Negotiating the Administrative Disappearing of Crisis in the US Deportation State, 1914-1920

• In Event: 40420 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 15: The Politics of Immigration 2

Abstract

What do state actors do when they lack the capacity to implement the law? The concept of “administrative disappearing” refers to how state actors manage crises of state incapacity not by making populations legible, but by mobilizing uncertainty and information gaps in a way that generates revenue (Lara-Millán 2022). But we know little about unsuccessful attempts at administrative disappearing. Addressing this gap, this paper traces state actors’ evolving responses to the inability to carry out deportations during and immediately following World War I. The Bureau of Immigration released people from detention first on an ad-hoc mix of immigration bond, immigration parole, and their own recognizance (which was not preferred by the Bureau), then on a work-release program (not preferred by detained people), and finally, through a Liberty Bond drive (a compromise between both parties). I argue that “the administrative disappearing of state crisis” is not a sleight of hand on the part of state actors, but a negotiation between state actors and the population posing the crisis. In addition to its contributions to the literature on knowledge production and statecraft, this research contributes to literature on penal supervision by highlighting its geopolitical influences; and literature on migrant incarceration by shifting focus from the figure of the “criminal alien” to that of the “enemy alien.”

Author

• Audrey Augenbraum, University of California-Berkeley