This article suggests that fears and concerns about disorder and crime are connected with urbanophobia, i.e. a low willingness to identify with public space and a certain incapacity to recognize deviancy and give it a place in one’s mind map. For this reason many citizens may not develop public familiarity. At the same time it is argued that tackling urban disorder is often necessary but not for reasons that proponents of repression and zero tolerance think. Current crime and disorder policies bring forth many counterproductive results, including increased fear and powerlessness. It seems more reasonable to combat disorder to undo the ‘situational normality’ of persistent forms of anti-social behaviour. For many citizens this signals a restoration of expected peaceful interaction.

Measures to combat international crime include customer identity controls by banks and repressive measures against informal money transfer systems. While there is debate surrounding the latter strategy, customer identity controls are largely taken for granted in the Netherlands. The author argues that these controls can negatively affect migrants. Moreover, exclusion of migrants from regulated banking systems has development implications. Phone-based remittances, that are linked to the regulated banking system, could serve as an alternative for informal transfer systems. Too stringent identity controls in host countries seem to prevent this however. The author recommends that controls focus on the amount being transferred, rather than on the person making the transfer.

Immigration detention is formally not a punishment, but governments do seem to use it to deter irregular migrants from staying in the territory. This study explores whether and how practices of immigration detention in the Netherlands affect detainees’ decision-making processes regarding return and result in ‘specific deterrence’. 81 unauthorized irregular migrants were interviewed in immigration detention and their casefiles were examined. We find evidence for a limited deterrence effect: a minority of the respondents indeed wanted to return to their countries of origin in order to end their (repeated) stay in immigration detention. For some respondents the detention experience contributed to a desire to migrate from the Netherlands to a different European country. We go into the relevance of these findings for the continuing societal debate on the use of immigration detention.