The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power

This article provides a fresh theoretical perspective on the most important development in immigration law today: the convergence of immigration and criminal law. It proposes a unifying theory - membership theory - for why these two areas of law recently have become so connected, and why that convergence is troubling. Membership theory restricts individual rights and privileges to those who are members of a social contract between the government and the people.\nMembership theory provides decisionmakers with justification for excluding individuals from society, using immigration and criminal law as the means of exclusion. It operates in the intersection between criminal and immigration law to mark an…