Policing Citizenship: Regulating Immigrants through Rights and Crime.

In 2006, over a million immigrants and their allies rose up in cities across the United States to denounce the now famous Sensenbrenner bill (HR4437) that introduced controversial measures to criminalize immigration. The historic mass mobilizations exposed an important paradox. Since the 1960s, there has been a growing convergence between criminalization on the one hand and the expansion of rights for immigrants on the other. This paper traces the development of this paradoxical convergence, which I refer to as a rights/crime nexus, over three periods: 1965, 1986, and post-9/11. It argues that the formal recognition of rights for migrants in the post-civil rights era led to a greater intersection between immigration and crime control. Thus, the logic underlying the intersection between rights and criminalization is less about restricting movement and ultimately about policing citizenship and membership within a post-civil rights context. The paper stems from a year and one half of ethnographic research of immigration law enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico Border.   ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]