(In)visible, illegalised and deportable : constructing immigration detainees in Hong Kong as the crimmigrant other

Abstract

This thesis is amongst the few sociological and qualitative studies of immigration detention in Hong Kong. Immigration detention is an administrative practice of confining non-citizens for immigration-related objectives, like identification and removal. This thesis studies the evolution of immigration detention in Hong Kong since 2005, and how it emerged on the public agenda from relative obscurity since 2019. It also documents immigration detainees’ accounts of their migratory journeys to Hong Kong. It examines their motivations to travel, how they became illegal and deportable, and how they reacted to their immigration detention and removal from Hong Kong. It analyses how social actors contested seeing immigration detainees as dangerous, undesirable and excludable in public discourses, and how this contestation shaped detention practices and experiences. This study draws on 26 interviews with former immigration detainees (n=18) and civil society organisation members serving detainees (n=8) in Hong Kong. These interviews took place between June to October 2023. It also relies on documentary research on policy discussions, court rulings and media reports, collected between 2023-2024.

This thesis is a sociological inquiry into the social processes that classify some migrants as illegal, detainable and deportable, using the theoretical perspective of social constructionism. It contends that the concept of ‘crimmigrant other’ (Franko, 2019) best captures the assemblage of discourses, laws, bureaucratic practices, technologies and infrastructure that socially construct some immigrants as criminogenic, foreign and excludable. The analysis interrogates and builds on this concept, while engages with the literature on the nature and purpose of immigration detention. What types of immigrant criminality and deviance are used to construct moral arguments against the crimmigrant other? What role does immigration detention play in constructing inmates as the crimmigrant other? Why and how are definitions of the crimmigrant other contested by social actors in and outside immigration detention?

In light of these questions, this analysis makes three theoretical contributions to the literature. Firstly, drawing on insights from deportation studies, it advances a pathway-based approach to study immigration detainees’ migratory journeys. Pathways to illegality capture immigration detention as a nodal point that transforms diverse migrants into the crimmigrant other. They also explain migrants’ differential response to exclusion and othering. Secondly, this analysis specifies the mechanisms through which immigrant criminality and ‘uncooperativeness’ supply resources to construct immigration detainees as the crimmigrant other. Finally, it demonstrates that crimmigrant other constructions are fluid and contested. They are constantly reinterpreted from bottom-up, dynamic interactions among street-level bureaucrats, civil society members and immigration detainees.

Overall, this study empirically contributes to a growing body of work on immigration detention, by supplying an intimate portrait of a hard-to-reach population in the under-researched region of East Asia. Theoretically, it advances a social constructionist approach to the study of immigration detention. It bridges insights from border criminology and deportation studies to examine immigration detention’s function in producing illegal and deportable migrants.