The Punishment Marketplace: Local Immigration Enforcement as Entrepreneurship

• In Event: Immigration and Justice

Abstract

Neoliberal economics play a significant role in American social organization and policy-making, imposing market logics into the provision of public goods and services and driving the valorization of free market ideology in cultural life. This neoliberal ‘project of inequality’ is upheld by an authoritarian system of punishment built around mass incarceration, surveillance, and other forms of social control directed at the lowest strata of American society – a group that includes unauthorized immigrants.

This work lays out the theory of the punishment marketplace: a conceptualization of how American systems of punishment both enable the neoliberal project of inequality, and are themselves subject to market colonization. The theory describes the rescaling of authority from an increasingly weak federal government to local centers of political power. The punishment marketplace defines criminal justice policy activism by local governments as punishment entrepreneurship: an accumulative approach to securing fiscal gain, political hegemony, security, and capitalized power through systems of punishment. Local immigration enforcement entrepreneurship is a manifestation of punishment entrepreneurship with unauthorized and other deportable immigrants as its object. I argue that this punitive immigration control reinforces America’s racially-structured social relations by obscuring the diminishing returns that globalization provides working class whites.

Author

• Daniel Lee Stageman, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY