ABSTRACT
EU's migration and border policies increasingly build on and generalize scenarios of threat and the risk of illegal migration, serious crime and terrorism associated with migrants. I take a critical look at the practices and processes involved in standardizing information infrastructures in these policy areas which configure the figure of the ‘crimmigrant other’, e.g., the criminalized migrant, in multiple ways. The case of the Eurodac database serves to illustrate my argument. Looking into the increasing role of law enforcement and the incrementally changing landscape of ever-growing infrastructures of interoperable database systems, I ask: how do transnational information infrastructures at the intersection of migration and crime control attempt to standardize data operations across Member States? How might these processes contribute to the construction and standardization of criminal suspicion against migrants? I identify two distinct forms of standardizing and generalizing criminal suspicion: torquing categories of (il)legitimate forms of migration and migrants; and invading databases holding information about subjects seeking protection, by law enforcement authorities with distinct cultures of categorial suspicion. Finally, I discuss the normalizing of the speculation about the migrant figure as a criminal and the lack of evidence of the utility of omnipotent databases for law enforcement.
