Rethinking the Criminal Alien: Insights from "Welcome the Wretched" – A Book Review

"Welcome the Wretched", a new book by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, argues for a paradigm shift in popular thinking about 'criminal aliens.'

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it is that immigrants who are charged and convicted of a crime should be deported — right?

After all, over the past several decades every immigration policy, proposed and enacted, has included the bright line of criminality as a condition for immigration benefits. Democrats and Republicans both agree on this condition and many Americans, even those who otherwise support policies that support migrants often make an exception for so-called “criminal aliens.”

Not so fast, says OSU professor and immigration attorney César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández in his new book Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien”. César argues that America’s moral panic surrounding “criminal aliens” is overblown, misguided, and ignores the history of racism that made migration a criminal act in the first place.

Just a reminder: you can listen to this article read aloud in an authentic voice on the Substack app, available for both iPhone and Android.

Criminal Migrants Get a Public Defender

Welcome the Wretched follows César’s previously well-reviewed book Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants, about how we ended up with a massive immigrant detention system in the first place. César is also the author of a far more technical book on Crimmigration Law, published by the American Bar Association and intended for working attorneys.

Sidenote: What is crimmigration? ‘Crimmigration’ is a portmanteau word coined by Juliet Stumpf in her research on how the criminal legal system and the immigration enforcement have become entangled in complex and unexpected ways due to changes in law since the 1990s. Learn more at the upcoming crimmigration conference in Portland, Oregon, where I’ll be speaking next month.

César’s experience as an immigration attorney and expertise in ‘crimmigration’ gives him a unique vantage point on this topic. Like a public defender in a criminal courtroom, César makes a case for criminal migrants when very few others will. This metaphor is especially relevant since, in immigration court unlike in criminal court, migrants are not provided an attorney.

In fact, many immigrant rights advocates prefer to center what we call “model minorities,” or migrants that appear perfect (valedictorians, excellent parents, no criminal record, etc.) to garner public sympathy. Even the immigrant rights movement often views migrants with criminal histories as lost causes. Better not to complicate policy advocacy by bringing up migrants with messy lives.

César’s book, on the other hand, does not shy away from migrant’s full and complex lives. The book uses stories to humanize migrants affected by the intersection of the U.S. criminal legal system and the U.S. deportation machine. Let’s start with just one.

An Old Drug Conviction Becomes a Death Sentence

Consider the story of Kamya Samimi. Kamya wasn’t in the country unlawfully. He was a permanent legal resident and an Iranian citizen. He had his green card. He was 64 years old and had lived in the United States most of his life. But a twelve-year-old drug possession charge that qualified as an “aggravated felony” (a term that only applies to immigrants) meant that once he was encountered by ICE, ICE was required to keep him locked up.

ICE filed a deportation case with the immigration court. Judges used to have the discretion to take into account a more holistic view of the circumstances and decide whether it was truly in the interest of the U.S. government to deport someone like Kamya. But this authority had been stripped from judges in the 1990s at a time of moral panic surrounding crime and terrorism that didn’t solve those problems but made immigrants’ lives much worse.

Perhaps if Kamya found an immigration attorney, he could have fought his deportation even under the current restrictive legal regime. Kamya, however, never got the chance. He died in detention just two weeks after being arrested, leaving his two daughters and his son fatherless. To add insult to injury, ICE’s press release about Kamya’s death paints only a dark and abstract picture of Kamya through his criminal charges but never mentions his children or why someone might have turned to drug use in America to begin with.

My Take on Welcome the Wretched

I read César’s book over the weekend, unable to put it down.¹ Kamya’s story stuck with me—like so many of the stories in the book—because I, too, find myself carefully avoiding discussions about migrants with criminal histories.

It’s easier to tell the stories of migrants facing deportation that I’ve worked with who have nothing more than a minor traffic infraction (often this counts as a criminal charge, by the way) than it is to tell stories of migrants with more serious convictions.

Welcome the Wretched challenges the avoidance culture surrounding the criminal legal system by reminding the reader just how powerfully effective this framework of “criminal alien” has become, while, at the same time, this framework erases its own troubling history and erases the social complexity of migrants’ lives.

Worse, while migrants face huge consequences for crimes, non-immigrants (and especially white Americans) both now and in the past often have their crimes excused as a routine matter. This system of differential outcomes is shaped by citizenship, but also by class and race in ways that contradict our ideas about fairness and equality before the law.

In its place, César advocates for expanding our notions of citizenship in a way that does not create and reinforce this binary. People who commit crimes should not be scapegoated or treated as easy targets by politicians. Rather, addressing both migration and crime requires a deeper understanding of the systemic forces that produce both.

Anyone who has taught (as I have) or taken a course in criminology or sociology of crime will appreciate César’s simple and elegant summation of basically the entire field:

“Most people try to comply with the law most of the time. All of us fail to do so some of the time. Some of us own up to it. Most of us don’t.” (175)

I found the book to be clear and well-written, with a balance of first-hand stories, case examples, and historical and legal context. As someone who reads a lot of immigration books (both popular and academic), this book’s theme stands out for addressing a controversial topic head-on. Even if you do believe that immigrants with criminal histories should be deported, this book provides depth and context that you likely find interesting and valuable.

