Criminalization of Immigration: Rationalizing Police Stops between Non-Discrimination Norms and Immigration Panic

The control oriented reaction to the rise of the number of people seeking asylum in European Union in 2015 and the rise of populist anti-immigration sentiment in Europe and USA has led to both increase in internal immigration controls and to an intensification of public discourse that conflates asylum policy, irregular migration, criminality and terrorism. These developments give rise to a concern that surveillance practices of police forces will increase ethnic profiling and that the principles of non-discrimination and ethnic equity are threatened.

The paper analyses the rationalizations that the Finnish police force uses in legitimizing the practices of internal immigration controls, and in selecting the persons that are targeted in the immigration checks. The research is made as a part of the three-year research project “Stopped – Spaces, Meanings and Practices of Ethnic Profiling” that examines the prevalence, the forms and practices of ethnic profiling by the police in Finland. The data used in this paper consists of semi-structured interviews (N=31) with the representatives of the police and other security authorities.

On the one hand, Finland and other European countries conceive immigration policing as a central means in solving perceived “migration crisis”; on the other hand, legal non-discrimination norms are seen as a guarantee that policing is conducted in an unbiassed way. However, the paper argues that one crucial question concerning limiting and controlling police discretion in the context of immigration policing is the way the police as an institution, and the policemen as professionals, react to different moral, juridical and political pressures concerning discrimination and immigration policy goals set by the government.