Austin Kocher

Syracuse University | SU · Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

In this paper we examine perhaps the most significant shift in US immigration enforcement since the militarisation of the US–Mexico border in the late 1980s and early 1990s – the now decade-long transformation of immigration enforcement from an outwards-looking power, located at the territorial margins of the state, into also an inwards-looking pow...

This article reports on the initial development of a generic framework for integrating Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with Massive Multi‐player Online Gaming (MMOG) technology to support the integrated modeling of human‐environment resource management and decision‐making. We review Web 2.0 concepts, online maps, and games as key technologies...

As the emerging literature on migration studies has demonstrated, migrants who are seeking asylum around the world are increasingly finding that the process is mediated by a variety of new technologies. While the process of digitizing various aspects of migrant protection may promise improvements, new technologies also risk limiting access to asylu...

Geographers have begun to explore the concept of ‘immigrant welcome’ as a framework for understanding the tension between spontaneous social support for immigrants and refugees and their subsequent restriction and criminalization by states. Overlooked in the emerging discourse on immigrant welcome is the rich literature in feminist geography that v...

As the MPP program—also known as Remain in Mexico—appears to come to a close, this essay examines key aspects of the program through the perspective of ontological, political, and physical death that Alison Mountz theorizes in her recent book The Death of Asylum (Mountz, 2020). Drawing on Mountz’s work, I view MPP as symptomatic of a concerted thou...

Undocumented activism is on the rise. In response to the expansion of immigrant policing, detention, and deportation, immigrant rights organisers have increasingly deployed a longstanding approach to anti‐deportation activism called “deportation defense campaigns” (DDCs). DDCs seek to disrupt the deportation regime by preventing or delaying individ...

In this chapter, Austin Kocher provides an analysis of the immigration court system under the Trump regime. Kocher explains not only how this system functions as an apparatus of state exclusion, but how the immigration court is being radically reconfigured under Attorney General Jeff Sessions to strengthen this process of exclusion. As Kocher argue...

In this article, we explore methodological difficulties related to proving racial profiling, specifically in the context of §287(g) and Secure Communities enforcement. How it is that critical immigration researchers understand racial profiling as the object of their research, and how might they go about substantiating racial profiling in the field?...

Polymorphic borders. Territory, Politics, Governance. Conceptualizing the respatialization, rescaling and mobilization of border work is a central problem in current borders research. Traditional and ubiquitous border concepts imply a coherent state power belied by much contemporary research. In this introduction to the special issue on ‘Polyphorph...