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Confined Within: National Territories as Zones of Confinement
Abstract
The securitization of immigration has led to increased reliance on border enforcement, detention, and deportation to control unauthorized movements. Based on a case study of the ways that Salvadoran immigrants to the United States have experienced these tactics, this paper analyzes the spatial implications of current enforcement strategies. As movement across borders becomes more difficult for the unauthorized, national territories become zones of confinement. This carceral quality is a dimension of national territory in that undocumented and temporarily authorized migrants cannot exit their countries of residence without losing territorially-conferred rights, while if they are deported, their countries of origin become extensions of the detention centers they occupied before exit. This transformation of national spaces is accompanied by internal differentiation, as interior enforcement confines migrants to subnational spaces where they must remain to avoid detection or harassment. Securitization thus entails both extraterritoriality, that is the extension of U.S. legal regimes into foreign territories, and intraterritoriality, or the operation of different legal regimes within national territories. The paper also highlights the ways that securitization contributes to multidimensionality, such that spatial locations are rendered ambiguous, both inside and outside at the same time. Finally, the paper considers how these spatial transformations redefine citizenship and belonging.
... The purpose of the book is to critically examine and to comprehend the significant violence mobilised to address the deportation limbo, the functions this violence serves, how it has come to be accepted, and its consequences for the people exposed to it, and for the individuals, institutions, and societies that enforce it. A rich body of literature has documented how violent state measures, which encompass incarceration, formal abandonment, and deportability, are experienced and challenged by those affected by them across a range of contexts (see Boochani, 2018;Coutin, 2010;Djampour, 2018;Khosravi, 2009;Sager, 2011;Wyss, 2019). Building on their insights, this book adds to the comparatively limited body of literature on the institutions and frontline workers, encompassing police officers, migration officials and social workers, humanitarian organisations, and prison officers, who are tasked with enforcing detention and deportations (Bosworth, 2014;Borrelli, 2021;Walters, 2019). ...
... The deportation limbo renders visible the racial borders of the welfare state and the struggles and contestations they give rise to. It is my Introduction European deportation regime is illustrative of how political deportation fantasies (Coutin, 2015) extend and expand coercive regulatory powers at the expense of migrants' freedoms, rights, and lives. ...
... Following a political ethnographic approach, it has centred on the perspectives of frontline workers tasked with implementing the policies designed to pressure non-deported people to leave, and how their efforts often perpetuate the same condition of limbo that they were meant to address, while exposing their target population to social, physical, and mental harm and premature death. The book has thus explored the adverse realities behind government fantasies assuming that deportations are normal, adequate, and politically necessary, and that they can be undertaken in an effective and humane manner (Coutin, 2015). Such fantasies of humane and effective enforcement, I have argued, are particularly prevalent in Nordic welfare states, where there is a widespread belief in ...
... "Documents are among the primary paraphernalia of modern states and legal systems: They are its material culture" (Navaro-Yashin 2012, 114). Despite growing attention to the arbitrariness of bordering practices and the meaning of documents or asylum applications and legal status (Abarca and Coutin 2018;Cabot 2014;Coutin 2003;Reeves 2013), the underlying premise in much of this work is that migrants' mobilities are policed by strong, state-led bureaucratic and formal legal systems. Biometric border controls, including fingerprinting, connect borders to migrant bodies (Amoore 2006). ...
... In this emerging discussion my analysis develops two interventions. First, I expand the kind of ambiguity described in other strong state contexts (Cabot 2014;Coutin 2003Coutin , 2010Reeves 2013Reeves , 2018, an ambiguity that results when migrants must bear the onus of verifying their own documents. In a context of fragmented state authority, documents can make migrants more vulnerable to exploitation. ...
... In this emerging discussion my analysis develops two interventions. First, I expand the kind of ambiguity described in other strong state contexts (Cabot 2014;Coutin 2003Coutin , 2010Reeves 2013Reeves , 2018, an ambiguity that results when migrants must bear the onus of verifying their own documents. In a context of fragmented state authority, documents can make migrants more vulnerable to exploitation. ...
In Libya's context of fragmented state authority, what does it mean for sub‐Saharan migrants to be legible to state and criminal actors through their bodies rather than through the law? How do they experience and navigate precarity? Examining informal bordering practices in Libya reveals a mode of migration governance that is based less on legally restricting mobility and more on allowing uncertainty to proliferate and on exploiting migrants’ lives. In this system, certain bodies become targets for policing according to their skin color, documents, and blood tests, which can lead migrants to be extorted for money and detained. Migrants cope with such informal borderwork through affective labor. This plays a vital role in shaping their mobility decisions. By linking informal bordering practices with affect and mobilities, we can recast formal, state‐centered ideas about migration governance. [mobility, migration, bordering practices, affect, Libya]
... The containment created through checkpoints, roadblocks, and random traffic stops results in a particular experience of "stuckness" (Cresswell 2012), in which immigrants' movements are constrained by larger bordering processes. As a result, entire regions have become zones of confinement (Coutin 2010). ...
... Building upon scholarship on carcelment, containment, and entrapment practices along the US/Mexico border (e.g, Nunez and Heyman 2007;Coutin 2010;Heyman 2010;Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga 2015), this article examines the experiences of undocumented youth within this context, including DACA recipients. Analyses are based on five years of ethnographic study in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, including longitudinal interviews with 167 individuals. ...
... The containment of immigrants along the US/Mexico border is an example of the complex spatial implications of the securitization of migration management (Coutin 2010) as it produces marginalized spaces with particular consequences for the people who inhabit them. Beginning in the 1990s, securitization practices and discourse have dominated migration management. ...
The containment of immigrants along the US/Mexico border illuminates the complex spatial implications associated with the securitization of migration enforcement. The production of marginalized, carceral national spaces has particular consequences for the people that inhabit them, as processes of spatial illegality shape their daily lives. Our analyses draw on five years of ethnographic study in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Here, we focus on the experiences of sixty‐one undocumented youth, including recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), to explore how the spatial violence created by checkpoints and everyday policing practices lead to experiences of confinement and accelerate processes of social exclusion. Spillover effects occur as all inhabitants must pass through inspection points and demonstrate proof of identity and legal residency; this contributes to the reformulation of citizenship. To this, our article adds insight into how social membership is experienced at the checkpoints so that “citizenship” and “authorization” become conflated. Early childhood and youth experiences of freely crossing spaces with school programs yet living with uncertain and precarious status contributes to persistent fear, instability, and confusion under a multilayered immigration policy regime.
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... The spatial reconfiguration of borders implies both the externalization of asylum, that is, the location of border control practices outside of national space (Hyndman and Mountz 2008), as well as the shift of borders and intensified immigration control into everyday spaces (Coutin 2010). These trends have contributed to a global rise in immigration detention and restrictions on mobility (Mountz et al. 2012). ...
... Previous research in the field of forced migration has established the centrality of space for understanding geographies of asylum (Hyndman and Mountz 2008;Coutin 2010;Mountz 2010;Mountz et al. 2012;Gill 2016;Conlon, Hiemstra, and Mountz 2017). The range of spatial tactics state actors employ is diverse, yet more often than not, their goal is 'to prevent irregular migrants from accessing the legal rights conferred by territorial presence' (Coutin 2010: 200). ...
Asylum accommodation is held to isolate asylum seekers spatially and socially from the majority population in host societies. Little attention has been devoted to variation in asylum accommodation at the level of the everyday. Central to this paper is the argument that variation between localities, as well as variation on the level of the built environment creates ‘uneven geographies of asylum accommodation’. The paper theorizes that more ‘open’ forms of asylum accommodation may foster familiarity between asylum seekers and local residents through the development of closer everyday social relations, and more ‘closed’ forms of asylum accommodation may enforce feelings of unfamiliarity by strengthening processes of categorization and everyday bordering. In so doing, we propose to differentiate between ‘spatial’, ‘material’ and ‘institutional’ dimensions of openness of asylum accommodation and aim to understand ‘(un)familiarity’ as expression of people’s experiences, knowledge and perceptions of social distance. We further argue that feelings of (un)familiarity are connected to processes of belonging and estrangement.
... Die Trennung von Familie und Gemeinschaft, die sie in dem Land, aus dem sie abgeschoben wurden, aufgebaut haben, kann ihr emotionales Wohlbefi nden gefährden. Erschwerend kommt hinzu, dass sie ihr Leben an einem neuen und ihnen oft unbekannten Ort wiederaufbauen müssen (Coutin 2010;Dingeman-Cerda 2017). Im Gegensatz dazu erfahren diejenigen, die starke Bindungen zu ihrem Geburtsland haben, die Reintegration als leichter. ...
... In einigen Fällen ist die Abschiebung "exilähnlich" (Coutin 2010: 205), da sie das Land, aus dem sie abgeschoben wurden, als Zuhause erachten (Rodkey 2018;Ybarra & Peña 2017;Boodram 2018). Diese extreme Isolation führt oft zu Depressionen (Coutin 2010;Martín 2013). ...
Die Forschung zu Abschiebungen verdeutlicht, dass diese leidvoll sind und schwerwiegende Folgen für Betroffene und ihre Familienangehörigen haben. Es gibt jedoch relativ wenige Studien darüber, wie sich die Erfahrungen zwischen verschiedenen nationalen Kontexten unterscheiden. Ausgehend von 81 Interviews mit dominikanischen und brasilianischen Abgeschobenen argumentieren wir, dass ihre Reintegration von Makro-, Meso- und Mikrofaktoren beeinflusst wird. Darunter zählen individuelle Merkmale wie kulturelle Anpassung und Humankapital (mikro), nationale und transnationale Bindungen (meso) sowie soziale und wirtschaftlichen Bedingungen, unter denen Abgeschobene aufgenommen werden (makro). Das Forschungsdesign des vorliegenden Artikels arbeitet diese Faktoren heraus und zeigt, wie sie voneinander abhängen. Je ungünstiger sich der Aufnahmekontext auf die Reintegration auswirkt, desto relevanter werden Faktoren auf der Meso- und Mikroebene. Dominikanische Abgeschobene werden von Regierung und Gesellschaft stigmatisiert und sind daher mehr auf transnationale Bindungen und ihre eigene Resilienz angewiesen. Im Gegensatz dazu stoßen brasilianische Deportierte auf einen weniger feindlichen Kontext, was bedeutet, dass sich Personen mit lokalen Bindungen und Humankapital einfacher reintegrieren.
