By Jonathan Haggerty

  Research suggests there is little connection between immigration and crime; and, to the extent any such relationship exists, immigration reduces crime rates. One frequently cited example—an analysis of 51 studies on immigration and crime conducted between 1994 and 2014—showed that the relationship between immigration and crime is either nonexistent or negative, which means that immigration appears to reduce crime rates. Nonetheless, immigration and crime—specifically related to Latin American gang members—was a major theme of the 2016 presidential election, as opposition to immigration was fundamental to then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. Because much of the opposition to immigration stems from a conviction that immigrants are uniquely prone to crime, it is important to review the current evidence. This paper looks specifically at the evidence on illegal immigration and crime, as many supporters of President Trump claim to only oppose illegal immigration, and not immigration itself. There is limited research on the crime rates of illegal immigrants due to data restrictions; however, much of the current, impressive body of evidence that suggests immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native-born Americans combines data on legal and illegal immigrant populations  The most frequently cited studies specifically on illegal immigration can be divided into two categories: those looking at institutionalization rates—the rate at which a given population is arrested or incarcerated—and experimental studies measuring illegal immigration’s impact on crime rates in particular geographic areas. Both categories suggest that illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. Of the nineteen studies examined in this policy brief, only one suggested a higher crime rate for illegal immigrants, while the rest suggested that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, that they have no effect on crime rates or that they decrease crime rates in areas where they settle. These findings are largely consistent with the overall empirical evidence on immigration and crime.

  R STREET SHORTS NO. 97  

Washington, DC: R Street, 2020. 4p

By Joanna Dawson 

The Government can proscribe organisations that it considers engage in or promote terrorism. When an organisation is proscribed, it becomes a criminal offence to belong to it or to support it. This briefing describes the recent history and present status of proscribed organisations under the Terrorism Act 2000. Proscription under the Terrorism Act 2000 Prior to the 2000 Act, proscription was exclusively concerned with terrorism connected with the affairs of Northern Ireland. Under the 2000 Act, proscription was extended to include organisations concerned with both domestic and international terrorism. The Home Secretary may proscribe an organisation if they believe it is “concerned in terrorism”. If the Home Secretary believes that an organisation meets this statutory test, they must then decide whether to proscribe the organisation. In doing so, they must take into account various policy considerations. Consequences of proscription The 2000 Act sets out a number of proscription offences. These include: • belonging to or inviting support for a proscribed organisation • arranging or assisting with the arrangement of a meeting that supports a proscribed organisation • addressing such a meeting • wearing clothing or displaying articles in public which arouse suspicion of membership or support of a proscribed organisation. The maximum penalty for these offences (except wearing clothing or displaying images) is 10 years’ imprisonment and/or a fine. The Government can also impose financial sanctions on proscribed organisations. 

London: House of Commons Library, 2024. 78p

Edited by Alejandra J Josiowicz, Irasema Coronado 

The Americas are witnessing an era of unprecedented human mobility. With their families or unaccompanied, children are part of this immense movement of people. Children Crossing Borders explores the different meanings of the lives of borderland children in the Americas. It addresses migrant children’s struggle to build a sense of belonging while they confront racism and estrangement on a daily basis.

Unified in their common interest in the well-being of children, the contributors bring an unrivaled breadth of experience and research to offer a transnational, multidimensional, and multilayered look at migrant childhoods in Latin America. Organized around three main themes—educational experiences; literature, art and culture, and media depictions; and the principle of the “best interest of the child”—this work offers both theoretical and practical approaches to the complexity of migrant childhood. The essays discuss family and school lives, children’s experience as wage laborers, and the legislation and policies that affect migrants.

This volume draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022. 255p.

