Historically, immigration and criminal law have been thought of as very separate from one another. The concept of crimmigration focuses on how and why these two traditionally separate areas of law have suddenly blurred to the point that it is hard to distinguish where one ends and the other begins.

The neologism 'crimmigration' crept into the vocabulary of activists and researchers in 2010, a year that saw widespread, migrant-led activism and civil disobedience against Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070. In the name of ensuring public safety, the bill encroached on immigration legislation that has long been the prerogative of the US federal government.

So there's a new industry afoot, the kind of migration-industrial complex that's driven by things like what some call "crimmigration."

This use of membership theory places the law on the edge of a crimmigration crisis. Only the harshest elements of each area of law make their way into the criminalization of immigration law, and the apparatus of the state is used to expel from society those deemed criminally alien.