Competing Narratives in the Nexus of Migration-Crime-Gender

Crimmigration – the conflation of migration control with criminal justice control – serves to legitimise tough responses to mobility, especially by persons without fully provable rights to enter and remain in the UK. In this nexus, harm is politically framed as one of migrant harm to citizens, legitimising a hostile environment of detention, deportation and civil exclusion. This chapter addresses two elite narratives in the nexus for providing our gendered and racial ways of seeing the wrong sort of migrant. Framed in a culture of fear and stranger making, the first narrative on nationhood constructs the foreigner as crimmigrant – someone deviant or dangerous, to be watched and evicted. Framed as a drain on society, the second narrative on duplicity stories non-citizens as bogus and non-contributory. Based on lived experience, undocumented females re-story the crimmigrant harm as one of their unjust treatment by the State and re-tell the civil harm as one of their exploitation at the hands of policy makers, employers, and unscrupulous citizens. In an alternate telling of political stories, women counter their wrongfulness to one of their wrongful ideation under our given lens for seeing the wrong sort of migrant.