By Deborah M. Weissman, Angelina Godoy,  Havan M. Clark

Immigration enforcement has long served as an indicator of the prevailing visceral fears and loathing toward the Other. The foreign is always suspect. Foreigners in great numbers are especially suspicious. These developments are historically tied to the conventions of colonialism, expanded as a function of foreign policy, and to be sure, ideology.' By the mid-2010s, the Global South was characterized as "shithole countries,"  populated by people who were terrorists, rapists, murderers, and corrupt drug dealers. According to former President  Donald J. Trump, immigrants "aren't people. The[y] are animals, further describing them as "bad  thugs and gang members."  These representations have shaped a retributive agenda and have served to create a structure with roots in federal policies and branches in localities throughout the country through which to expel noncitizens. Deportation is a legal concept about which much has been written.' But it is more complicated. For noncitizens, forced expulsion is a lived experience occurring in time and space-an act against the body, mostly black and brown bodies. In this Article, we part ways with the well-established narratives of deportation and the punishment/non-punishment paradigm to conceive of deportation not only as a legal concept, but as a physical act-the final act-that is, the culmination of the immigration enforcement dragnet.  The physical removal of persons from the United States requires a complex system comprised of aviation networks and their various components, airports and airplanes, hangars and flight crews, and an array of physical restraints to intimidate, punish, or subdue deportees.'" We examine this infrastructure to illuminate the circumstances of expulsion and the egregious rights violations often suffered by deportees-violations that are almost always hidden from public view. Part I examines the full dimensions of deportation as a legal concept whereby courts readily admit the harms of expulsion while simultaneously deny its character as a form of punishment." The courts' construction of deportation as a nonpunitive sanction to which a range of constitutional procedural safeguards are not applicable serves to conceal the violence that occurs and distracts from the physical abuse and maltreatment associated with the final act. The legal treatment of deportation elides what, as Jacqueline Rose has written, is conveyed by "the technical term for the returning of migrants to their country of origin [that] is 'refoulement' (to push back or repulse) which also happens to be the French word for the psychoanalytic concept of repression. Part II then describes deportation as an act by which the body is seized and ultimately transported to airports and boarded onto airplanes''-sites previously not considered in the scheme of the immigration removal system's apparatus." It describes the heretofore hidden machinery of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") Air's network of mass deportation and further describes the perils upon removal occasioned by ICE flights.' Part III examines the "legal" trajectories of forced expulsion. It demonstrates how hostility toward immigrants has given rise to an ever-expanding deportation apparatus by which growing numbers of immigrants, including those seeking shelter from persecution, are stripped of legal protections.  It chronicles the subversion of legal processes that result in a heightened risk of wrongful deportation and thus by which immigrants reach the point of the final act of removal." It also illuminates how the ICE Air machinery, which executes deportation orders arising within an unfair system, is complicit in the various legal violations by giving effect to such orders and further curtailing whatever rights remain at the moment of the final act of deportation  Part IV takes up concerns largely unaddressed in legal scholarship: the detailing of human rights abuses on airplanes and airports-sites that function as the terminal instrumentalities of banishment. It describes the physical and psychological abuses that deportees experience during the final act of removal to demonstrate the urgency of immigrant rights advocacy at these sites. It then identifies the violations of international human rights treaties committed by the United States.25 We do so mindful that invoking human rights law in an effort to reframe the discourse occurs at a time when the question of whether these norms have any relevancy in the United States is very much at issue.  The issue of the relevancy of human rights-or lack thereof-is not a new concern, to be sure. As Jack Goldsmith stated over two decades ago, "We can now better understand how and why the United States perpetuates the double standard. The explanation is not subtle. The United States declines to embrace international human rights law because it can."  However, as Part IV argues, immigrants' rights advocates have nonetheless seized on international norms that apply locally and globally to realize an expanded vision of justice when addressing the harms wrought by ICE Air's deportation machinery. The need to call attention to U.S. exceptionalism with regard to human rights requires that scholars and activists seek their implementation as a means to encourage a discourse of hope and an expectation of realization. Stated otherwise, "all theory must end in practice or come to nothing as theory."  Part V examines airports and airplanes as sites of resistance in the context of immigration federalism debates.  We build on the literature that has called attention to the importance of political geography and immigration devolution policies to underscore the importance of new forms of local activism as a means to assert immigrant rights. Even as growing numbers of localities craft policies to protect immigrants, forming a first wave of resistance to federal anti-immigrant policies, a second wave of subnational advocacy is emerging, seeking to contest both the mechanisms by which people are drawn into the system of immigration enforcement and the institutions which detain them. It is in this context that we identify the campaigns to disrupt the aviation deportation machinery, and the importance of focusing on the local as a means to ensure accountability for individuals whose human rights have been violated. Deportation is a term frequently associated with nativist sentiment and revulsion for those who appear foreign, as well as a type of "cleansing" as consequence of aggressive annexation of territory. 4 The efforts to accelerate the removal of noncitizens from the United States has reconfigured the historic narrative about the nation's relationship with immigration and immigrants. Concerns for the humanity of immigrants requires attention to all facets of the injustices of deportation, including the sites of the final act of removal. As we demonstrate, this may be accomplished through a variety of political and legal strategies designed to call attention to the ways that deportation violates the protection of rights that exist at the very local to the very global levels of law. Notwithstanding our descriptions and analyses of innovative and important anti-deportation campaigns to mitigate the deliberate infliction of human suffering on immigrants, we do not suggest that these strategies ensure success. In the face of the deportation dragnet machine and the aviation networks that are hidden from the public, it would be presumptuous to suggest victory. What this Article offers is a way of understanding and modeling new forms of resistance at sites previously overlooked-resistance that must stand in for the protection of rights until the structures of immigration laws and processes can be humanely reset.  

