Drawing on an empirical study, this article explores the role of immigration detention in Italy by analysing the way a specific rhetoric of ‘dangerousness’ has developed and is being used within the framework of immigration enforcement policies. Our argument is that immigration detention has been transformed into an instrument of crime prevention and ‘social defence’, and that this transformation is fuelled by the central position that the legal categories of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’ have assumed in the regulation of the return procedure. The article contends that immigration law enforcement agencies can make use of immigration detention as a flexible control tool to manage what are perceived as the most problematic populations in urban areas, thus practising a policy of selective enforcement that while not explicitly built along racial and ethnic lines, clearly discriminates among migrants according to their ‘social marginality’ or supposed ‘social dangerousness’.

中文翻译：

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作为社会防御的移民拘留：在意大利监管“危险的流动性”

本文通过一项实证研究，通过分析“危险”这一特定修辞的发展方式以及在移民执法政策框架内的使用方式，探讨了移民拘留在意大利的作用。我们的论点是，移民拘留已经转变为预防犯罪和“社会防御”的工具，而这种转变是由“风险”和“危险”的法律类别在监管中所采取的中心地位推动的。退货手续。文章认为，移民执法机构可以利用移民拘留作为一种灵活的控制工具来管理被认为是城市地区问题最严重的人群，