Saskia Sassen

[Ed. Note: This article appeared on the opinion page of the International Herald Tribune on 23 June 2000. The writer, author of Guests and Aliens, is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.]

Last year more than 2,500 would-be immigrants died trying to get into Europe. That is many dead, but not many immigrants for a continent of more than 350 million people. The 58 victims found in a truck in Dover, England, on 19 June are part of this year's count. 

Whom is it that we are fightingÐthe determined, tiny minority of men, women and children from mostly poor countries who will come no matter what or the criminals who profit?

On this point of promoting or reducing criminality, one is tempted to ask whether the criminalising of marijuana in the United States really works better as a policy than the controlled legality of marijuana in the Netherlands, which leaves very little room for profitmaking by drug dealers and which even worked in recent days to temporarily civilise the conduct of English soccer hooligans while they were in that country. An issue that has got lost in the post-Dover exclamations of horror and pity is the fact that this concerns us all, affects us all. Yes, the central victims are the men and women who die, but we would be foolish to think that we can allow these deaths to happen and remain untouched.

The large and looming issue confronting societies under the rule of law is whether policies that brutalise people and promote criminalised profitmaking are sustainable if we are to keep up our systems based on the rule of law for which our forebears fought so hard. Sooner or later, allowing this sort of brutalisation and criminality begins to tear at the fabric of the lawful State.

Are there ways of regulating the flow of people into our societies that strengthen its civil fabric? Facts like the 58 deaths in the Dover truck do not. They risk producing indifference when it happens over and over again, even when not in such numbers. They risk promoting acceptance of these deaths among ourselves and our children, all in the name of maintaining control.

The price we pay for allowing the abuse that is human smuggling is much higher than the cost of accommodating these people, who just want a chance to work. And work they do. For instance, 17 percent of entrepreneurs in London belong to ethnic communities.

Continuing to use policies that make possible the brutalisation of would-be migrants and the profitmaking of criminal smugglers is a cancer deep inside our states and societies. It is the price we pay for criminalising undocumented immigrants and, more generally, for resorting to policing as the way to regulate immigration.

The United States illustrates this to some extent. In the name of control, it has strengthened policing by reducing judiciary review of immigration police actions in the U.S. 1996 Immigration Act. A crucial issue here is the object of expanded policing. The object is not known criminals, or firms suspected of violating environmental regulations, or drug dealers. It is a population sector, not even select individuals, but a fairly broad spectrum of men, women and children.

Sooner or later this policing will get caught in the expanding web of civil and human rights. Policing, when unchecked by civil review, can easily violate citizens' rights and interfere with the functioning of civil society.

If my son decided to go write the great American novel by spending time with farm workers or in garment sweatshops and there was a raid by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS), he could well be part of the suspects. If he were among farm workers in California running away from the INS police and pushed toward jumping into an irrigation channel, he might be one of those who drown.

Now many INS actions can escape accountability in front of a judge if the persecuted is suspected of being undocumented. Sooner or later stronger policing and the weakening of judicial review will interfere with the aspiration toward the rule of law that is such a deep part of our inheritance. Sooner or later, this type of police action will touch us, the documented.