Arresting Movement: The Political Economy of Immigration Detention

• In Event: Immigrant Detention and Deportation

Abstract

Immigration detention is a central component of global efforts to curb migration, defined by its purpose of depriving people of their freedom to move due to their immigration status. Today, it is an almost ubiquitous global phenomenon. It exists in the desert of the Sahel, airports in Korea and in the border regions of the European Union. Equally ubiquitous are the human rights violations that occur in immigration detention. From forced sterilizations and other forms of reproductive injustice in the United States to immigrant detainees setting themselves on fire in Australian immigration detention sites - immigration detention has been marked by its punitive nature. The British immigration detention facility Yarl’s Wood for example has seen repeated hunger strikes and protests against inadequate health care, inhumane living conditions and lack of psychological support and access to clothing. In 2019, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture reported on the excessive use of force in the German immigration detention site Eichstätt. To explain why immigration detention is so punitive, this paper looks at the relationship between immigration detention and criminal justice and seeks to further theorize their entanglement. I argue that immigration detention and prisons exist in a co-constitutive relationship where the practices and policies in one do not only inform the other, but where they originated as the same system and came to be treated as two separate institutions after the end of the Second World War with the emergence of refugee camps in Europe.

Three sets of scholarship inform my argument. One is the literature on the welfare state which discusses how the welfare regimes shape countries’ responses to global liberalization. This argument has been taken up in comparative penal studies where scholars have found that the structure of the welfare regime shapes levels of punitiveness in a country. In some countries prisons have come to replace the welfare state while others exhibit more emphasis on reintegration based on the structure of the welfare system and the labor market. Secondly, I draw on the literature on the racialized construction of deservingness and delinquency to understand how threats to national and personal security are constructed. I suggest that what can help us see the co-constitutive nature between prisons and immigration detention is an emphasis on how notions of delinquency, deservingness and threats to national and personal security have been racialized and shape the treatment of racialized minorities by the state. Much prominent scholarship has explored the existence of racism in the criminal justice system, while research into the role of racism in migration control has only recently emerged as a budding research field. Finally, I draw on and complement the crimmigration literature which looks at the criminalization of migrants and how police and the penal system are used to control migrants. But while this research has made important headways in recognizing how there is significant overlap between the regular penal system and migration control, it largely still operates under the assumption that a two-tiered institutionalized penal system emerged - one for citizens and one for migrants. It thus views citizenship as guaranteeing access to a more humane prison system which, as shown by the global Black Lives Matter movement, does not correspond with reality. I instead draw on scholarship on the history of prisons which were used to control the movement vagrants and the rural poor as well as the use of practices like transportation and indenture to reveal how the control of mobility is a central element of the history of prisons and thus viewing immigration detention as separate from the prison system hides these important historical connections.

In doing so I push beyond existing scholarship on migration control which explains the existence of migration control measures like border controls, detention and deportations by looking at how private corporations, humanitarian actors and governments cooperate to curtail the movement of people and how they benefit financially and/or politically. There are empirical limitations to this emphasis on private actors. Several countries that do not use private corporations in immigration detention or are adopting a mixed approach have also turned towards more punitive policies and practices. This scholarship also views migration control as outside of the normal functions of the state and as a recent innovation that began to be used in earnest only in the 1980s. I instead propose examining immigration detention through its entanglement with the prison system and as a central element of the state’s carceral apparatus.

Author

• Sabrina Diana Axster, Johns Hopkins University