... More recently, under the Obama Administration, immigration policies in the United States expanded dramatically to an interior enforcement system via the 287(g) and Secure Communities programs, which called upon local police and sheriff's offices to act as foot soldiers for the enforcement of federal immigration law. ICE officers increasingly conducted raids at worksites, residences, and public places resulting in an annual high of 400,000 deportations each year (Coleman & Stuesse, 2014;Coutin, 2010;De Genova, 2002). ...
... Another focus of President Trump's policy has been to further secure the southern border by enhancing surveillance, building a larger border wall, increasing the number of Customs and Border Protection agents and ICE officers, and by physically separating recent undocumented arrivals from their children at the U.S. border (Vinick, 2017). Immigrants' work spaces and neighborhoods are now saturated with immigration policing practices unlike any other time in U.S. history and deportability is now more than ever a possibility for undocumented families (Coutin, 2010;De Genova, 2002). ...
Shifts in U.S. immigration policy over the past two decades have resulted in increased deportations of unauthorized persons residing in the United States. Given the current political climate concerning unauthorized immigrants, social workers must understand the influence of parental deportation on youth/adolescent psychosocial and academic wellbeing. This study reviews relevant empirical literature on the impact of forced family separations on child and youth wellbeing from 2000 to the present. Overall, these studies showed that family separation due to immigration enforcement had negative effects on child and youth well-being, specifically, mental health, psychosocial and academic outcomes. These findings, which have implications for both research and practice, suggest that more culturally-based interventions are needed to better serve the psychosocial and educational needs of youth who have experienced a forced family separation due to deportation.
... We met in the marble reception area of a hotel, the sea breeze wafting through the double doors to coat the interior in a thin quasipermanent layer of sand, to which an Ivoirien member of the cleaning staff tended while we talked. In a trajectory that might be seen as a metaphor for the ever-deeper encroachment of border controls into sovereign state territory (cf Coutin, 2010;Cuttitta, 2018;Fitzgerald, 2020;Yuval-Davis et al., 2018), Luis was first stationed at sea off the coasts of Nouadhibou, but now patrols the streets of the city with Mauritanian counterparts. The deployment comprises 25 Guardia Civil officers, covering maritime and land patrols, liaison work, and technical assistance. ...
This article contributes to debates about the autonomy of migration (AoM) by ethnographically detailing the EU border regime's external operations in Nouadhibou, Mauritania. In showing how the EU border regime is entangled within the political economy and social relations of the city, it offers three contributions to AoM discussion. Firstly, it nuances and reframes the interplay between illegalised migrants and the border regime by showing that it can take multiple forms, some less antagonistic than others. Secondly, it contextualises this interplay by situating it within the historical trajectory and social relations of the political economy in which it unfolds. Thirdly, it highlights the relevance of the Global South context of this analysis to AoM debate, much of which has been concerned with European contexts and Europe-bound movement.
... On the other hand, detention and pre-removal centres and practices are also an example of the deterritorialisation of the EU space (Andrijasevic 2010;De Genova and Peutz 2010;Mezzadra and Neilson 2003;Mountz et al. 2013). Detention centres become "borders of nations" (Coutin 2010: 207) and, through their dissemination both inside and outside the EU territory, they contribute to blurring the distinction between internal and external borders (Andrijasevic 2006(Andrijasevic , 2010Coutin 2010;Mountz et al. 2013). ...
The article explores the relation between detention and information-giving practices and
investigates its contribution to migration control and (re)bordering processes at the southern European border. By focusing on the case of the hotspot system implemented in Sicily, the paper explores two main issues: a) the role played by detention practices and their relation with processes of migrant selection and migrants’ rights stratification; b) the link between authorities’ detention practices and information-giving practices carried out by
intergovernmental organisations such as the UNHCR and the IOM, and the contribution of
this relation to processes of migrant differential inclusion. The research methodology is built on ten months of fieldwork carried out in eastern Sicily between 2017 and 2018, on document analysis and on semi-structured interviews conducted with seventeen key informants. The article argues that the intergovernmental organisations information-giving practices about asylum, identification and relocation procedures a) contributed to perpetuating subtle and indirect forms of migration control and b) were linked, more or less directly, to detention practices carried out by authorities, and this relation contributed to reinforcing the stratification of migrants’ access to mobility and rights.
... Overall, spaces of claim-making have been crucially reshaped to reduce and shift "ports of entry" (Mountz 2011c) for claim-making or to prevent arrivals altogether through the creation of extraterritorial spaces or internal spaces of lawlessness (Dikeç 2009). Relatedly, studies have pointed to the emergent regimes of detention (Achermann 2008;Bigo 2007;Mountz 2011b), deportation (Ellermann 2009;Fekete 2005; de Genova 2010a) and confinement (Coutin 2010;Makaremi 2009a) that different people falling into the category of "unwanted migration" (IOM 2012, 7) face. ...
... Overall, spaces of claim-making have been crucially reshaped to reduce and shift "ports of entry" (Mountz 2011c) for claim-making or to prevent arrivals altogether through the creation of extraterritorial spaces or internal spaces of lawlessness (Dikeç 2009). Relatedly, studies have pointed to the emergent regimes of detention (Achermann 2008;Bigo 2007;Mountz 2011b), deportation (Ellermann 2009;Fekete 2005; de Genova 2010a) and confinement (Coutin 2010;Makaremi 2009a) that different people falling into the category of "unwanted migration" (IOM 2012, 7) face. ...
Administrative asylum procedures are permeated by tensions between rationalities of legality, efficiency, and deterrence in asylum casework and their various effects on cases. Based on ethnographic research in the Swiss asylum administration, this book unveils the pragmatics and politics of rendering asylum cases resolvable by re-cording the lives of applicants in terms of asylum. With his reading of power and agency in administrations, Ephraim Pörtner offers a critical view of the intricate relationship between practices of asylum casework and the governmental need to resolve claims of people seeking protection.
... By appearing to explain, rather than to generate, this classification Ordering Diversity rationalises a form of divide not only in terms of transmission rates but also in terms of governing and differentiating bodies. These shifting, calculated forms of differentiation inclusion/exclusion situate migrants ambiguously as apart from the rest of the populace even when, physically, they are within (Coutin 2010). Fluctuations of organising and framing pandemic infections point to the unresolved tension of the non-human virus and managerial expertise. ...
What do measures of management during this exceptional and volatile time tell us about the regulation of migrant-driven diversity and its implications in the arrival city? Using the term “differential diversification” from Singapore, I examine how the socio-political life of the pandemic is deeply entangled with the management of low-waged labour migrants. Techno-political discourses and practices of pandemic management accelerated the state’s attempts to differently include migrant workers, revealing the bare viscerality of biopolitics already in place prior to the pandemic. I argue that diversity is ordered through a striking co-production of migrant management and pandemic management. This paper draws upon government discourses to demonstrate that measures of pandemic management contribute not only to the spatial regime of migrant management. They also articulate and rationalise the subject transformation of the low-waged migrant to the extent that, on top of being a moral risk, they are also now a medical risk.
... To understand the growth of detention regimes and practices, the rationales and purposes for detention, and its consequences, scholars have turned to a variety of approaches and perspectives including post-structural and post-modernist theories (Agamben, 1998(Agamben, , 2005Diken and Laustsen, 2002;Mountz et al., 2012), criminology and legal studies (Bosworth, 2014;Menjívar and Abrego, 2012), economic theories and privatization logics (Fernandez, 2007;Hiemstra and Conlon, 2017a), organization sociology and processes of bureaucratization (Flynn and Flynn, 2017;Hiemstra and Conlon, 2017b), and geographical studies (Coutin, 2010;Martin, 2013) to name just a few. In particular, Agamben's ideas of "bare life" (Agamben, 1998) and "zones of exception" (Agamben, 2005) have heavily influenced studies on the containment and detention of asylum seekers and refugees (Cardoso, 2016;Jenkins, 2004;Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2004). ...
Under the Trump administration and its “zero-tolerance” policy, the number of detained asylum seekers in the United States has been growing significantly. Yet we know little about their mobility, agency, and social relations at the micro level during the time they are subject to a detention regime. This is because research about detention has frequently developed independently of sustained engagement with the lived experience of those detained within the relevant institutions. Building on literature about the spatiality of social relations and studies that analyze detention “from below,” the current article conceptualizes detention as a social space in which social relations between detained asylum seekers are formed and negotiated. It draws on ethnographic material collected in detention prisons in the greater New York City area and pays particular attention to the seemingly mundane social facets of everyday life in detention. The article reveals the complexity, ambivalences, and forms of social relations that range from shared and unifying feelings of injustice, to the development of friendships and shared practices of resistance and disobedience that sometimes even go beyond the confines of detention. This perspective allows us to see detained people as agents in the exercise of power and in negotiation with structures of control, waiting, punishment, and exploitation that organize but do not complete their everyday lives in detention.
... In the fourth, fifth and sixth sections, the administrative control, the material conditions and the disciplinary rules that operate in migration detention centres are analyzed. This paper contributes to the growing body of research on border criminologies and adds to the extensive literature on migrant detention that has mainly focussed on migrants' destination countries (Coutin 2010;Bosworth and Kaufman 2011;Mountz et al. 2013;Bosworth 2014;Conlon and Hiemstra 2014;Campesi 2015;Macías-Rojas 2016;Mainwaring and Silverman 2017;Molfetta and Brouwer 2020;Slack 2019). ...