Should you read this book?

That’s the big question. Let me answer it by illustrating some of the main themes of the book, and hopefully that will help you decide.

Read this book…

…if you want to understand why migration was criminalized in the first place.

Welcome the Wretched examines the history of unlawful entry and unlawful re-entry. These two crimes were added to U.S. law in the 1920s, just a few short years after the Border Patrol was formally established in 1924. (That’s right: Border Patrol is celebrating its centennial anniversary this year.)

But the story behind the invention of these two crimes has rarely been told. If you read the book, you’ll learn more about the role that the eugenics movement and racism played in creating these laws. You’ll learn about Coleman Blease, a politician who defended lynching and believed that America was a “white man’s country”. Blease went on to help push through legislation that criminalized migration and later fueled the immigrant detention system.

You’ll also learn about recent changes in immigration law in the 1990s that made criminal penalties even worse and further separated citizens from non-citizens in the criminal legal system. This was not an accident, it was by design, and it was the shared design of both Republicans and Democrats. As Chuck Schumer, now Senate leader said in 1995:

“Non-citizens do not—and, in my judgment, should not—have the same rights as citizens.” —Chuck Schumer, 1995

Regardless of how you feel about this trend in criminalization, the book explains the key historical moments clearly and concisely.

…if you believe that a criminal conviction shouldn’t make someone less human.

As César says early on: “This is a book about the ordinariness of migrants.” The book takes an analytical yet compassionate approach to migrants who are living in America often as people of color.

For many migrants—like many U.S. citizens—it is life in the United States itself that contributes to criminality, drug abuse, and poverty, not to mention the racial inequalities in enforcement and convictions that tarnish the legal system.

Whether migrants have criminal convictions or not, they do not live in isolation but exist as a part of social networks. Like in the story of Kamya above, “pinning the dreaded moniker of ‘criminal alien’ on a migrant doesn’t erase their genuine ties to other people” (159).

In fact, dehumanizing migrants in this way often leads to consequences that affect citizens and non-citizens alike. The raid on agro-processing plants in Postville, Iowa, in 2008, destabilized the entire community—as did the raids on chicken processors in Mississippi just a few years ago. When ICE detains or deports one parent, the whole family is affected, including U.S. citizen spouses and children.

“It is true that communities with migrants tend to be the safest communities in the United States. But to say that migrants commit less crime than people born in the United States isn’t to say that migrants are angelic. They are not. Migrants are simply people. Like all people, migrants are complicated and contradictory” (99).

…if you want an alternative framework for how to think about crime and migration.

The truth is, we have never really figured out as a society how to think about criminality. Even police officers, whose job it is to enforce the law, rarely believe that criminal acts are solely due to individual choices and decisions. Police officers and sheriffs that I have interviewed over the years recognize that there are social and biological factors at play.

Welcome the Wretched argues that we need to rethink the assumption that simply because someone has committed a crime, they should be deported. This has never worked, and besides, available statistical evidence does not support the foundational assumption that migrants, on the whole, necessarily contribute to crime in the first place.

The book argues that we could take action by removing statutes that criminalize migration, reducing or abolishing criminal penalties for migrants, and establishing alternatives to deportation that address the larger picture of why people end up with criminal charges in the first place.

This may be a big ask for people who arrive at this debate with ready-formed opinions. Which is why I am curious to see if and how the book prompts public debate about the legitimacy of the concept of “criminal alien.” If you have a comment, please do share in the comment section below.

Where to get Welcome the Wretched

You can buy Welcome the Wretched online from the publisher (The New Press), online through Amazon, or you can borrow it from your local library.

If you want to learn more about the book, check out immigration attorney Dan Kowalski’s review here or listen to NPR’s discussion with César below.

If you want to hear César speak, here’s his upcoming schedule:

• PHOENIX Friday, Feb. 16 7:00 PM MT Palabras Bilingual Bookstore 906 W Roosevelt St. Unit 2 Phoenix, AZ 85007

• SEATTLE Wednesday, Feb. 21 7:30 PM PT Town Hall Seattle 1119 8th Ave. Seattle WA 98101

• SAN DIEGO Thursday, Feb. 22 7:00 PM PT San Diego Public Library Logan Heights Branch 567 S 28th St. San Diego, CA 92113

• MIAMI Tuesday, Feb. 27 7:00 PM ET Books & Books 265 Aragon Ave. Coral Gables, FL 33134

What else should you read?

Readers who want more information, especially related to the statistical relationship between migration and crime, will benefit from additional resources:

• Standford University: The mythical tie between immigration and crime

• American Immigration Council: Immigration and Crime

• Cato Institute: New Research on Illegal Immigration and Crime

• The Conversation: Migrants don’t cause crime rates to increase — but false perceptions endure anyway

I read other books recently, including Love Across Borders by Anna Lekas-Miller and Asylum: A Memoir & Manifesto by Edafe Okporo. You can read my reactions to these books and more in the part of my Substack dedicated to Books.

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1. Full disclosure: I received a copy of the book from the publisher for review purposes. Neither the publisher nor César saw a copy of this review before it was published and I was not paid directly or indirectly for this review.