The Convergence of the Criminal and the Foreigner in the Production of Citizenship

Abstract

The ‘migrant’ as a contemporary manifestation of the outsider or ‘stranger’ is an enduringly problematic figure. Although some categories of migrant are tolerated, and some are even welcomed, the majority tend to be resented, marginalised or excluded. Yet, despite the opprobrium faced by migrants, Honig (2003), de Genova and Peutz (2010) and others have argued that the migrant as Non-Citizen has been crucial to the definition of the Citizen. Demarcating categories of Non-Citizen serves to mark the boundaries of belonging and the national community from the outside. This chapter builds on this insight to consider the United Kingdom’s recently fetishised figure of the ‘foreign criminal’. Given the contemporary British obsession with migration, there should be little surprise that this dominant twenty-first century bogeyman is a Non-Citizen. But the Foreign Criminal brings the migrant together with another denigrated Other, the Criminal, in order to create a means through which the Citizen is simultaneously defined from both the inside and outside. The Criminal, to use Anderson’s (2013) terminology, is a Failed Citizen, one which publically delimits the (im)moral and illuminates conceptualisations of ‘proper’ social conduct and causes of social insecurity (Durkheim 1960).