Crimmigration as Hate Speech

Abstract

Taken as speech acts, the norms and the praxes of crimmigration show the same features as hate speech: first, crimmigration is a way of expressing hostility towards certain social groups (and individuals belonging to those groups) in virtue of certain characteristics they allegedly share (nationality, lack of residency visa, etc.); second, crimmigration is explicitly aimed at the social exclusion of its targets. Both these traits are also distinctive of hate speech. The article elaborates on this parallel, with a view to bringing to light, first, how crimmigration is troublesome not only as a form of legal coercion, and because of its being in conflict with fundamental legal principles, but also as a form of language that performatively contributes to the construction of the social identity of crimmigrized foreigners as subordinated subjects. Secondly, and consequently, crimmigration as a form of hate speech not only legitimizes institutional actors (judges, police, border agents, etc.) to treat crimmigrized foreigners in ways that would be branded as illegitimate if applied to citizens and regular foreigners; it also has the illocutionary effect of reinforcing current social prejudices against them (that they are dangerous and suspect subjects, parasites, etc.), thus providing non-institutional actors (i.e., ordinary people) with a sort of indirect legitimation to treat them according to those same prejudices.