The Dialectics of Migration: Social Bulimia and the Deportation Pipeline in New York City

Following the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 New York City has undergone challenges to its status as a refuge to the teeming masses of the globe. Based on recent research in New York City, we trace the policing of its migrant communities as the US state has resorted to punitive measures to regulate non-citizens regarded as deportable aliens. While the city has resisted the exclusionary pressures of the security state, its criminalized black and migrant communities still produce the highest rates of removal, described as the deportation pipeline. We argue that the city, while presented as a model of immigrant integration, is a contested space caught between the forces of exclusion and inclusion and overdetermined by processes of crimmigration (Stumpf 2006). Such processes expand the criminological concept of ‘social bulimia’ (Young (1999a), a characteristic of late modern capitalistic society—examining how a broader dialectic between cultural assimilation and structural punitiveness is navigated by multilayered networks of contradicting actors, processes, and policies at the municipal level.