Hofstra Law Review Volume 49 Issue 2 Article 5 12-1-2021, 63 pages

Stephanie Brooks Holliday, Nicholas M. Pace, Nastassia Reed, Rosemary Li

In 2020, California took steps to address intercounty variation and shortcomings in indigent defense resources through the Indigent Defense Grant Program (IDGP), which provided 9.8 million to public defenders’ offices in small to medium-sized counties. An understanding of the implementation and outcomes of the projects initiated by grantees is critical to identifying ways to improve the effectiveness of indigent defense across the state and achieve the goals of the IDGP. Authors detail how grantees used program funds, what the funds enabled offices to accomplish, and statewide lessons learned from this program and make recommendations for similar future grant programs.

Key Findings

• The most common grant-funded hires were attorneys, law clerks or law students, and administrative assistants.

• Offices used funds for case-support services, including expert witnesses, immigration support, and interpreters.

• Grantees reported making progress toward such goals as increasing knowledge and skills of staff, improving attorney and staff workloads, and providing services related to behavioral health and well-being.

• Challenges that grantees experienced included hiring and retention difficulties, delays outside the control of the offices, and data and technology limitations.

• Grantees cited flexibility in using funds as a feature of the grant program that maximized its impact and suggested increasing the minimum funding allocation

Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2024, 73 pages

By American Immigration Council

The collusion between local law enforcement agencies and U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) is well-documented. Local law enforcement agencies like the Ohio State Highway Patrol (OSHP) often work in concert with USBP agents in constructing a dragnet that serves as a force multiplier for USBP to funnel immigrants—most of whom have no criminal history—into deportation proceedings. These enforcement practices often go unchecked despite accounts suggesting a pattern of potentially unconstitutional practices. This unfettered enforcement upends the lives of immigrants who have developed deep ties to the United States and often impacts U.S. citizens and immigrants with lawful status who are part of mixed status families. It also makes Latino residents and people of color who are U.S. citizens or lawful immigrants undue targets of enforcement. Immigrants of color including those of Latin American origin who live, travel, or work in Ohio often bear the brunt of these disproportionate and discriminatory immigration enforcement practices.

Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, 2024. 22p.

By Shreya Bhat and Hui Yin Chuah

Mixed migration from Myanmar to countries in South and Southeast Asia has become a common phenomenon driven by various factors, including violence, insecurity, conflict, deprivation of rights, and economic reasons. This report underscores the integral role of smugglers in facilitating migration from Myanmar to Malaysia and Thailand, influenced by a complex interplay of factors that result in considerable variation in the dynamics of smuggling among different population groups and on different routes. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for developing targeted interventions aimed at addressing the vulnerabilities and challenges faced by refugees and migrants in the region.

Geneva, SWIT: : Mixed Migration Centre. 2024, 17pg

By Inga Thiemann

This research report looks into the conditions attached to visa routes for both the care and agricultural sectors, known as ‘tied’ and short-term visas respectively, and the increased vulnerability to exploitation associated with these visas.

The findings show significant issues of debt and deductions of wages across both sectors and barriers to reporting concerns.

