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Dario Melossi's latest work, Crime, Punishmentand Migration, is a short but dense book that offers an original perspective on the complex issue of transnational migrations in contemporary global society. With an important focus on the growing interconnections between the politics of immigration control and the criminalization of "immigrant illegality" in the global North, Crime, Punishment and Migration builds a powerful critique of the process of "creation of a pariah caste constructed ... through the legal marginalization of migrants ... whether external or internal, and their exploitation as cheap 'illegal' labor, an exploitation made possible by their very legal marginalization" (p. 85).
Along the coordinates of the neo-Marxist criminological perspective known as political economy of punishment, Melossi looks at the experience of migration, both historically and at present, through the lens of labor. The increasingly punitive governance of human mobility across Europe and the United States illustrates a vicious circle of "work marginalization, racialization, and criminalization" (p. 60) that aims to (re)produce an exploitable and disposable sector of the labor force within late-capitalist societies. When observed through this materialist lens, formal legal distinctions between nationals and foreigners turn out to be less crucial than politico-economic conjunctures in defining the structural position migrants occupy in the highly segmented labor markets of contemporary Western capitalism.
In this direction, Melossi touches upon structural developments that seem to have at least partially blurred the boundaries between citizens and aliens, complicating the traditionally binary notions ofcitizenship-first and foremost, the emergence since the 1970s of a global working class that is the product of a new international division of labor. In a post-Fordist global economy increasingly polarized between high-tech immaterial production and low-skill service work, this new transnational labor force includes not only migrant laborers but also racialized ethnic minorities, underprivileged women, and hypercriminalized youth of color: surplus populations forced at the bottom of the labor market by multiple systems of social oppression. As Melossi shows in his book, a further development that blurs the distinction between citizens and aliens is the cyclical production of internally displaced populations-that is, fractions of the population that, although formally endowed with formal citizenship, are treated as de facto denizens-not just in global South countries struck by wars or catastrophes, but also within advanced capitalist societies...