An Ethnographic Study of the Policing of Internal Borders in the Netherlands: Synergies Between Criminology and Anthropology

Tense contact between the police and migrants in Western societies remains to be an important topic in police scholarship. In sociological studies of the police, this matter is ascribed to the discretionary authority of individual officers that is sanctioned by their departments—not to official policy or direct ethnic or racial orientations. This article (1) discusses the ‘policing of migration’ literature that claims the exact opposite; (2) applies this literature to the Dutch context in order
to show that migrants are increasingly and deliberately targeted for control by numerous public, semi-public and private agencies; (3) empirically explores the ramifications of such ‘internal border control’ and (4) argues in favour of a synergy between criminological and anthropological work on this topic.