London: Focus on Labour Exploitation. 2024, 68pg

By  Claire Rimmer 

Setting the scene for safe pathways: definitions and data Complementary or safe pathways are a relatively new addition to global refugee protection, and a particularly new phenomenon in Europe. Here, recent years have seen implementation of a growing number of safe pathway programmes, very often small in scale. This has created a complex landscape, involving many different stakeholders working in different ways, and involving different patterns of cooperation between host, destination and first asylum countries. As such, establishing common definitions is challenging, particularly given the necessary flexibility most programmes employ in order to succeed in their specific political and operational contexts. This study nonetheless identifies six types of pathway, showing that all safe pathway programmes include one or a combination of the six. They are as follows: 1) education, 2) labour mobility, 3) extended family members/ family unity, 4) humanitarian pathways and visas, 5) private and/ or community sponsorship, 6) and other, usually non-specific safe stay and entry options. Mapping safe pathways in Europe is further complicated by the limited availability of information on planned and current European programmes, and lack of transparency concerning the extent to which pathways achieve “additionality”, i.e. the extent to which they operate in addition to refugee resettlement and thus contribute to durable solutions for refugees. In some cases, they are rather a substitute for the – usually preferable – resettlement options. 2) European safe pathway programmes: what works? The study identifies a number of approaches and good practices which stakeholders believe have worked well, covering the range of pathways and programmes. It also identifies examples of promising new practices in both newer and more established programmes. The most important examples of what works 

Brussels, Belgium: ECRE  European Council on Refugees and Exiles, 2024. 58pg

By Emily Ryo and Ian Peacock

In the current era of intensified immigration enforcement and heightened risks of deportation even for long-term lawful permanent residents, citizenship has taken on a new meaning and greater importance. There is also growing evidence that citizenship denials in their various forms have become inextricably linked to immigration enforcement. Who is denied citizenship, why, and under what circumstances? This article begins to address these questions by developing a typology of citizen denials and providing an empirical overview of each type of citizenship denial. Taken together, the typology of citizenship denials and the accompanying empirical overview illustrate the close connection between immigration enforcement and citizenship rights in the United States

USC CLASS Research Paper No. CLASS19-31, USC Law Legal Studies Paper No. 19-31, 47 pages

By Emily Ryo and Reed Humphrey

Removal proceedings are high-stakes adversarial proceedings in which immigration judges must decide whether to allow immigrants who allegedly have violated U.S. immigration laws to stay in the United States or to order them deported to their countries of origin. In these proceedings, the government trial attorneys prosecute noncitizens who often lack English fluency, economic resources, and familiarity with our legal system. Yet, most immigrants in removal proceedings do not have legal representation, as removal is considered to be a civil matter and courts have not recognized a right to government­appointed counsel for immigrants facing removal. Advocates, policymakers, and scholars have described this situation as an access-to-justice crisis or a representation crisis for immigrant communities. The prevailing wisdom suggests that the solution to this crisis is more lawyers or more nonlawyer practitioners, such as accredited representatives and legal technicians, who can provide affordable and quality legal services. The focus, therefore, has been on the ubiquity of "legal deserts," commonly defined as areas that are in shortage of lawyers, and on ways to increase the supply of legal service providers in the marketplace.

This Article presents an empirical study of legal representation that unsettles this prevailing wisdom by showing why an adequate supply of legal service providers is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition to address the representation crisis. Our study uses a new and original dataset that we compiled for the purposes of this study on immigration lawyers and non-detained immigrant respondents in removal proceedings. Our findings suggest that although the focus on the supply­side dimension of the representation crisis is important, it obscures other complex sets of barriers to obtaining legal representation that are distinct from the problem of legal deserts. Specifically, our empirical analyses show that whether a non-detained immigrant respondent obtains legal representation is predicted by where they reside, their primary language, and the size of their conational social networks, controlling for the availability of practicing immigration lawyers in close proximity to their places of residence and other potential confounders. In short, we argue that geography, language, and networks are destiny for immigrant respondents when it comes to obtaining legal representation. Thus, addressing the representation crisis requires looking beyond the problem of legal deserts to attend to a variety of other hurdles to obtaining legal representation that are associated with certain geographical, linguistic, and social isolation in which many immigrants live.

