Australia’s Long History of Immigration, Policing and the Criminal Law

Modern immigration is a highly regulated procedure governing the mobility of peoples between sovereign jurisdictions. This procedure has been progressively refined since the late eighteenth century through mechanisms of government that have frequently deployed the apparatus of criminal law. In this chapter we examine the long history of the intersection of criminal law and policing regimes in the service of immigration control in Australia. We take the Australian case as exemplary rather than exceptional. The particular conditions of British settlement of the convict colonies and the later construction of the White Australia Policy constitute a particular local formation of a more general phenomenon found in the development of modern states. Through a brief history of Australian immigration law and policing we highlight both the long-standing criminalisation of migration regulation breaches, and the persistent governmental concerns with the exclusion of undesirable populations, especially of those with criminal records. In the light of these histories we question the assumption that ‘crimmigration’ is a peculiarly late modern convergence of criminal law and immigration regulation.Full Tex