In this dissertation, I develop a systematic account of illegalization, which I define as state practices of criminalization that use immigration enforcement as a tool of social degradation. Noncitizen status almost always suggests some precarity, but just how much is an under-discussed problem that implicates matters of justice and harm from the vantage of the harmed themselves. Illegalization as the state’s use of immigration enforcement as a tool for social degradation to create and sustain the permanence of an enemy, squares the punitive nature of immigration enforcement and its effects on aspects of the immigration apparatus outside of removal.

This dissertation finds its doctrinal home in crimmigration, the intersection of criminal andimmigration law. Whereas the portmanteau brings to bear the similarities between these two legal domains, my paper focuses on the ways in which they are different and argues that such differences—like the lack of many procedural protections that are in the criminal law—are significant in that they provide a glimpse of how the state treats noncitizens.