101 North Carolina Law Review 787-840 (2023), 54 pages

By Melanie Gower

People claiming asylum in the UK are not eligible for mainstream welfare benefits and are generally not allowed to work. Instead, asylum seekers who are destitute can apply to UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI, a Home Office directorate) for accommodation or money (or both) while they are waiting for a decision on their asylum claim. This is commonly referred to as ‘asylum support

London: House of Commons Research Library 2024. 29p.

By Karen Sands-O’Connor

Exploring a history of activists writing for and about children of colour from abolition to Black Lives Matter, this open access book examines issues such as the space given to people of colour by white activists; the voice, agency and intersectionality in activist writing for young people; how writers used activism to expand definitions of Britishness for child readers; and how activism and writing about it has changed in the 21st century. From abolitionists and anti-colonialists such as Amelia Opie, Una Marson and Rabindranath Tagore; communist and feminist activists concerned with broader children’s rights including Chris Searle and Rosemary Stones; to Black Panthers and contemporary advocates for people of colour from Farrukh Dhondy to Len Garrison, Catherine Johnson and Corinne Fowler, Karen Sands-O’Connor traces how these activists translated their values for children of colour. Beginning with historical events that sparked activism and the first cultural products for children and continuing to contemporary activism in the wake of the Windrush Scandal, this book analyses the choices, struggles and successes of writers of activist literature as they tried to change Britain and British literature to make it a welcoming place for all child readers.

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.  

By Joseph H. Jackson

Writing Black Scotland examines race and racism in devolutionary Scottish literature, with a focus on the critical significance of blackness. The book reads blackness in Scottish writing from the 1970s to the early 2000s, a period of history defined by post-imperial adjustment. Critiquing a unifying Britishness at work in black British criticism, Jackson argues for the importance of black politics in Scottish writing, and for a literary registration of race and racism which signals a necessary negotiation for national Scotland both before and after 1997.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 216p.

By Donald Kerwin and Evin Millet

This study examines the legal capacity available to low-income immigrants on national, state, and sub-state levels. Legal professionals working in charitable immigration service programs serve as the study’s rough proxy for legal capacity, and undocumented immigrants its proxy for legal need. The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) compiled data on charitable immigration programs and their legal professionals from the:

• US Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) “Recognized Organizations and Accredited Representatives Roster by State and City,” which is maintained by the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s (EOIR’s) Office of Legal Access Programs (OLAP).

• Directories of two leading, legal support agencies for charitable immigration legal programs, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) and the Immigrant Advocates Network (IAN).

CMS supplemented and updated these sources with information from the websites of charitable immigration programs. It also added legal programs to its dataset that did not appear in any of these lists. It counted as legal professionals, attorneys, federally accredited non-attorneys, paralegals, and legal assistants. The paper finds that there are 1,413 undocumented persons in the United States for every charitable legal professional and far less capacity than the national average in:

• States such as Alabama (6,656 undocumented per legal professional), Hawaii (4,506), Kansas (3,010), Georgia (2,853), New Jersey (2,687), Florida (2,681), North Carolina (2,671), Virginia (2,634) and Arizona (2,561).

• Metropolitan areas (MAs) such as Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario (5,307), Dallas-Fort Worth Arlington (4,436), Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale (3,439) and Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land (3,099).

• San Bernardino County (6,178), Clark County (4,747), Riverside County (4,625), Tarrant County (3,955) and Dallas County (3,939).

The study’s introduction summarizes its top-line findings. Its first section describes the importance of charitable immigration legal programs to immigrants, families and communities. Its second details the study’s findings on charitable legal capacity and immigrant need. Its third compares the legal capacity of 1,803 charitable legal programs and their 7,322 legal professionals, with the US undocumented population by state and for the 15 largest MAs and counties. Its fourth describes CMS’s research methodology and data sources. The paper ends with policy recommendations on how to expand legal capacity for low-income immigrants and better assess legal capacity and need moving forward.

Journal on Migration and Human Security 2022, Vol. 10(3) 190-214

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

By RYAN CROPP

IFROM THE COVER: In the 1960s, DONALD HORNE offered Australians a compelling reinterpretation of the Menzies years as a period of social and political inertia and mediocrity. His book The Lucky Country was profoundly influential and, without doubt, one of the most significant shots ever fired in Australia's endless culture war. Ryan Cropp's landmark biography positions Horne as an antipodean Orwell, a lively, independent and distinct literary voice 'searching for the temper of the people, accepting it, and moving on from there'. Through the eyes - and unforgettable words - of this preternaturally observant and articulate man, we see a recognisable modern Australia emerge.

