Book Review of Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement

Book review Punishment & Society 0(0) 1–3 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1462474517714777 journals.sagepub.com/home/pun Doris Marie Provine, Monica W Varsanyi, Paul G Lewis, and Scott H Decker, Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2016; 208 pp. (including index): 9780226363189, $25 (pbk) The book reviewed here provides a new framework for critically analyzing the federalization of immigration enforcement. It contends with the complexities and contradictions that adhere to implementing immigration enforcement at the street level. This perspective plays with the old law and society adage that law on the books is not the same as law on the streets. Still it is a departure in how many critical immigration scholars view the relationship between anti-immigrant injustice and law enforcement. The routinely held view is of the subordination of immigrants coinciding with hierarchically imposed enforcement strategies in such federal legislation as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, as implemented through the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As a result, most of the literature on immigration enforcement focuses on case law about immigration statutes or such ICE ACCESS initiatives as Secure Communities, Priority Enforcement Program, Criminal Alien Program and more. The book Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines, by Doris Marie Provine, Monica W Varsanyi, Paul G Lewis, and Scott H Decker, takes a different perspective. It focuses on a ‘‘multijurisdictional patchwork’’ that depends in large part on how states and even more importantly local authorities respond to federal policies and initiatives. The patchwork consists of a multitude of policies and practices at the state, county and local levels, with each level of policy informed by both contradictory and overlapping factors. Enforcement practices are informed by a variety of factors: local institutional interests, politics and economics, culture along with individual discretion. Missing is a unified ideological vision, which the authors describe as, ‘‘a broadly shared sense that immigrants who have settled in the United States have some moral claim to remain that law and policy should honor.’’ (p. 154). Also missing are the integration, predictability and consistency that facilitate a fair and accountable process and are generically embedded in the rule of law. But with such disjunctures, the patchwork generates a multitude of new vision. It’s a vision of immigration enforcement as legal pluralism. Here a multitude of levels of law impress conflicting messages upon the immigrant and front-line officers, creating as an outcome discretion for the officer and uncertainty for the immigrant. For scholars, such framing of immigration federalization promises dissertations worth 2 Punishment & Society 0(0) of unpacking all the fragmentary and disjointed legal strategies from the variety of legal systems that create uncertainty and fear within a net of control. In the spirit of contemporary immigration research the patchwork metaphor also ties nicely with the image of immigration as salad or mosaic, rather than the anachronistic and assimilationist melting pot: less integration and more distinctiveness within the arena of immigration federalization. Top among the book’s contributions is the ease with which it integrates theory and empirical research. Its normative claim is easy to decipher: Statutes and ICE ACCESS initiatives are unjust. But rather than drawing upon doctrine, the book relies on empirical research that ties the claim to a nuanced analysis of different institutional actors and agencies, along with several case studies. The claim is almost self-evident when viewed from the street, from the perspective of local police whose task is to maintain trust in immigrant and ethic communities that bear the uncertainty and fear generated by immigration federalization. Local routines develop around the economic interests of local meat packing industries, or the cross-border culture inherent in some border towns and cities. Within these particular spaces, local police and sheriff offices may abide by the welcoming habits of the community. But overall welcoming spaces still subordinate immigrants to secondary status and reinforce uncertainty and fear that wreak havoc on everyday life. This is due to interlocking decisions that help comprise the patchwork. Decisions to arrest—let’s say—under 287(g), leads to booking under Secure Communities, which connects the individual’s fingerprint biometrically to any immigration infraction in the individual’s past. Thus, the initial arrest decision can quickly lead to detention, another big decision, and even deportation for immigrants who might have committed nothing more than a non-serious offense decades earlier. Even a green card, a sign of long-term residence, cannot protect the immigrant from the immigration consequences of an arrest, which breaks up families by the tens of thousands annually. Police chiefs and sheriffs are responsible for local practices and thus hold a lot of sway over local law enforcement’s relationship to ICE. Additionally, front-line officers take cues from the sheriff and police chief. The book investigates the role of sheriffs and police chiefs with a survey instrument designed to investigate the officer’s attitudes on immigrants, immigration policy, and interactions with the federal government. Overall, sheriffs have a closer relationship with ICE, while police chiefs are more likely to condemn the victimization of immigrants and be more committed to building trust with local residents, including unauthorized immigrants, a circumstance that may create friction between towns and surrounding counties. Similarly, county sheriffs are more independent than police chiefs and are not creatures of state constitutions, which means that county sheriffs can establish practices that are at odds with state policy. Discretion is informed by a variety of local factors including institutional culture, local economies and politics. The authors focus on geography and demographics, but more often than not suggest that these latter factors are not Book review 3 determinative of enforcement patterns, which means that enforcement patterns may be quite disparate along the border and in highly populated Hispanic communities. It is here that case studies bring the multijurisdictional patchwork to life. In El Paso, for example, while demography and geography contribute to the lenient approach taken by local law enforcement, the authors focus on the ‘‘dramatic change of policy under Sheriff Wiles.’’ In Dodge City, by contrast, the key factor on enforcement is the local meatpacking economy, which lives or dies by its immigrant—much of it undocumented—workforce. Enforcement in Allentown brings other factors to bear, such as demographic change and racial tensions, and in Salem Oregon unauthorized immigrants fall prey to unofficial agreements between local authorities and ICE, even in the absence of official 287(g) agreements. The big take-away from this book is that immigration enforcement is much more complicated than previously assumed. The book belongs on the shelf of lawyers, political scientists, sociologists and anyone interested in federalism or immigration politics. It is accessible to the lay public, although it is likely to offer more nuance than many in the general public might desire. Perhaps the book could have integrated more literature on legal pluralism—and for that matter, social control—to make more conceptual sense of the oppressive nature of the patchwork. For scholars, this book is destined for status as a classic for its empirical contribution and insistence on the contradictions and contested terrain that drive a labyrinthine immigration policy and practice. Robert Koulish University of Maryland, USA