Criminal state practices during migration control: Identifying another face of crimmigration

Crimmigration scholarship examines the growing intersection of criminal and migration law, focusing on the excessive criminalization of migrants and solidarity actors. Yet this focus is heavily one-sided: While human mobility is increasingly governed through criminal law, state actors routinely engage in crimes during migration control—but this is rarely recognized within criminal justice systems and academic debates. Moving beyond this dominant understanding of the crime-migration nexus, the article applies the concept of criminal selectivity to reveal the asymmetrical role of criminal law in migration governance. Drawing on critical criminology, it identifies the impunity surrounding unlawful migration control as another face of crimmigration, conceptualizing the simultaneous over- and under-reach of criminal law as interconnected manifestations of a single logic of control. By unpacking this selectivity, the theoretical argument shifts focus from the criminalization of migration to the criminality of its control, thereby expanding the horizon of crimmigration scholarship.