'A compulsive read about a writer who shaped the way we Australians think about ourselves' -Judith Brett

Melbourne. La Trobe University Press. 2023. 375p.

By David Goodhart

This report calls for a new safe and legal route for genuine refugees – which would only come into effect once illegal Channel crossings have dropped to below 10,000 a year.

Under the plan put forward by David Goodhart, the number of refugees admitted under this new route would be set by an annual cap from Parliament – placing the asylum system under democratic control.

It would be modelled after the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme, used for Syrian refugees, and focussed on women and girls in conflict zones, not healthy young male migrants attempting to cross from France.

The report argues that in order to address the numbers of migrants crossing the Chanel illegally in small boats, the Government must prioritise return agreements and rapid deportation of Channel crossers – if necessary, giving aid to countries in exchange for securing return agreements.

London: Policy Exchange, 2023. 31p.

By: Team from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), including (in alphabetical order) Lucia Bird, Giulia D’Amico, Sarah Fares, Alex Goodwin and Tuesday Reitano

As of January 2024, over 100 000 people had crossed the English Channel using small boats since 2018. The current peak came in 2022, when over 45 000 people were detected arriving in the UK illegally using small boats launched from the coast of northern France. Although small in comparison with the flows of migrants risking the journey across the Mediterranean to reach Europe each year, this figure marked a record high for the UK since records began in 2018. The spike in the number of arrivals can be largely explained by the ‘industrialization’ of a system of smuggling migrants by boat, a process that began in 2018.

This report explores how the English Channel has become a commercialized human smuggling route. It analyzes the shift in human smuggling transportation from land to sea, from trucks using the Channel Tunnel to rigid inflatable boats (RIBs).

Geneva, SWIT: 2024 Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.2024. 34p.

By Oreva Olakpe

  This paper examines the literature on cities, citizenship and performative rights claiming through the lens of undocumented migrant status, using ethnographic research of the Nigerian community in the city of Guangzhou, China as an example. It begins with a background of the research, delineating the context of migration in China and the factors shaping the perceptions of citizenship and undocumented status in that locale. Next, it delves into the literature on citizenship and rights claiming, looking at the approaches to citizenship and tries to situate undocumented migrant status in these approaches. It then relies on examples for the city of Guangzhou to illustrate how undocumented migrant communities perform citizenship and negotiate legal and legitimate status through alternative channels and resist hegemonic structures in big cities in real life. This paper unpacks the ways in which undocumented migrants exhibit citizenship, belonging and agency from below to demonstrate the different meanings and manifestations of agency, marginality and asymmetries of power in big cities in the Global South.

Toronto: Toronto Metropolitan University, 2020. 23p.

By Mariam Elgabry , Darren Nesbeth , Shane Johnson 

Background

The way science is practiced is changing and forecasting biotechnology crime trends remains a challenge as future misuses become more sophisticated.

Methods

A parallel Delphi study was conducted to elicit future biotechnology scenarios from two groups of experts. Traditional experts, such as professionals in national security/intelligence, were interviewed. They were asked to forecast emerging crime trends facilitated by biotechnology and what should be done to safeguard against them. Non-traditional experts, such as “biohackers” who experiment with biotechnology in unexpected ways, were also interviewed. The study entailed three rounds to obtain consensus on (i) biotechnology misuse anticipated and (ii) potential prevention strategies expected.

Results

Traditional and non-traditional experts strongly agreed that misuse is anticipated within the cyber-infrastructure of, for example, medical devices and hospitals, through breaches and corporate espionage. Preventative steps that both groups strongly advocated involved increasing public biosecurity literacy, and funding towards addressing biotechnology security. Both groups agreed that the responsibility for mitigation includes government bodies. Non-traditional experts generated more scenarios and had a greater diversity of views.

Discussion

A systematic, anonymous and independent interaction with a diverse panel of experts provided meaningful insights for anticipating emerging trends in biotechnology crime. A multi-sector intervention strategy is proposed. 

Futures Volume 141, August 2022, 102970