Migrant detention in Mexico, as a cornerstone of the Mexican Transit Control Regime, is intrinsically related to US migration control. Drawing on Katja Franko Aas’s ‘border penality’ and ‘abnormal justice’ conceptualizations, this paper argues that Transit Control Regimes are an abnormal bordering and the outcome of two trends of the geographies of migration control: reverberation and distancing. To examine how this abnormal bordering is enforced, following the ‘bordering as a practice’ research agenda, this paper analyses the practices of control, punishment, and deterrence used in Mexico’s migrant detention centres drawing on state agents’ narratives. Particular emphasis is given to clerical control, material conditions and disciplinary rules. The analysis presented sheds light on the precarious conditions of the facilities, the discrepancy between regulations and practice, questionable practices of control and discipline and the reality of migrant detention as a de facto punishment for migrants.
... Brigden and Mainwaring 2016;Coutin 2010;Hess 2012;Khosravi 2014;Missbach 2013). Not necessarily immobilized or without choices, migrants draw on diverse legal mechanisms and social strategies to continue moving and avoid deportation and victimization(Fernández Casanueva and Paulín 2019, 162;Brigden and Mainwaring 2016;Frank-Vitale 2020;Schapendonk 2012). ...
As insecurity in Central America persists and avenues for asylum in the U.S. constrict, migrants are exploring options in Mexico—to seek humanitarian relief or to bide time as they consider whether to continue north, settle, or return. Based on interviews with migrants and shelter staff at the Mexico‐Guatemala border in the summer of 2017, this article applies contingency logics (Bledsoe 2002) to analyze how proximate social ties, accumulated experiences, and harsh ordeals inform how migrants make decisions, change their minds, and re‐envision destinations amid uncertainty. Complicating tensions between mobility/immobility and settlement/transit, we demonstrate how decisions to settle, seek protection, or wait in Mexico may be socially understood as fostering migrants’ larger goals to continue their journeys and pursue their migratory aspirations. However, given Mexico's expanding deportation apparatus and the unpredictability of options in Mexico, such forms of waiting also risk consigning migrants to indeterminate waiting, vulnerability, and entrapment. Debido a la inseguridad y a las restringidas posibilidades de asilo en Estados Unidos, los migrantes están explorando sus opciones en México: buscar ayuda humanitaria o esperar mientras deciden continuar hacia el norte, establecerse o regresar a sus lugares de origen. Este artículo se basa en entrevistas realizadas con migrantes y personal de los albergues en la frontera México‐Guatemala durante el verano de 2017 y aplica lógicas de contingencia (Bledsoe 2002) para analizar las formas en que las relaciones sociales cercanas, las experiencias acumuladas y la adversidad determinan cómo los migrantes toman decisiones, cambian de opinión y replantean sus destinos en medio de la incertidumbre. Por otro lado, las complejas tensiones existentes entre movilidad/inmovilidad y asentamiento/tránsito evidencian cómo la decisión de establecerse, buscar protección o esperar en México pueden entenderse como si promovieran el objetivo de los migrantes de continuar sus viajes y aspiraciones migratorias. Sin embargo, dado el creciente aparato de deportación y la imprevisibilidad de las opciones en México, estas formas de espera también podrían condenar a los migrantes a la vulnerabilidad, a esperas indeterminadas y al aprisionamiento.
... It shows a partial continuity with techniques of dispersal deployed for policing and dispersing migrants enacted over the last decade. In so doing, it points to the need of situating 'spatial tactics' (Coutin 2010) for policing migrants within a much longer colonial genealogy of dispersal strategies adopted for targeting and disciplining colonial populations. Scattering migrants across spaces, by forcing them to enact convoluted geographies, is a mode of government that acts upon singular individuals and, simultaneously, upon temporary collective formations that are targeted as potentially dangerous 'migrant mobs' (Tazzioli 2016). ...
This article focuses on the politics of migrant dispersal that has been enforced in Europe for regaining control over ‘unruly’ migrants’ presence and movements, with a specific focus on the French and on the Italian contexts. The article shows that dispersal can be considered as a spatial strategy of governmentality and that far from being a new policy, it was already adopted to manage former colonised populations. The article argues that strategies of migrant dispersal are today enacted by state authorities, in collaboration with humanitarian actors, for troubling migrants’ presence and autonomous movements, as well as for disrupting and dividing temporary migrant collective formations. First, it retraces a colonial genealogy of dispersal, as a political technology used for disciplining unruly populations. Then, it analyses how dispersal strategies have been put into place in France (Calais and Paris) and in Italy (Ventimiglia) not only by scattering migrants across space but also by dismantling migrant spaces of life (‘lieux de vie’). The article moves on demonstrating that the politics of dispersal is mainly enforced for preventing the consolidation of migrant multiplicities, criminalising them as ‘migrant mobs’ and spatially dividing them. The third section of the article brings attention to the effects of migrants’ forced hypermobility and to the convoluted geographies that dispersal triggers. It concludes by bringing attention to the increasing criminalisation of migrant support networks that try to prevent the dismantling of migrant autonomous spaces.
... Presence is foundational to accessing territorially-based rights (Allon 2013;Bauder 2015;Carens 2008;Coutin 2010;Sawyer and Turpin 2005;Varsanyi 2006). The refugee determination system can only be accessed by entering and remaining in Canada. ...
Increasing processing times for immigration applications, increasing numbers of people admitted on temporary visas, and delays processing refugee claims mean that more newcomers spend longer periods of time living in Canada with precarious immigration status. This paper uses qualitative research to examine how people with precarious immigration status exercise agency in the face of restrictions to their rights and risk of deportability, as well as the extent to which agency is able to transform people’s everyday realities. The research shows that regimes of immigration control construct people with precarious immigration status as un-belonging and undesirable as members of Canadian society. The research identifies two ways that research participants exert autonomy over their lives: persistent presence and critiquing their construction as un-belonging and undesirable. Both forms of agency involve the creation of counterpublics to build networks for practical support and recognition of the legitimacy of their presence in Canada. While agency made it easier for participants to sustain themselves, the research shows that participants internalized discourses hostile to people with precarious immigration status, suggesting that agency is both necessary but also limited in its capacity to mitigate the harm caused by the construction of them as un-belonging and undesirable.
... Son precisamente esos hijos a los que se refiere Mestries los que se enfrentan a diversos retos a su regreso al país de origen, México. Por ejemplo, a su regreso, se enfrentan al estigma social de ser asociados con poblaciones de inmigrantes y criminales (McGuire & Coutin, 2013;Silver, 2018), problemas económicos (Bengtson, Chase, Long, Monterroso & Montenegro, 2013), y diversas formas de marginalización (Coutin, 2010;Hagan, Castro & Rodríguez, 2010), lo cual los lleva a enfentarse a problemas para encontrar trabajo (Couting, 2010;Silver, 2018). Aparte de estos retos, uno de los principales se relaciona con los contextos educativos. ...
El presente trabajo reporta los hallazgos sobre las percepciones de actuales alumnos universitarios migrantes de retorno acerca de los desafíos a los que se enfrentan a su regreso a México. Siguiendo una metodología cualitativa y a partir de autobiografías y entrevistas semi-estructuradas, los participantes dan cuenta de sus experiencias en los sistemas educativos de México y Estados Unidos, además, relatan los desafíos que enfrentan en diferentes ámbitos: administrativo y lingüístico. Los resultados sugieren que los participantes muestran cierta nostalgia al pensar en el sistema educativo de Estados Unidos. Al mismo tiempo, sugieren que uno de los principales retos a los que se enfrentan en su adaptación social, se deriva de su competencia lingüística en español y en inglés, que si bien los pone en ventaja en algunas situaciones, como en convertirse en profesores de inglés, los margina en otras. Esto nos permite avanzar en los estudios de migrantes de retorno ya que su inserción en el sistema educativo mexicano no se da de manera sencilla y demuestra las complejidades de la adaptación de los migrantes a un sistema educativo y a una sociedad que no les es tan familiar como generalmente se piensa.
... In the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Guatemala, police and gangs target and harass these forced returnees, who are easily recognizable by their Zilberg 2004). In these unwelcoming environments, it is not surprising that many deportees desire to remigrate abroad, where they have strong family and economic connections and feel they belong (Alpes 2019, Berger Cardoso et al. 2016, Brotherton & Barrios 2011, Caldwell 2019, Coutin 2010, David 2017, Galvin 2015, Hagan et al. 2008, Martínez et al. 2018, Schuster & Majidi 2015. ...
Currently, two distinct bodies of scholarship address the increased volume and diversity of global return migration since the mid-1990s. The economic sociology of return, which assumes that return is voluntary, investigates how time living and working abroad affects returnees' labor market opportunities and the resulting implications for economic development. A second scholarship , the political sociology of return, recognizing the increasing role of both emigration and immigration states in controlling and managing migration , examines how state and institutional actors in countries of origin shape the reintegration experiences of deportees, rejected asylum seekers, and nonadmitted migrants forced home. We review these literatures independently , examining their research questions, methodologies, and findings, while also noting limitations and areas where additional research is needed. We then engage these literatures to provide an integrated path forward for researching and theorizing return migration-a synergized resource mobilization framework. 7.1
... In the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Guatemala, police and gangs target and harass these forced returnees, who are easily recognizable by their Zilberg 2004). In these unwelcoming environments, it is not surprising that many deportees desire to remigrate abroad, where they have strong family and economic connections and feel they belong (Alpes 2019, Berger Cardoso et al. 2016, Brotherton & Barrios 2011, Caldwell 2019, Coutin 2010, David 2017, Galvin 2015, Hagan et al. 2008, Martínez et al. 2018, Schuster & Majidi 2015. ...
Currently, two distinct bodies of scholarship address the increased volume and diversity of global return migration since the mid-1990s. The economic sociology of return, which assumes that return is voluntary, investigates how time living and working abroad affects returnees’ labor market opportunities and the resulting implications for economic development. A second scholarship, the political sociology of return, recognizing the increasing role of both emigration and immigration states in controlling and managing migration, examines how state and institutional actors in countries of origin shape the reintegration experiences of deportees, rejected asylum seekers, and nonadmitted migrants forced home. We review these literatures independently, examining their research questions, methodologies, and findings, while also noting limitations and areas where additional research is needed. We then engage these literatures to provide an integrated path forward for researching and theorizing return migration—a synergized resource mobilization framework.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 46 is July 30, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
... This divide between citizens of the 'Global North' and the 'Global South', results in 'transnational inequalities', i.e. differential abilities to move across international space (Mau 2010). Obtaining a passport in the 'Global North' therefore constitutes an important motivation to naturalize (Coutin 2010;Gálvez 2013;Leitner and Ehrkamp 2006;Leuchter 2014). ...
