Framing and the mechanisms of criminalisation in the migration context

This scoping review synthesises empirical literature on the criminalisation of migrants, focusing on how criminalisation is framed and the mechanisms through which it is enacted and experienced. Drawing on 16 peer-reviewed studies published between 2013 and 2023, the review demonstrates that criminalisation operates as a multidimensional regime of governance, extending beyond formal law enforcement to encompass spatial, administrative, discursive, and internalised forms of regulation. Criminalisation is shown to function through anticipatory suspicion, racialised moral sorting, and the bureaucratic production of illegitimacy governing migrant life through control, delay, surveillance, and symbolic devaluation. Thematic analysis reveals four key modalities: (1) spatial and institutional control; (2) administrative and legal mechanisms of control; (3) discursive and symbolic violence; and (4) internalised moral governance. These mechanisms intersect to produce a lived experience of marginalisation, in which migrants are simultaneously managed, silenced, and morally judged.