Only Connect? Race Thinking, Migrant Mobility and the European City

Abstract

In this chapter Griffiths argues that the subject of the ‘foreign criminal’ is less an identifiable social demographic than a creation of a particular kind of state imagination. The foreign criminal, like other iconic figures of public discourse such as the mugger, the punk rocker and the drug addict, serve in part to maintain the social order through their exemplary cultural distance from the normal and the proper. Moral panics are said to use the grist that accumulates around such figures to generate popular support for narratives that make sense of the world through a particular political lens. A rhetorical trope — in this case an appeal to a threatened national border — uses the plausible folk devil figure to reinforce a more general vision of the world — in this case a nativism suspicious of those that arrive from other countries.