Based on interviews with 21 immigrants in Norway, including both naturalized citizens and ‘denizens’, this article addresses immigrant meanings of citizenship and naturalization. The findings show that the interviewees attributed three meanings to citizenship. First, Norwegian citizenship served as a powerful means of spatial mobility, thereby facilitating transnational connections. Second, citizenship signified a legal stability that may guard precarious immigrants against ‘liminal legality’, i.e. enduring legal uncertainty. Third, citizenship was conceptualized as a formal recognition of equality and belonging, although ‘race’ and ethnicity persisted as salient markers of inequality and alienage. The article contributes empirically to the growing literature on the experiencing side of citizenship and naturalization by delineating what citizenship means to different groups, and to whom it matters the most. Theoretically, it contributes by demonstrating that citizenship acquisition may not only be strategic, but also rooted in needs of symbolic sanctioning of equality and belonging, particularly important to individuals debarred from naturalization.
... Derickson's work on policing and Ferguson resonates with our prior findings on the endgame of state and local policing and immigration enforcement. Whereas some researchers have posed detention and deportation on terms set out by the state-for example, as literally an attempt to reduce and eventually eliminate the undocumented resident population-we have argued that detention and deportation, especially at the state and local scale, are about capture and regulated mobility (Coleman & Kocher, 2011;Coutin, 2010;Gilbert, 2009). But more important, in terms of our argument here, Derickson draws very useful attention to policing in terms of institutionalized practices with identifiable, cumulative, and racialized outcomes. ...
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? Can racial profiling be made a straightforward object of problematization and, if not, why? We are particularly interested in how racial profiling can be so self-evidently at the core of programs like §287(g) and Secure Communities and yet how racialized law enforcement decisions and tactics are so often inscrutable—and difficult to prove—in the context of routine police work. Building on original fieldwork findings and data on roadblocks by §287(g) and Secure Communities agencies in central North Carolina, we dissect the differences between racially discrepant police work and racial profiling, and argue that chasing the “gold standard” of racial profiling risks leaving racially discrepant policing on the table as an apparently unproblematic, and perhaps even defensible, outcome of policing. As such, we argue that critical scholars should leave aside the problem of proving racial profiling and instead refocus on the problem of racially discrepant policing.
... Many Political Geographers tend to begin their inquiries at the micro-scale, through efforts to describe identification, arrest, detention and deportation practices and the relationships that constitute them. They note how efforts to extend control beyond borders halt migrants for extended periods in detention centres, transit zones and camps (Hyndman & Mountz, 2008;Isleyen, 2018;Mountz, 2011); how increased control at the border leads migrants to move in alternate and often riskier ways and directions (Cornelius, 2001 cf.;Carling, 2007); how internal policing pushes migrants into hidden and underground urban spaces (Coutin, 2010;Franck, 2016;McDowell & Wonders, 2009); and how detention systems can simultaneously stop migrants in their tracks and keep them in constant motion (Gill, 2009). ...
International regimes govern how officials address specific issue areas in global politics. There is a deep and unresolved debate as to whether we can speak of an international migration regime. This article seeks to develop the theoretical language to resolve this debate. We introduce the concept of a ‘distributive regime’: a structure that coordinates movement and settlement control practices in ways that engender ideal distributions of populations across space. The paper demonstrates the discriminatory power of this concept by using it to shed light on analogous forms of movement and settlement control in the study of slavery and incarceration. We then suggest that we could resolve the extant debate about the status of the international migration regime by further exploring the hypothesis that contemporary migration control practices are coordinated in ways that achieve a distributive effect.
... Unlike (though necessarily linked to) geopolitical strategies that focus on territorial control, interior enforcement as a biopolitical strategy follows migrants as they move internally, within the nation-state. As Coutin (2010) argues, the proliferation and expansion of immigration enforcement practices and policies have created a context in which migrants are forced to inhabit subnational spaces-spaces that are divested of both constitutional (e.g. the right to an attorney at public expense) and everyday (e.g. the right to inhabit public space without fear) rights. However, this is not to suggest that the threat of immigration enforcement is ever-present everywhere to the same degree. ...
A broad body of research has examined the shifting spatialities of contemporary border enforcement efforts, drawing particular attention to how border enforcement efforts increasingly take place away from the territorial edges of border enforcing states. However, existing research largely focuses on border enforcement efforts that mobilize strategies of militarization, securitization, and criminalization. In response, this paper draws on work in the fields of emotional and feminist geopolitics, to broaden understandings of the sites, modalities, and spatialities of border governance. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival research, and discourse analysis, this paper examines public information campaigns launched by US border enforcement agencies between 1990 and 2012. In doing so, I show how these campaigns aim to affect migrant decision-making and reduce unauthorized migration by circulating strategically crafted messages and images into the intimate spaces of everyday life where potential migrants and their loved ones live and socialize. Unlike the hard power strategies of militarized borders and migrant criminalization, public information campaigns work as soft-power tools of governance that target the emotional registers of viewers and both respond to and counter particular gender ideologies. As this analysis suggests, understanding the full complexity of contemporary border governance requires that we broaden the scope of analysis beyond the hard power strategies of militarization, securitization, and criminalization to examine the softer side of border governance, a project that the insights of feminist political geography are particularly well suited for.
This paper examines the impact of immigration law on US citizens' understanding of legal status categories. Prior research on legal consciousness has uncovered the ways in which undocumented persons make sense of and navigate their legal position in society. Less is known, however, about the paradox of US‐citizen children who are legally protected by their citizenship yet grow up in the context of their parents' precarious immigration statuses. Drawing on interviews with US citizen youth and undocumented parents, I conceptualize the phenomenon of undocumented consciousness to explain how US citizens make sense of parental legal status vulnerability. By witnessing their parents' blocked opportunities from work, travel, and other aspects of life, youth begin to attach meaning to citizenship and its protections, all the while forming an understanding of what it means, practically, to live in the U.S. with and without legal status. Findings reveal the mechanisms by which it is possible for functions of immigration law to have adverse impacts on the lives of US citizens themselves.
Based on ethnographic research, this research explores how migratory regimes affect and echo migrants' everyday life. For this, Yaatsil Guevara González investigated the daily lives of Central American migrants on the move, asylum seekers, and recognized refugees in a migrant shelter in Mexico’s southern border. Throughout the thesis, she explored how residents of the shelter first, experienced their daily lives under situations of unexpectedly prolonged waiting, and second, how, based on this condition, they overcame it and handled this interim situation in their continuing trajectories. She discussed 1) the role of places en route, i.e., how placemaking occurs while migrants are on their way; and 2) the meaning of waiting phases in refugees’ affective lives during the journeys. She concluded that waiting is an ambivalent condition in which on the one hand migrants are obliged to live in conditions of precarity, exclusion, and denial, creating states of disenchantment and discouragement. On the other hand, waiting also served as a platform for identifying new strategies and reinventing tactics to search for new aspirations and goals and to cope with the multiplicity of challenges encountered along the migratory
According to the Westphalian system of international law, all people are meant to be citizens or subjects of territorially bounded and sovereign nation‐states, which in turn guarantee certain rights to, and impose certain duties upon, their members. Anarchism, by contrast, is predicated upon a rejection of the legitimacy of state sovereignty, and a refutation of the justness and practicability of representative government. Anarchists took individual and collective “self‐determination” to their logical extremes—and in the process confounded state legal regimes and bureaucracies that understood national belonging and individual rights only in terms of citizenship. From the perspective of the United States, alien anarchists “belonged” back in their countries of origin, but from those European states' perspective, anarchists had no place in their national communities. This article examines how both radicals and governments in the era of America's “First Red Scare” engaged with the rules governing the interstate system. As individual radicals, government functionaries, and international diplomats wrestled to define where anarchists belonged in the international order of nation‐states, the solutions they found simultaneously reinforced the boundaries of the Westphalian system and revealed contradictions and fissures within it.
Border cities in Yunnan, China, have become attractive destinations among Myanmar migrants. Using Ruili as a case study, this paper analyzes China’s border control upon Myanmar migrants to create a cross-border division of labor. It finds that China experiments with a flexible model of border control by allowing Myanmar migrants to cross the border with relative ease and integrate into the local labor market, while denying their rights to civil protection and limiting their mobility to other Chinese cities. This model promotes and regulates the movement of Myanmar migrant workers, constituting a pragmatic order to facilitate the logic of capital accumulation. The cross-border division of labor in production between Ruili and northern Myanmar articulates a spatially uneven structure of capitalist production that creates incentive and hinderance to low-end workers’ transnational migration and, moreover, reflects the Chinese state’s efforts to encourage industrial relocation from the affluent coast to the poor hinterland to address regional disparity.
In this essay, I discuss YouTube travel videos produced by Zapotec Indigenous communities across the US–Mexico border. These point-of-view travel videos that depict the arrival of the videographer into Indigenous communities along the International Highway 190 in Oaxaca, Mexico. To those unfamiliar with the regions depicted, they are seemingly devoid of content, but for undocumented Zapotec viewers who reside away from their homelands, these videos offer them a way to exercise an imaginative mobility. Drawing from the fields of mobility studies, media studies, and critical Indigenous studies, I examine how these YouTube videos are mobile postcards that help immigrant communities stay connect to their communities and challenge uneven structures that deny them the ability to travel freely across borders. In this essay, I contextualize how settler colonial structures in both Mexico and the US intervene in the lives of Zapotec communities in ways that attempt to dictate Indigenous people’s mobility.
