The Institutional Castling of the Immigration and Penal Spheres

• In Event: The Wellbeing of Immigrant Students, Parents, and Workers in the US

Abstract

       The United States has legal humanitarian obligations under international and domestic law to provide protection and aid to individuals seeking refuge from persecution. Yet, President Donald Trump’s overhaul the U.S. immigration system and dismantlement of legal pathways for migration suggest that humanitarianism is not an obligation rather a courtesy extended to those considered worthy and/or deemed a political benefit. In this chapter, I conduct a content analysis of presidential, congressional, and other immigration-related documents to assess how state and political interests, historically and contemporary, perpetuate settler colonial structures of racialized domination and exploitation, and employ biopolitical practices to regulate and control the flow of unauthorized and legal migration to the U.S. I argue that these structures have been maintained through institutional castling - the shifting prominence of state institutions in the lives of specific demographic groups (Sykes and Bailey 2020) – whereby deliberate changes to policy, legislation, administrative procedures, resource allocation, and judicial decisions are used to systemically exclude, marginalize, and subjugate certain migrant groups through punitive measures. The U.S. immigration and correctional systems have castled, institutionally, across generations. This institutional castling has shifted the immigration system from being a ‘protective’ or ‘integrative’ institution to one that is ‘punitive’ and ‘corrective’ via detention and deportation based on one’s legal status. For instance, the Carter administrations passage of the 1980 Refugee Act set precedent to provide protection and pathway for legal status has shifted under the Trump administration resulting in the detention and removal of all migrants regardless of their legal status. Thus, my findings draw attention to how the contemporary political attacks on immigration not only emulate historical political trends whereby humanitarianism has been co-opted and appropriated by state and political interests to commodify migration, but demonstrate how shifts in political power have played a crucial role in shaping (and reshaping) the functions of the U.S. immigration system from providing humanitarian protection and resources to a punitive institution that seeks to punish and expel. 

Author

• Vicente Celestino Mata, Jr., Cornell University
  Presenting Author