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Background While recent years have seen moderate progress toward more humanistic drug policy in the United States, the well-documented disproportionate incarceration of Black and Latino Americans continues largely unabated, and non-citizens are still frequently detained and deported based on drug-related crimes and violations. These processes draw from a long history of targeted drug enforcement that has served to scapegoat, punish, and exclude immigrants and native-born racial minorities, culminating in a modern War on Drugs intimately intertwined with processes of immigration and deportation. Drawing on the concept of “crimmigration”—which captures how the intertwining of criminal and immigration policy and enforcement enhances the punitive and exclusionary potential of both systems—this article examines the enduring effects of drug prohibition in the contemporary U.S. immigration and deportation regime. Methods Primary data is drawn from my qualitative research on criminal deportation—including a year of ethnographic observation of removal proceedings in New York City immigration court, as well as 39 interviews with immigration lawyers, criminal lawyers, and advocates. These are supplemented by a review of relevant policy, as well as existing research on drug-crime-based deportation. Results I argue that drug-related deportation from the United States is a key example of a “crimmigration” connection bolstered by the ongoing societal scapegoating of immigrants for the social problems of drugs and crime. Drug-related deportation, and the immigration court policies and processes that surround it, serve to reproduce and intensify racial and ethnic inequalities inherent to the domestic War on Drugs, while also sending uniquely vulnerable migrants to countries rife with violence attributable to the international apparatuses of that same War. Conclusion Findings suggest a need for concurrent reforms to drug and immigration policy in order to truly mitigate the drastic impacts of the enduring U.S. War on Drugs.

The harm reduction movement formed during a period in which social movements of the working class and the excluded were weak, neo-liberalism ideologically triumphant, and potential opposition movements were viewed as offering "tinkering" with the system rather than a total social alternative. This climate shaped and limited the perspectives, strategies, and tactics of harm reductionists almost everywhere. In many countries, this period was also marked by a "political economy of scapegoating" that often targeted drug users as the cause of social woes. This scapegoating took the form of "divide and rule" political initiatives by business and political leaderships to prevent social unrest in a long period of worldwide economic trends toward lowered profit rates and toward increasing income inequality. However, times have changed. Mass strikes and other labor struggles, opposition to the World Trade Organisation and other agencies of neo-liberalism, community-based protests against belt-tightening, and other forms of social unrest have been increasing in many countries. This opens up the possibility of new allies for the harm reduction movement, but also poses difficult problems for which we need to develop answers. On-the-ground experience in alliance formation needs to be combined with careful discussion of and research about what approaches work to convince other movements to work for and with harm reduction, and which approaches do not. Class differences within the harm reduction movement are likely to become more salient in terms of (a) creating internal tensions, (b) increasingly, opening up new ways in which working class harm reductionists can organize within their own communities and workplaces, and (c) producing different strategic orientations that will need to be discussed and debated. As a movement, we will need to find ways to accommodate and discuss differing perspectives, needs, and assessments of opportunities and threats without paralyzing harm reduction activities.