Refugee camps are among the most prevalent institutional responses to global displacement. Despite a quasi consensus among scholars, activists, and humanitarians that camps are undesirable, and should only ever be temporary, little work has charted the political project and practices of camp abolition that challenge their spatial unfreedom. Rather than life‐supporting spatial technologies of care that unwittingly signal political failures of inclusion, camps form part of a calculated system of “carceral humanitarianism”. This article draws on experiences from Kenya where aid interventions have shaped politics, social dynamics and economic life since the 1990s. Kakuma camp and Kalobeyei settlement serve as empirical windows to explore the limits of institutional decampment and reform policies, while demonstrating that more radical, abolitionist struggles are enacted through everyday mobilisation and acts of fugitivity among refugees themselves. Advancing critical studies of humanitarianism and forced migration, this article contends that only abolishing camps and their carceral logics helps to build more viable, safe, and humane futures for people on the move. Kambi za wakimbizi ni moja ya njia za kitaasisi zilizozoeleka kukabiliana na suala la uhamiaji wa kulazimishwa wa kimataifa. Ingawaje kuna muafaka baina ya wanazuoni, wanaharakati, na watetezi wa masuala ya kibinadamu kwamba kambi hazifai, na ziwepo kwa muda mfupi tu, michango michache ya kitaaluma imefafanua mradi wa kisiasa na vitendo vya ukomeshaji kambi ambavyo vinakabili ukosefu wa uhuru. Badala ya kuwa mahali pa kuokoa na kujali maisha—penye mapungufu yaliyosababishwa na sera jumuishi zilizoshindwa—kambi ni sehemu ya mfumo wa makusudi wa misaada ya kibinadamu yenye mrengo wa kiudhibiti. Makala hii inatumia mafunzo kutoka Kenya ambapo misaada imeathiri siasa, mienendo ya jamii na maisha ya kiuchumi tangu 1990. Kambi ya Kakuma na makazi ya Kalobeyei yanatumika kama madirisha halisia kuchunguza mkomo wa kitaasisi katika sera za uondoaji kambi na za kimageuzi, ilihali ninaonyesha kwamba mapambano makali ya ukomeshaji wa kambi yanafanywa kila siku kupitia uhamasishaji na vitendo vya kikimbizi kati ya wakimbizi wenyewe. Katika kuendeleza tafakuri ya kihakiki katika masomo ya mfumo wa kibinadamu na uhamiaji wa kulazimishwa, chapisho hili linadai kwamba njia pekee ya kujenga hatima nzuri, salama na ya kibinadamu kwa watu wanaotoka sehemu moja kwenda nyingine, ni kwa kukomesha kambi na mantiki yake ya kiudhibiti.
Administrative asylum procedures are permeated by tensions between rationalities of legality, efficiency, and deterrence in asylum casework and their various effects on cases. Based on ethnographic research in the Swiss asylum administration, this book unveils the pragmatics and politics of rendering asylum cases resolvable by re-cording the lives of applicants in terms of asylum. With his reading of power and agency in administrations, Ephraim Pörtner offers a critical view of the intricate relationship between practices of asylum casework and the governmental need to resolve claims of people seeking protection.
Bibliografía sobre: Pensar los Éxodos, nuevos desplazamientos forzados, discriminación y representaciones mediáticas del racismo
Asylum laws cannot function without spatial technologies and practices. Refugee camps, detention centers and accommodation facilities, in addition to dispersal and residential obligations, highlight the spatiality of asylum laws and policies. They are not only designed to regulate forced migrants' movement and place them in alternative legal and spatial regimes, but they are also spaces where migrants’ legal rights are violated and access to integrating institutions are restricted. Based on findings from Germany and the United States, this paper argues that current asylum regimes are characterized by a system of legal-spatial violence; a process in which a form of violence is embedded in law, implemented through policies and formal processes, and realized and reproduced spatially. This entanglement between the law, space, and violence involves complex and paradoxical processes: immobility and internal bordering practices (where forced migrants are confined and their movement is limited), as well as forced mobility and situations of unbordering (where movement is forced, and where spatial restrictions are either repealed or replaced). These processes fragment and prolong the trajectories of forced migration. Compulsion, displacement, and the dispossession of rights—which constitute the process of forced migration—do not cease on entering Germany or the United States, but can continue. The rationale for legal-spatial violence goes beyond the securitization of forced migration and the control and deterrence of forced migrants, and also includes economic logic and profit making.
This chapter interrogates the impacts of mass deportation for people recently removed from the U.S. to Mexico. It draws from a novel survey conducted in 2018 with 128 individuals at a migrant shelter in Nogales, Mexico to assess factors impacting intentions to re-migrate the U.S. after removal. Far from deportation preventing remigration to the U.S., the authors found most individuals planned to return to the U.S. at some point. The number of deportations a person experienced did not influence their future migratory plans. Rather, individuals were motivated to attempt another migration based on the location of their subjective belonging, family ties, and nature of their interactions with the U.S. legal system prior to deportation. These findings contribute to research suggesting that migratory decisions are socially embedded, opening up new areas for research on the impact of institutional processes on re-migration plans.
This set of collaboratively written keywords uses the critical standpoint of migration to engage with a range of categories and concepts that are "minor" in the sense that they are widely used in both public discourse and political theory, but which remain often under-theorized outside of critical border and migration studies. As the contributions to this collection show, engaging with these allegedly "minor keywords" allows to expose and trouble established convictions and notions of "major" political concepts and categories from the viewpoint of migration. The present collection of "minor keywords" is a collaborative writing project insofar as each entry has been written by two or more co-authors. A special thanks goes to Nicholas De Genova and Martina Tazzioli who initiated the project and edited the keywords. The 11 keywords included in this collection are: Membership; Struggle; Solidarity; Mobility/Mouvement; The Mob; Refuge; Protection; Alien/Foreigner; Detention/Confinement/Containment; Deportation; Eviction.
This set of collaboratively written keywords uses the critical standpoint of migration to engage with a range of categories and concepts that are "minor" in the sense that they are widely used in both public discourse and political theory, but which remain often under-theorized outside of critical border and migration studies. As the contributions to this collection show, engaging with these allegedly "minor keywords" allows to expose and trouble established convictions and notions of "major" political concepts and categories from the viewpoint of migration. The present collection of "minor keywords" is a collaborative writing project insofar as each entry has been written by two or more co-authors. A special thanks goes to Nicholas De Genova and Martina Tazzioli who initiated the project and edited the keywords. The 11 keywords included in this collection are: Membership; Struggle; Solidarity; Mobility/Mouvement; The Mob; Refuge; Protection; Alien/Foreigner; Detention/Confinement/Containment; Deportation; Eviction.
US immigration policy has deeply racist roots. From his rhetoric to his policies, President Donald Trump has continued this tradition, most notoriously through his border wall, migrant family separation, and child detention measures. But who exactly supports these practices and what factors drive their opinions? Our research reveals that racial attitudes are fundamental to understanding who backs the president's most punitive immigration policies. We find that whites who feel culturally threatened by Latinos, who harbor racially resentful sentiments, and who fear a future in which the United States will be a majority–minority country, are among the most likely to support Trump's actions on immigration. We argue that while the President's policies are unpopular with the majority of Americans, Trump has grounded his political agenda and 2020 reelection bid on his ability to politically mobilize the most racially conservative segment of whites who back his draconian immigration enforcement measures.
More than six million people have been deported from the United States since 1996. The Dominican Republic is one of the top ten countries to which deportees are sent. Most scholarship on deportation focuses on the challenges deportees face post‐deportation. There is also a long history of scholarship on how migrants draw from social, human and financial capital to integrate into host societies. This article thus asks what forms of capital are useful for deportees’ re‐integration and focuses on the forms of capital deportees draw from to survive in the aftermath of deportation. An analysis of 60 in‐depth interviews with Dominican deportees reveals how deportees’ combination of limited human capital, fractured social capital and positive psychological capital assists in their re‐integration. Results also show that access to employment is not only an important step in social and economic integration, but that it also helps deportees to achieve emotional stability.
US immigration enforcement has led to a rise in the number of deportations. Several studies identify deportees as more likely to attempt re-entry to reunify with family members in a variety of international settings. These demographic changes have prompted some scholars to theorize how deportation produces a unique mobility subject: the unintended returnee. The importance of studying unintended returnees is amplified when we examine the 3.1 million unauthorized migrants deported by the US between 2005-2013. Over 1.5 million children living in the US were impacted by these removals. Data from the US Department of Homeland Security, indicate that among those who remigrate, the majority are those with US born children. While unauthorized reentry, is not new, the forms that return migrations take reveal changes in the organization of clandestine border-crossings that heighten the risk of violence. To provide insight on how these changes may impact deportees who remigrate, this article examines the chain of events that followed a 2006 immigration work-site raid and deportation of a migrant who was separated from his US based family. The concept of clandestinity – licit and illicit strategies that enable surreptitious cross-border mobility – is employed to understand how this person, following deportation, leverages his involvement in a human smuggling network as a smuggler (coyote) to reenter without authorization. By drawing inferences from a single case, I elucidate how immigration enforcement measures, along with limited avenues for humanitarian relief, may create conditions that compel deportees to defy the power of the state to produce involuntary transnational families and rely on illicit clandestine migration services to enable family reunification.
This article examines why deportation and imprisonment for immigration offenses rose under presidential administrations that claimed to favor more “humane” approaches to immigration enforcement. I examine the politics of enforcement discretion on the US-Mexico border during the administrations of Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and Barack Obama (2009–17). Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I argue that the Clinton and Obama administrations took a punitive humanitarian approach to enforcement discretion aimed at punishing “illegal immigration” at the border while protecting “legal immigrants” with long-standing ties to the United States from deportation. The findings show that such an approach extended crime control to US-Mexico border enforcement. This blend of humanitarian and punitive approaches systematized criminal enforcement priorities and expanded the discretion of border agents to deport and imprison. Just as other scholars have shown how liberal reform contributed to the rise of the carceral state, this article shows how immigration policies that blended humanitarianism and security punished the very people such policies were designed to protect.
