This thesis is a close examination of the criminalization of immigration in the United States. This work asserts that there is an increasing hybridization of immigration law enforcement and criminal law enforcement mechanisms, resulting in the criminalization of immigration. Moreover, this work seeks to place great emphasis on the afterlife of racial slavery in the criminalization of immigration. The enforcement of brutal laws during racial slavery classified enslaved Africans as property, not persons unless they were accused of a crime. In the United States legal system, the only aspect of their personhood that was considered legitimate was their capacity to commit crime. I argue that laws from this same time period also define citizenship to exclude African descended peoples. Once criminality is taken under consideration, this complicates the access that descendants of racial slavery and Black immigrants have to legal protections, including the rights enumerated to citizens in citizenship. Chapter One focuses on the transatlantic slave trade as a point of origin for explicitly racially coded laws to control domestic movement patterns due to the social and legal construction of criminality as it is racially constructed to be Black. Chapter Two evaluates lawsthat define citizenship, and asserts that citizenship is a coveted form of property inaccessible to Black people. Chapter Three closely examines the plight of Haitian asylum seekers and asserts that immigration and criminal enforcement are closely intertwined following U.S. immigration policy in this era, and concludes urging further consideration towards the lack of access Black people have to legal protections, such as those outlined in domestic and international human rights laws.
