Annually, tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants are intercepted by the Canadian Border Services Agencies and other law enforcement, most of whom are asylum seekers and refugees attempting to enter the country. From 2017 to 2021, nearly 60,000 migrants were intercepted, approximately 24,000 of whom have been accepted into the country (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, 2021). One of the primary reasons for the criminalization of undocumented immigrants is the designated foreign national (DNF) policy established which regulates law enforcement to arrest and detain foreign nationals if there are reasonable grounds to believe they are inadmissible, serve as a danger to the public, or unlikely to appear before an immigration hearing for admissibility or removal (Government of Canada, 2020). A range of practices known as “crimmigration” has also been implemented in recent years as nationalism has expanded. These are legal processes that integrate criminal law processes, categories, and techniques into immigration control and seek to apply criminal law enforcement strategies or sanctions on migrants for immigration violations (Atak & Simeon, 2018).
This gradual shift towards criminalization can be attributed to the social, political, and economical determination of certain groups as criminals and the implementation of immigration enforcement strategies and mechanisms at all levels of government. Despite human rights and refugee protection concerns, states such as Canada continue to emphasize national sovereignty through restrictive migration regimes. Crimmigration arises as the interplay of legal form and function of criminal law and immigration law, in which the sovereign (or government) uses means as a rationalization of choice about who should be members of society, individuals whose characteristics make them worthy of being a part of the community.
Therefore, this results in the active criminal prosecution of individuals that have violated laws such as provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA). Making some forms of migration or similar activities criminal does not require stepping outside the boundaries of criminal law. Similarly, the government can detain and deport noncitizens for a wide variety of, often unclear reasons, within the apparatus of the immigration law (Atak & Simeon, 2018). Therefore, the Canadian state misuses the analogy between crime and migration to criminals and migrants in order to justify the imposition of harsh criminal and disproportionate measures on noncitizens such as undocumented immigrants.
References
Atak, I., & Simeon, J.C. (Eds.) (2018). The criminalization of migration. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Government of Canada. (2020). ENF 20. Web.
Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. (2021). Irregular border crosser statistics. Web.