This article identifies and analyses the tactic of kidnapping migrants that is increasingly deployed by states to disrupt, decelerate, and block migrants’ mobility. Kidnapping, we argue, is one of the political technologies of capture used by state authorities in their efforts to reassert control over migratory movements. This analysis contributes to a new understanding of the politics of border enforcement through strategies aimed at the containment of migration. The article focuses on the U.S.–Mexico border and the European border in the Mediterranean Sea as crucial sites where states have increasingly engaged in heterogenous modes of kidnapping.It also considers migrant struggles against these diverse kidnapping tactics. Through a focus on kidnapping, the article expands how we understand border violence and interrogates accounts of the biopolitics and necropolitics of borders that rely on the overly reductive formula of ‘making live/letting die’. The article concludes by highlighting how the critical examination of kidnapping migrants allows us to trace affinities and partial continuities among various historical modes of racialised subjugation that have affected both contemporary migrants and previously colonised populations.
This article contributes to theorising the often unrecognised continuities between the illegalisation of migrant and refugee mobilities as an effect of lawmaking or other state practices of border policing and immigration law enforcement and the illegalisation of the rights, claims, and juridical status of minoritised citizens. Against a backdrop of resurgent right‐wing nationalisms, we pursue this transversal analysis of state practices of illegalisation to draw attention not only to labour subordination and disposability but also the more fundamental relationship between law and terror. The making of such regimes of citizenship takes place in obvious ways at the ostensible outer edges of nation‐state territories. They are also replicated in the various spatial arrangements that ensure racialised dispossession within global cities, cities that are better understood as reconfigurations of settler‐colonial cities. We argue that the study of practices of illegalisation allows critical poverty scholarship to better discern how sociopolitical categories and classifications that are central to wider processes of marginalisation and domination may arise or be reinforced as effects of the state’s legal productions of illegality.
This paper intervenes in recent geographical debates about territory, sovereignty, hegemony and urban marginality by introducing the concept of a ‘spatial contract’. The concept emerged from a longitudinal ethnographic engagement with the Exarcheia neighbourhood in Athens, Greece. The neighbourhood's unique concentration of riots during Greece's post‐dictatorial era is theorised thus as manifesting a kind of spatial contract in which local conflict and contestation of state sovereignty endures amidst the wider regional and national reproduction of state hegemony. Exarcheia's reputation and sustenance as a place of protest becomes explainable in this way as being made possible by an unstated but enduring state‐society compact that the local contestation can be continued so long as it is also spatially contained. The paper first identifies key advances in geographical understandings of the relationship between territory and sovereignty that support such a theorisation. This growing body of scholarship is still largely unable to account for temporal and spatial exceptions in the sovereign control of territory. The paper proceeds to explain how a two‐year ethnographic residence in Exarcheia (2008–2010), and repeat field visits since, have made manifest the emergence of a distinct spatial contract during Greece's immediate post‐dictatorial era (1974–), and again since 2008 during the country's three‐fold crisis (economic, political and of migrant reception). Far from being disconnected from these wider social transformations, the spatial contract actually reflects them, including now as it comes undone during in a new and arguably revanchist period of hegemony through coercion. In this way, the changing conflictual relationships in Exarcheia can be interpreted anew as part of a hybrid yet hegemonic sovereign control over territory at large. This hybrid hegemonic mix has critical implications for our understanding of marginality, sovereignty, and territorial control more generally, including our ability to conceptualise agency, resistance and citizenship within shifting forms of hegemony.
Post-colonial legal geographies intersect productively with an emergent global War on Terror discourse, by embedding local cases within a powerful and growing narrative of international concern for security, translating “peace and harmony” into public order. This article traces translations of public order in three distinct but interlocking arena within which the legal circulates: the impact of British colonial legal frameworks on post-colonial legal decision making; the transnational practice of cross-jurisdictional citation and transjudicial communication; the effects of the international war on terror on internal security arrangements. Seeking the making of increasingly global notions of public order in domestic courts in Malaysia and Pakistan, it places common law practices and institutions in the context of a series of networked internationalisms underwritten by the colonial legacies of the British Indian empire, practices and institutions which are now implicated in new international networks undergirded by the security concerns of the United States. From the vantage point of these Muslim majority allies in the War on Terror, this article builds upon recent efforts to reconsider empire and law as key factors in the study of international history and international relations, making visible a series of interlinked domestic, transnational and global spaces in which agents, institutions and ideas travel, conditioned by both imperial and international logics. It finds that what the colonial legacy of British law made possible – legal logics in which religious freedom is understood through the calculus of internal security – the war on terror has made far more likely.
Much recent research has focused on examining various binary contradictions and employing metaphors pertaining to border security. Ultimately, this article argues that existing debates and metaphors are inadequate in describing what is understood and agreed upon in the literature in terms of borders. This article proposes a refinement of existing theory for contemporary borders, employing Baudrillard's concept of 'simulation'. The metaphor of the 'simulated border' functions to avoid debates surrounding geospatiality while also incorporating aspects of risk society and control in concluding that borders are anything but organic security environments, with the 'stretched screens' of border agents serving to produce dividuals that are tested within games of security to govern mobility anywhere in time or space.
New regimes of labor and mobility control are taking shape across the global north in a militarized form that mimics South Africa’s history of apartheid. Apartheid was a South African system of influx and labor control that attempted to manage the “threat” posed by black people by incarcerating them in zones of containment while also enabling the control and policed exploitation of black people as workers, on which the country was dependent. The paper argues, first, that the rise of a system of global apartheid has created a racialized world order and a hierarchical labor market dependent on differential access to mobility; second, that the expansion of systems of resource plunder primarily by agents of the global north into the global south renders localities in the global south unsustainable for ordinary life; and, third, that in response, the global north is massively investing in militarized border regimes to manage the northern movement of people from the global south. The paper argues that “global apartheid” might replace terms such as “transnationalism,” “multiculturalism,” and “cosmopolitanism” in order to name the structures of control that securitize the north and foster violence in the south, that gate the north and imprison the south, and that create a new militarized form of apartheid on a global level. © 2018 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
A pdf is available upon request to jmheyman@utep.edu . Lays out a fundamental groundwork for the study of the interplay of states and illegal practices. Rather than thinking of state legality and illegal practices as polar opposites, we approach them with an open inquiry as to their mutual constitution, interactions, and in some cases interpenetration. The role of illegal practices in capital accumulation is also considered.
In addition to a geopolitics of containment model of immigration policing at the Mexico-US border, US immigration-related statecraft has incorporated a geopolitics of engagement model in which spaces previously at arms reach from US immigration authorities and at some remove from the border have been aggressively brought into the purview of US immigration enforcement. These newly engaged spaces are at once local (i.e., US cities) and regional (i.e., Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean Basin). This shift has in large part been a response to the tension between trade and security at the border, and thus allows us to see differently how statecraft is being multiplied, reactivated and transformed at and away from the border in light of the war on terrorism and its complex relationship with economic globalisation and the neoliberalisation of the Mexico-US border region.
Studies of identity politics have often overlooked the role of bourgeois law in eliciting and confirming people's experience of themselves as persons with inherent qualities that they have a right to express. By constituting people as proprietors of their persons and capacities, bourgeois law requires those who come before it to display difference. Yet bourgeois law disclaims its role in producing difference, for by declaring all men equal before the law, in constitutes differences as developed outside its purview. Although the cultural logic of bourgeois law encourages people to imagine themselves as unique persons with rights, people achieve rights only through specific historical struggles.
The violence and economic devastation of the 1980-1992 civil war in El Salvador drove as many as one million Salvadorans to enter the United States, frequently without authorization. In Nations of Emigrants, the legal anthropologist Susan Bibler Coutin analyzes the case of emigration from El Salvador to the United States to consider how current forms of migration challenge conventional understandings of borders, citizenship, and migration itself. Interviews with policymakers and activists in El Salvador and the United States are juxtaposed with Salvadoran emigrants' accounts of their journeys to the United States, their lives in this country, and, in some cases, their removal to El Salvador. These interviews and accounts illustrate the dilemmas that migration creates for nation-states as well as the difficulties for individuals who must live simultaneously within and outside the legal systems of two countries. During the 1980s, U.S. officials generally regarded these migrants as economic immigrants who deserved to be deported, rather than as political refugees who merited asylum. By the 1990s, these Salvadorans were made eligible for legal permanent residency, at least in part due to the lives that they had created in the United States. Remarkably, this redefinition occurred during a period when more restrictive immigration policies were being adopted by the U.S. government. At the same time, Salvadorans in the United States, who send relatives more than $3 billion in remittances annually, have become a focus of policymaking in El Salvador and are considered key to its future.
List of Figures and Illustrations xi List of Tables xiii Acknowledgments xv Note on Language and Terminology xix Introduction Illegal Aliens: A Problem of Law and History 1 PART I: THE REGIME OF QUOTAS AND PAPERS 15 One The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the Reconstruction of Race in Immigration Law 21 Two Deportation Policy and the Making and Unmaking of Illegal Aliens 56 PART II: MIGRANTS AT THE MARGINS OF LAW AND NATION 91 Three From Colonial Subject to Undesirable Alien: Filipino Migration in the Invisible Empire 96 Four Braceros, "Wetbacks," and the National Boundaries of Class 127 PART III: WAR, NATIONALISM, AND ALIEN CITIZENSHIP 167 Five The World War II Internment of Japanese Americans and the Citizenship Renunciation Cases 175 Six The Cold War Chinese Immigration Crisis and the Confession Cases 202 PART IV: PLURALISM AND NATIONALISM IN POST-WORLD WAR II IMMIGRATION REFORM 225 Seven The Liberal Critique and Reform of Immigration Policy 227 Epilogue 265 Appendix 271 Notes 275 Archival and Other Primary Sources 357 Index 369
In July 1999, Canadian authorities intercepted four boats off the coast of British Columbia carrying nearly six hundred Chinese citizens who were being smuggled into Canada. Government officials held the migrants on a Canadian naval base, which it designated a port of entry. As one official later recounted to the author, the Chinese migrants entered a legal limbo, treated as though they were walking through a long tunnel of bureaucracy to reach Canadian soil. The “long tunnel thesis” is the basis of Alison Mountz’s wide-ranging investigation into the power of states to change the relationship between geography and law as they negotiate border crossings. Mountz draws from many sources to argue that refugee-receiving states capitalize on crises generated by high-profile human smuggling events to implement restrictive measures designed to regulate migration. Whether states view themselves as powerful actors who can successfully exclude outsiders or as vulnerable actors in need of stronger policies to repel potential threats, they end up subverting access to human rights, altering laws, and extending power beyond their own borders. Using examples from Canada, Australia, and the United States, Mountz demonstrates the centrality of space and place in efforts to control the fate of unwanted migrants.
