Migration and Crime in a Divided World: Strategies, Perceptions, and Struggles

• Published date: 01 September 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00027162241251625
• Author: Luigi Achilli,Antje Missbach,Soledad Álvarez Velasco
• Date: 01 September 2023

8 ANNALS, AAPSS, 709, September 2023

DOI: 10.1177/00027162241251625

Migration and

Crime in a

Divided World:

Strategies,

Perceptions,

and Struggles

By

LUIGI ACHILLI,

ANTJE MISSBACH,

and

SOLEDAD ÁLVAREZ

VELASCO

1251625ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYMIGRATION AND CRIME IN A DIVIDED WORLD

research-article2024

Contemporary research shows that current migration

policies and technologies produce criminality. It would

be advantageous, then, to understand how migrants

make sense of and respond to these criminalizing

migration policies, technologies, and practices. This

volume delves deeply into criminalization processes,

focusing on how migrants perceive and react to the

enactment and implementation of policy. The articles

take a close look at the day-to-day experiences of

criminalized migrants, advancing our understanding of

some of the societal effects of migration policies and of

the relationship between criminalization and migration.

The collection of work presented in this volume seeks

to inspire more critical scholarship, given that public

narratives about migration tend to present narratives of

tragedy and despair only. We argue that policy and

public understanding of migration can improve if we

understand more about how, exactly, migrants respond

to their criminalization and how they manage to sustain

their migratory projects and their lives.

Keywords: migration; criminalization; global apart-

heid; illegality; resistance; penal powers

Immigration is a pressing issue. Many coun-

tries in the so-called Global North and

Global South grapple with an influx of migrants

from areas plagued by war, political and reli-

gious conflicts, ecological devastation, and

Correspondence: luigi.achilli@eui.eu

Luigi Achilli is a senior researcher at the European

University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy, and at the

Christian Michaelson Institute (CMI) in Bergen,

Norway. His research and writing focus on migration,

crime, forced displacement, agency, and conflict. He is

coeditor of Global Human Smuggling: Buying Freedom

in a Retreating World (Johns Hopkins University Press,

2023).

Antje Missbach is a professor of sociology at Bielefeld

University, Germany, specializing in global and trans-

national migration and mobility. Her latest book, The

Criminalisation of People Smuggling in Indonesia and

Australia: Asylum out of Reach, was published in 2022

(Routledge).