The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016 United States.
Int J Drug Policy. 2021 Jan;87:102846. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102846. Epub 2020 Jul 9.
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.
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.
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.
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.
近年来，美国在更人性化的药物政策方面取得了一定进展，但黑人和拉丁裔美国人不成比例的监禁现象仍在继续，而且非公民仍因与毒品有关的犯罪和违法行为而经常被拘留和驱逐出境。这些程序源自长期以来有针对性的药物执法，这一过程将移民和本土出生的少数族裔视为替罪羊、惩罚对象和被排斥的对象，最终导致现代毒品战争与移民和驱逐出境过程密切交织。本文借鉴了“刑移民”的概念——刑移民捕捉了刑事和移民政策及执法的交织如何增强了两个系统的惩罚性和排斥性潜力——来考察毒品禁令在美国当代移民和驱逐出境制度中的持久影响。
主要数据来自于我对刑事驱逐出境的定性研究，包括对纽约市移民法庭驱逐程序进行了一年的民族志观察，以及对 39 名移民律师、刑事律师和倡导者进行了 39 次访谈。这些数据补充了对相关政策的审查，以及现有的毒品犯罪型驱逐出境研究。
我认为，从美国进行的与毒品有关的驱逐出境是一个“刑移民”联系的重要例子，这种联系是由社会对移民的持续指责所支撑的，他们将毒品和犯罪等社会问题归咎于移民。与毒品有关的驱逐出境，以及围绕它的移民法庭政策和程序，有助于复制和加剧国内毒品战争固有的种族和族裔不平等，同时也将特别脆弱的移民送往暴力事件频发的国家，而这些暴力事件可归因于同一毒品战争的国际机构。
研究结果表明，需要对毒品和移民政策进行同步改革，以真正减轻美国持久的毒品战争的巨大影响。