Through an exploration of relevant legislation and court cases, this article discusses the contemporary constitution of neoliberal subjects via the devolution of select immigration powers to state and local governments by the federal government of the United States. Since the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the federal government has had plenary power over immigration, which has enabled it to treat “people as immigrants” (or as “nonpersons” falling outside of many Constitutional protections), simultaneously requiring that states and cities treat “immigrants as people” (or as persons protected by the Constitution). Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, the devolution of welfare policy and immigration policing powers has challenged the scalar constitution of personhood, as state and local governments have newfound powers to discriminate on the basis of alienage, or noncitizen status. In devolving responsibility for certain immigration-related policies to state and local governments, the federal government is participating in the rescaling of membership policy and, by extension, the rescaling of a defining characteristic of the nation-state. This recent rescaling is evidence of the contemporary neoliberalization of membership policy in the United States, and specifically highlights the legal (re)production of scale.
As a field, criminology has paid insufficient attention to societal processes that obscure the distinction between legality and illegality, decriminalize formerly objectionable behavior or redefine law-breakers as deserving members of society. An analysis of undocumented immigrants’ efforts to redefine themselves as legal residents highlights ways that the category of the criminal is rendered unstable, suggests that logics of social control create opportunities to challenge exclusion and shows how law and illegality are entangled. For instance, individuals who are deemed socially dangerous can argue that they are low risk, or can redefine risk, highlighting the social costs of situating offenders exclusively in a domain of illegitimacy. Through such arguments, the licit can seep into and reconstitute the illegal, and vice versa
Latina immigrant women who work as nannies or housekeepers and reside in Los Angeles while their children remain in their countries of origin constitute one variation in the organizational arrangements of motherhood. The authors call this arrangement “transnational motherhood.” On the basis of a survey, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic materials gathered in Los Angeles, they examine how Latina immigrant domestic workers transform the meanings of motherhood to accommodate these spatial and temporal separations. The article examines the emergent meanings of motherhood and alternative child-rearing arrangements. It also discusses how the women view motherhood in relation to their employment, as well as their strategies for selectively developing emotional ties with their employers' children and for creating new rhetorics of mothering standards on the basis of what they view in their employers' homes.
This article strives to meet two challenges. As a review, it provides a critical discussion of the scholarship concerning undocumented migration, with a special emphasis on ethnographically informed works that foreground significant aspects of the everyday life of undocumented migrants. But another key concern here is to formulate more precisely the theoretical status of migrant "illegality" and deportability in order that further research related to undocumented migration may be conceptualized more rigorously. This review considers the study of migrant "illegality" as an epistemological, methodological, and political problem, in order to then formulate it as a theoretical problem. The article argues that it is insufficient to examine the "illegality" of undocumented migration only in terms of its consequences and that it is necessary also to produce historically informed accounts of the sociopolitical processes of "illegalization" themselves, which can be characterized as the legal production of migrant "illegality.".
Scholars' and policy-makers' interest in the remittances that migrants send home to relatives has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Focusing on remittances from the United States to El Salvador, we examine how academic studies, public discourse, and state accounting practices simultaneously produce and reveal the nature of this phenomenon. By treating the money that migrants send home as both national resource and foreign currency, central banks and international financial institutions define remittances as a ‘cost-free' source of national income. Further, debates about remittances' social and economic impact focus on whether remitting promotes or undermines particular values associated with neoliberalism, such as self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship and empowerment. Our analysis thus sheds light on new configurations through which money, states and migrant citizens are linked.
Compared with refugee or immigration policy, the historical and political analysis of deportation is poorly developed. This paper suggests some lines along which critical studies of deportation might proceed. First, it argues that we can historicize and denaturalize deportation by setting it within a wider field of political and administrative practices. This is done by comparing modern deportation practice with other historical forms of expulsion. Second, the paper interrogates the forms of governmentality which invest the practice of deportation, and asks what they might tell us about modern citizenship. It argues that deportation can be seen as one key element in the international police of aliens.
The matrículas consulares are identity cards issued by the Mexican government to its nationals living abroad. Since 9/11, businesses, local, and state governments in the US have started accepting them as a valid form of identification for undocumented immigrants living in their communities, who otherwise do not have any form of acceptable identification. In this article, I first outline the history and context of federal jurisdiction over immigration and naturalisation policy in the United States, and then expand upon the case study of the consular ID cards. I argue that the increasing acceptance of the matrículas consulares provides an example of how, in confronting the local impacts of undocumented migration, communities are formulating both “foreign policy” (as immigration policy is considered as foreign policy in the United States), as well as “citizenship policy,” at the local scale. I conclude by taking the analysis one step further and arguing that this partial rescaling of membership policy enables the nation-state to better manage what political theorist, James Hollifield, calls the “liberal paradox,” or the growing tension between neoliberal economic openness and the continued necessity of national political closure.
The principal focus of this paper is on interdiction at sea, in the Caribbean, by the United States. It is directed against one particular group of boat people — Haitians. There will, however, be some brief references to related United States programs and to US interdiction of non-Haitians.
Haitian asylum seekers began arriving in the United States by boat as early as 1963. The numbers started becoming significant in the 1970s and surged dramatically in 1980 and 1981. The Haitians were fleeing persecution, poverty, and in some cases both. In response to the influx, in 1981 President Reagan entered into an agreement with the Haitian government.
This paper will discuss the asserted justifications for interdiction, the resulting policy and legal problems, and the consequences of combining interdiction with related non-entrée policies, such as detention, expedited removal, and other practices. It will suggest that the combination of measures is more lethal than the sum of its parts, sometimes leaving refugees with no acceptable options. If interdiction must be used, it will be argued, adequate provision for full and fair refugee status determinations is critical.
This contribution to a memorial symposium in honor of Kim Barry confronts the political rights of non-resident citizens. It first describes the trend towards extending to and facilitating the exercise of the franchise by external citizens. An increasing number of states permit non-residents to vote, in many cases without requiring return to the homeland. The trend requires a changed conception of citizenship and nationhood, as political membership decouples from territorial location. The essay addresses objections to non-resident voting rights, including those based on assumptions that non-residents will be irresponsible and uninformed voters, that they will form unpredictable and destabilizing voting blocs, and that non-resident voting will impose unsustainable logistical costs. None of these objections carry enough weight, empirically or normatively, to deny the franchise to non-resident citizens, voting rights validated by the increasing degree to which non-residents can access information and maintain significant interests in their home states. Nevertheless, voting rights need not be extended on a one-person, one-vote basis. In certain circumstances - in particular, cases in which the home state sets a low bar for non-resident citizenship and where the non-resident citizen population is large relative to the resident population - it may be justifiable to accord lower proportional voting power to non-residents, at least where their interests are discretely represented in national legislatures. In other words, once the concepts of nationhood and full citizenship are no longer bounded by geography, it may be normatively acceptable to derogate from the creed of formal equality between citizens and within the nation. The increasingly prominent practice of non-resident voting, the piece concludes, thus presents a formidable challenge to political liberalism.
In this Article, I explore the origins and consequences of the blurred boundaries between immigration control, crime control and national security, specifically as related to the removal of non-citizens. Part II of this Article focuses on the question of how immigration control and crime control issues have come to be subsumed by national security rhetoric. Discussions about the removal of non-citizens have been treated as national security issues, when in fact the driving motivation is basic criminal law enforcement. Part III of this Article disentangles the use of removal for criminal and immigration law enforcement ends from national security removals. Non-citizens are seldom removed on national security grounds. At the same time, the government has relied upon national security justifications to explain the removals of thousands of non-citizens who pose no demonstrated security risk. This strategy does little to enhance national security, and undermines the important national security objective of protecting civil liberties. Part IV of this Article explains that although the vast majority of removals effectuated each year are carried out on the basis of a non-citizen's violation of the immigration law or criminal law, there is little reason to believe that the recent expansion in the removal of non-citizens will serve as an effective or efficient means of decreasing domestic crime or preventing undocumented migration. The insistence on formulating immigration policy while gazing through a distorted lens of national security perversely ensures that the law is ill-suited to achieve either national security or other immigration policy goals.
Immigration reform may reasonably be characterized as the most significant labor reform in a generation. This Essay considers the shape of labor and employment law after congressional enactment of comprehensive immigration reform. For this purpose, the Essay assumes that Congress does in fact enact a legalization program that permits many, but not all, undocumented immigrants to participate; that expands temporary worker programs; and that mandates intensified immigration enforcement at the border, in the criminal justice system, in communities, and especially in the workplace. This exercise is important for at least two reasons. First, it may illuminate, from a labor perspective, some of the shortcomings of the leading immigration reform proposals. An unintended benefit of the failure of immigration reform in 2006 and 2007 is the opportunity for the labor movement to find its voice and correct these deficiencies by introducing important pro-worker improvements in whatever legislation is ultimately enacted. Second, regardless of the details of the final package, low-wage workers and their advocates have an interest in imagining the world we will one day inhabit, so as to prepare to seize new opportunities to promote labor organizing, and to address new dangers that may arise.
In Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB (2004), the Supreme Court addressed the scope of remedies available to undocumented workers under the National Labor Relations Act, and by implication, under other labor and employment laws. It was only the second Supreme Court decision ever to examine the status of undocumented workers under any labor or employment statute. Behind debates about the labor rights of immigrants and limits on employer exploitation of immigrant workers lie enduring arguments regarding the significance of international borders and the meaning of membership in the national community, the power of the government to deputize private employers as enforcers of public immigration policies, and struggles between labor and management over control of the workplace. Part I of this paper examines labor and employment rules as applied to immigrants and their employers, and as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Hoffman Plastic and by other courts and executive branch agencies. Part II identifies and analyzes a set of emerging issues of particular importance to immigrant workers in the United States, including those prompted by the recent Hoffman Plastic decision.
