The term "crimmigration" was coined by Juliet Stumpf in her 2006 article, The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power, 56 Am U L Rev 367. Crimmigration describes the nexus between criminal and immigration law and enforcement. One scholar described crimmigration as "a new system of social control that draws from both immigration and criminal justice but is purely neither."

Although immigration law is a branch of administrative law (like environmental, securities, or labour law), non-citizens have long been subject to negative stereotypes and discourses that solder a linkage of immigration with crime. The label "illegal immigrant," affixed to people who breach the provisions of an immigration statute is a stark example.

This course explores how immigration law increasingly draws on techniques and logics associated with the penal governance, and also how the criminal law has been mobilized to turn breaches of immigration law in criminal offences, and to create crimes applicable only to non-citizens. Topics include the production of irregular or "illegal" status, race and the legacy of colonialism, migrant detention, "hostile environment" policies that surveille and stigmatize non-citizens, deportation, counter-terrorism, anti-smuggling, and denationalization.