Carceral Immigration Reforms and the Joint Project of Abolition

Abstract

Carceral Immigration Reforms and the Joint Project of Abolition Marlene Nava Ramos (bio) Alexandra Délano Alonso’s From Here and There: Diaspora Policies, Integration, and Social Rights Beyond Borders, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018 Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz’s Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018 Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz’s Boats, Borders, and Bases and Alexandra Délano Alonso’s From Here and There, two of the most recently published works on the topic of U.S. immigration, build on the now extensive interdisciplinary literature that oscillates between the exclusion of immigrants, on the one hand, and forms of political power and integration, on the other. While they remain within their respective sides of the field, these manuscripts are timely and push the literature empirically and theoretically. Furthermore, these works pair well in order to help readers theorize on the synergism of oppositional forces—“exclusion” versus “inclusion”—affecting U.S. immigrants. In doing so, these works can also guide critical discussions on calls to come “together”—this issue’s theme—within the context of mass mobilizations and efforts toward carceral reforms. In their work, Loyd and Mountz ask: How did the largest migrant detention system in the world come about? And now that we are here, Alonso asks: What kinds of counterstrategies exist to support immigrants’ political and economic participation and power? Loyd and Mountz, two geographers with distinct theoretical training, write a metanarrative on the birth and expansion of “migration detention” across onshore and offshore U.S. territories. As in her previous work, Seeking Asylum, Mountz uses Giorgio Agamben’s philosophies of exceptionalism to study remote, offshore, militarized landscapes, adding to Loyd’s perspective on the political economy of prison towns and military bases across the contiguous U.S. and its territories. Lloyd plumbs the archives to understand the broader politics and economies of prison towns holding [End Page 127] federal immigrant detainees in Oakdale, Louisiana, Pinal County, Arizona (Florence and Eloy), and Batavia, New York, challenging the narrative of migrant detention sites as spatially isolated. These chapters are then connected by Mountz’s expertise on the use of military bases in remote places such as Guantánamo as well as in the contiguous U.S. (Fort Chaffee, Arkansas) in order to show the plethora and expansion of confinement sites since the late 1970s. Loyd and Mountz ambitiously unify these case studies under a clever three-part chronology: the federal government’s contested but definitive introduction of detention practices as an immigration deterrence strategy in the aftermath of the 1980 Mariel boatlift crisis; the systematic building of prisons throughout the 1980s on military bases and in towns eager to host new facilities; and, finally, the expansion of detention into the “world’s largest system”—an accurate proclamation by California prison administrators about California’s corrections system (Gilmore 1999; 2007) that also rings true for the federal government’s own carceral system. Their research provides a much needed alternative perspective in the literature about immigration enforcement, which has tended to date the rise of comprehensive enforcement practices to the aftermath of the 1996 anti-immigrant laws and/or post-9/11 responses—these are important moments that expand the breadth and scope of state practices. Loyd and Mountz, however, trace the roots of this phenomenon to the country’s prison boom in the aftermath of the Cold War and the shift between what Loyd’s academic mentor Ruth Wilson Gilmore (1999) calls Keynesian militarism and post-Keynesian militarism. Loyd and Mountz’s joint research maps an extensive onshore and offshore carceral archipelago which should be examined, they argue, from the critical perspective of Cold War refugees and the Caribbean region, challenging the nearly exclusive focus on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Boats, Borders, Bases is a must-read in immigration courses. The authors’ ambitious geographic-temporal scope and sophisticated theoretical tools for studying onshore and offshore confinement will need to be contextualized for undergraduate readers to avoid a misreading of temporal and theoretical linkages as undifferentiated forms of confinement. Offshore and onshore confinement, while connected as...