Federal law enforcement agencies responded to the attacks of September 11, 2001, with forceful initiatives directed at noncitizens and their communities. In the years since the September 11 attacks, some of these initiatives have waned, but one that may come to rank among the most dangerous and enduring has seemingly gathered steam: the effort to enlist state and local police in the routine enforcement of federal immigration laws. Over the past century, individual police departments have occasionally participated in federal immigration enforcement, but the strategy rapidly became central to the federal government's post September 11 "war on terror" in a series of law enforcement initiatives.Together, these initiatives mark a sea change in the traditional understanding that federal immigration laws are enforced exclusively by federal agents, with local policing priorities set principally by local officials. The federal effort to enlist, or even conscript, state and local police in routine immigration enforcement has also prompted numerous policy criticisms. This Article first considers the validity and implications of the administration's determination that state and local police possess the "inherent authority" under federal law to make immigration arrests. Part II examines the lawfulness of a chief FBI method adopted to encourage such arrests, namely the use of its NCIC database to disseminate immigration status information to state and local police. Part III analyzes some of the implications of state and local immigration enforcement for racial profiling and selective enforcement.
Contributing to the growing literature on globalization and migration, this article identifies the new phenomenon of the shifting border of immigration regulation, which has turned the U.S. border into a moving barrier - a legal construct no longer affixed to territorial benchmarks. Charting the logic of this new cartography (or legal reconstruction) of the border in the context of immigration regulation, I consider several vivid illustrations of the emerging shifting-border concept. These include the procedure of expedited removal, pre-inspection, interdiction, 'smart' borders, and excision zones. These new measures significantly redraw the line of inclusion and exclusion, blurring the once-firm distinction between the protected citizen and less-welcomed alien. Indeed, we increasingly witness how border control requirements, initially designed to apply only to members of other nations, are traveling ever faster towards a new role of challenging long-accepted norms concerning U.S. citizens as well. Whereas post-nationalists and others have predicted the retreat of the regulatory state's control over immigration, the domestic and comparative examples discussed here demonstrate how border controls are being retooled and redesigned by nation-states to reassert control over their so-called 'broken' borders in the age of increased international mobility and security risks.
Deportations of long-term U.S. residents to El Salvador and roots trips that Swedish transnational adoptees make to their countries of birth attempt to reconnect individuals to their origins. As they (re)connect, however, such journeys dismantle, reconfiguring the original departure—emigration or adoption—in ways that can destabilize current, future, and past selves and the national and familial belongings in which these selves are embedded. By examining the paths and disjunctures that journeys “back” entail, we consider the significance of “return” for the production of legal knowledge.
Insecurity and fear in the global North produce political space to advance security measures, including the externalization of asylum. States in the global North make it increasingly difficult for asylum seekers to reach sovereign territory where they might make a refugee claim. While legal protection remains intact under the Refugee Convention, extra-legal measures employ geography to restrict access to asylum and keep claimants at bay through a variety of tactics. This article probes the ways in which fear of uninvited asylum seekers is securitized and looks at the tactics utilized to keep them at bay, far from the borders of states that are signatories to the UN Refugee Convention. Drawing on research in Europe and Australia, we demonstrate how states are promoting ‘protection in regions of origin’ through practices of de facto neo-refoulement. Neo-refoulement refers to a geographically based strategy of preventing asylum by restricting access to territories that, in principle, provide protection to refugees.
This essay examines the legitimation work of globalization by bringing into dialogue the authors' research on immigration, finance, and intercountryadoption. It is concerned with the practices that produce, define, and preclude both movement and connection, such as “naturalizing” some border crossings while criminalizing others; denying the histories and policies that allow some parents to “choose” babies while others must abandon them; and challenging the practices through which small states tweak transnational financial systems while allowing multinational corporations privileges denied small states. Legitimation work (re)configures jurisdictionality, transparency, and sovereignty–the constructs on which debates over globalization's consequences hinge. Examining how these constructs order, include, and exclude persons, goods, and practices sheds light on the boundaries, slippages, and connections between the legitimate and the illegitimate within global processes.
"Michael Welch offers not just a comprehensive review of the devastating impact of U.S. anti-immigrant laws and policies since 1996, but a compelling explanation for how a nation of immigrants could adopt an 'us versus them' attitude toward newcomers. This book should be required reading for policy makers and citizens concerned about our nation's just treatment of immigrants." ââ¬âDonald Kerwin, Executive Director, Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. In 1996, Congress passed expansive laws to control illegal immigration, imposing mandatory detention and deportation for even minor violations. Critics argued that such legislation violated civil liberties and human rights; correspondingly, in 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that many facets of the 1996 statutes were unconstitutional. Michael Welch shows how what he calls "moral panic" led to the passage of the 1996 laws and the adverse effects they have had on the Immigration and Naturalization Service, producing a booming detainee population and an array of human rights violations. Detained: Immigration Laws and the Expanding I.N.S. Jail Complex offers sensible recommendations for reform along with an enlightened understanding of immigration. In an epilogue, Welch examines closely the government's campaign to fight terrorism at home, especially the use of racial profiling, mass detention, and secret evidence. Recently, the INS, particularly its enforcement and detention operations have expanded dramatically. This book will offer many readers their first look inside that system. It will be an invaluable guide to thinking through whether the system is fit to take on the additional responsibilities being asked of it in the post-September 11th world. "This is a timely and striking study. Michael Welch shows the ugliness of the formidable powers given to the INS ('Expedited Removal,' 'Indefinite Detention'): asylum seekers criminalized; refugees stigmatized and illegal immigrants warehoused ( 20,000 in 2001, many in local jails and detention centers run for corporate profit). Detained demands an audience well beyond its subject and geographical borders." ââ¬âStanley Cohen, Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics "Welch shows in riveting detail how American immigration law and policy have increasingly relied on incarceration, locking up thousands of immigrants not because they pose any real danger, but as a collective expression of moral panic and hostility toward perceived outsiders. In the wake of September 11, as government officials exploit immigration law for criminal law ends, Welch's cogent analysis could not be more timely and important. This is critical reading for anyone concerned with how this nation of immigrants treats immigrants in the years to come." ââ¬âDavid Cole, professor, Georgetown University Law Center, and legal affairs correspondent, The Nation "A well written and timely analysis of INS detention policies and the controversies surrounding them. The hallmark of Welch's work, both here and in his previous publications, is the care he takes in presenting controversial issues....Welch has written a fine book that provides a framework for understanding the extraordinary tradeoffs between security and civil liberties." ââ¬âMichael Hamm, Indiana State University and author of The Abandoned Ones: The Imprisonment and Uprising of the Mariel Boat People In 1996, Congress passed expansive laws to control illegal immigration, imposing mandatory detention and deportation for even minor violations. Welch argues that "moral panic" led to the passage of the 1996 laws, and that the laws have had adverse effects on the Immigration and Naturalization Service, producing a booming detainee population and an array of human rights violations. ââ¬âLaw and Social Inquiry, Book Notes
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1990.
From the Author's Introduction: We live in a time of unusual vigor, efficiency, and strictness in the deportation of long-term permanent resident aliens convicted of crimes. This situation is the result of some fifteen years of relatively sustained attention to this issue, which culminated in two exceptionally harsh laws: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA). In many cases, these laws have brought about a rather complete convergence between the criminal justice and deportation systems. Deportation is now often a virtually automatic consequence of criminal conviction. This convergence, and the harshness of these laws - their retroactivity, their use of mandatory detention, the automatic and often disproportionate nature of the deportation sanction, and the lack of statues of limitation - raise two related questions: First, why are we doing this? Second, what could be the consequences of this approach for the constitutional legitimacy of deportation proceedings?
The proliferation of state and local regulation designed to control immigrant movement has generated media attention and high-profile lawsuits in the last year. Proponents and opponents of these measures share one basic assumption with deep roots in constitutional doctrine and practice - immigration control is the exclusive responsibility of the federal government. As a result, assessments of this important trend have failed to explain why state and local measures are arising in large numbers, and why the uniformity both sides seek is neither achievable nor desirable.I argue that is time to come to a modus vivendi regarding participation by all levels of government in the management of migration. To do so, I provide a functional account of sub-federal immigration regulation and demonstrate how the federal-state-local dynamic operates as an integrated system to manage contemporary immigration. The primary function states and localities play is to integrate immigrants into the body politic and thus to bring the country to terms with demographic change. This process cannot be managed by a single sovereign, and it sometimes depends on states and localities adopting positions in tension with federal policy.Given these dynamics, I offer a reformulation of existing federalism presumptions. These will not be primarily for application by courts, though courts should abandon constitutional or strong field and obstacle preemption theories in immigration cases. Instead, I offer a framework for federal and state lawmakers intended to restrain their impulses to preempt legislation by lower levels of government, and to create incentives for cooperative ventures in immigration regulation.Counterintuitively, the changes wrought by globalization demand strong institutions beneath the national level. Immigration highlights this convergence of the transnational and the local. Only by assimilating our understandings of immigration federalism to this realization can we explain and harness the value of state and local regulation.
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Legalizing moves: Salvadoran immigrants' struggle for U.S. Resi-dency
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Coutin, S. B. (2000). Legalizing moves: Salvadoran immigrants' struggle for U.S. Resi-dency. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Border games: Policing the USeMexico divide Undocumented migration to the United States: IRCA and the experience of the 1980s On crimes and punishments The citizen and the alien: Dilemmas of contemporary membership
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Born in the shadows: The uncertain futures of the children of unauthorized Mexican migrants. Unpublished dissertation
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Gonzales, R. G. (2008). Born in the shadows: The uncertain futures of the children of unauthorized Mexican migrants. Unpublished dissertation. Irvine: Department of Sociology, University of California.
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Paper presented at the conference, “Immigrants’ Rights: From Global to Local
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Una comunidad desgarrada por la migra
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