Crimmigration as Hate Speech
Alessandro Spena · 2025
Crimmigration is a way of expressing hostility towards certain social groups in virtue of certain characteristics they allegedly share (basically, their being mass-foreigners); moreover, it is explicitly aimed at the social exclusion of its targets. Both these traits are also distinctive of hate speech. This chapter elaborates on this parallel, with a view to bringing to light, first, how crimmigration is troublesome not only as a form of legal coercion, because it conflicts with fundamental legal principles, but also as a form of language that performatively contributes to the construction of the social identity of crimmigrised foreigners as subordinated subjects.