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

Criminal and immigration law have increasingly merged in a development labeled “crimmigration” by many scholars. This development is constituted by several elements, including a popular preoccupation with “criminal aliens” and attribution of crime problems to them.  In addition, immigrants in deportation proceedings are detained in jails that look and feel like prisons, immigration agents collaborate with police, and immigration offenses are often prosecuted as crimes. Scholars have argued that this convergence occurred in the 1980s as part of the War on Drugs, where crime served as a proxy for race for policy makers unable to openly argue for racial exclusion of Latino immigrants in the post-civil rights era.  Drawing on original archival research, I will trace those roots back much further, to the Prohibition Era of Gangland Chicago when federal and local authorities colluded to pursue a series of deportation raids on Italian Americans. I contend that the nascent system of crimmigration that developed during the 1920s was driven by the eugenics movement, and that this influence of eugenics on crimmigration paved the way for its growth in the 1980s.