Crimmigration in Gangland: Race, Crime, and Removal During the Prohibition Era

“Crimmigration,” defined by Prof. Garcia Hernandez as “the intertwinement of crime control and migration control,” was as rampant at the beginning of the 20th century as it is today. In the article “Crimmigration in Gangland: Race, Crime, and Removal During the Prohibition Era,” Geoffrey Heeren, Professor of Law at Valparaiso University Law School, examines how crime became associated with race and influenced U.S. criminal and immigration laws. While most scholars contend that “crimmigration” arose in the 1980s, Heeren's examination of the original records of the Immigrants Protective League of Chicago found that it dates at least as far back to a deportation drive in Chicago in 1926. It was meant to target presumed gang members but in fact resulted in indiscriminate raids on immigrant communities. Italians and Sicilians, whose “whiteness” was contested at the time, became targeted as criminals in the same way that Latino immigrants are today. The author demonstrates that eugenics and “scientific racism” – the idea that certain ethnic groups have a greater propensity to crime – were used in the 1920s to justify the racist frameworks that conflated immigration with increased levels of crime. Heeren concludes that the current practice of associating immigrants with criminal activity is based on a century of pseudoscience that allows crime to serve as a proxy for race and ethnicity. (Lydia Grinnell for the Immigrant Learning Center's Public Education Institute)

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