer, and deviant — bodies.”
The year after Marielitos arrived in the US, Ronald Reagan’s Task Force on Immigration released recommendations that, according to Shull, changed the future of American detention and deportation policy. Based on the task force’s recommendations, Reagan embraced “new strategies… to assure the exclusion of unwanted immigrants: the use of the specter of another Mariel to legitimize more permanent detention facilities, the use of detention as a deterrent to illegal immigration, and the detention of asylum-seekers upon arrival.” Then and now, both political parties in the US have been complicit in turning migrants into criminals — weaponizing race, gender, class, and sexuality to exclude people from the country.
In Harris's first sit-down interview with CNN as the Democratic presidential nominee, she reiterated that “there should be consequences” for people who cross the border without authorization. “We have laws that have to be followed and enforced,” she told CNN anchor Dana Bash. Harris set herself apart from Trump by claiming to be the only presidential candidate to have prosecuted “transnational criminal organizations who traffic in guns, drugs, and human beings,” effectively conflating migration with threats to public safety.
Harris’s approach to immigration may seem very different than Trump’s: He explicitly calls migrants monsters and animals and warns of waves of crime if they are allowed into the country, while Harris comes from an immigrant family and celebrates immigration as part of America’s origin story. But Democrats can’t have their cake and eat it too. Their more neutral language is just as dangerous, ignoring the history of criminalizing migration that implicates prior administrations, Republican and Democratic alike.
Studies have long shown that there is no correlation between migrants and crime. Still, Trump continues to build a campaign on the imagined threat of the migrant criminal and Harris continues to emphasize the need to “enforce our laws.” Both of these approaches miss the point. In Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary, Paik suggests that the construction of migrants as criminals shifts responsibility away from governments that dislocate and dispossess people, that create conditions that make people leave home, and criminalize their movements once they do. Targeting drug smugglers ignores the fact that the US is responsible for criminalizing drug use. Deporting migrants who shoplift (through the “aggravated felony” designation) ignores the fact that US neoliberal policies too often impoverish and abandon poor residents. And excluding asylum seekers ignores the fact that the US (and the Biden administration, specifically) has, over time, eliminated pathways to seeking asylum. When we discuss migrant crime, this history must be front and center.
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