Noncitizen Detention: Spatial Strategies of Migrant Precarity in US Immigration and Border Control

Abstract

(2015) 'Noncitizen detention : spatial strategies of migrant precarity in US immigration and border control.', Annales de geographie., 702-703 (2/3). pp. 231-247. Further information on publisher's website:http://www.revues.armand-colin.com/geographie-economie/annales-geographie/annales-geographie-ndeg-702-703-2-32015-geographie-lenfermement/retention-non-citoyens-strategies-spatiales Publisher's copyright statement:Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Abstract:The United States Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)operates the largest confinement system in the country, no small accomplishment in the world's largest prison system. This article analyzes the US immigration detention system as a series of spatial strategies through which state officials seek to manage and redirect transboundary migration. I argue that while detention works to confine, segregate, and categorize migrant bodies, detention is also a performance of state power. As such, it produces effects beyond deportation. The article will first outline how immigration detention both relies upon and extends the US criminal justice system to open up spaces of arbitrary administrative discretion. I then draw on my research on noncitizen detention and visitation programs to demonstrate how detention is more than a fixing of bodies in space; it is a process of isolation, criminalization, and marginalization. I argue that detention cannot be subsumed under or explained 2 by deportation, and that it plays a key role in the production of migrant precarity in current US immigration and border control.

Polymorphic borders

“…In the United States, scholars have analysed the intermingling of criminal justice and immigration policing (Coleman, 2007;Martin, 2015); interior immigration enforcement resulting in detention and deportation (Coleman, 2009;Hiemstra, 2013;Mountz, Coddington, Catania, & Loyd, 2013); devolution of immigration inspections to local agencies (Varsanyi, Lewis, Provine, & Decker, 2012) and risk-based profiling and financial surveillance (Amoore, 2013;De Goede, 2012). In the European Union, migration and border policies have produced complex spatial dynamics: the bounding of Europe's Schengen Area (Prokkola, 2013;van Houtum, 2010); simultaneous freeing of internal mobility for EU citizens and 'hardening' of external boundaries (Huysmans, 2000;Vaughan-Williams, 2008); the harmonization of border and immigration controls as a condition of EU admission; Good Neighbor Agreements with non-EU members tying aid to immigration and border policing requirements (Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias, & Pickles, 2013); and the expansion of long-term detention as a mobility control practice (Gill, 2009;Schuster, 2005).…”

Conveyor-Belt Justice: Precarity, Access to Justice, and Uneven Geographies of Legal Aid in UK Asylum Appeals

“…Precarity has pernicious effects. Harald Bauder (:100) argues that a precarious status keeps people from making connections and becoming stakeholders in communities by excluding them from participating in public and civic life (see also Martin ). Social and legal precarity sentences people to uncertain futures and the vicissitudes of fortune.…”

“…These three elements provide new ways to understand the spatial nature of precarity. As Martin (:244) explored in her study of immigration detention in the US, certain practices produce precarity and “exploit life's precariousness ” by making life effectively unliveable. We assert that these practices have a spatiality, and that the three frames we identify help to unpack that spatiality by providing new lenses onto how refused asylum seekers are differentially exposed (Ettlinger ; Harker ).…”

“…However, we do not propose that these can only be applied to the context of asylum law. Rather we intend to open a discussion about the spatial nature of precarity in legal and social contexts more broadly, and identify how precarity embeds within specific places and at particular times or life stages, beyond that of forced or unfree labour, in reducing access to life‐affirming resources (Casas‐Cortes ; Martin ; Vasudevan ).…”

“…Recent work by geographers has highlighted the potential of a spatial approach to precarity (Lewis et al ; Martin ; Waite ). Within this paper we provide a socio‐spatial and socio‐legal conceptual framing of precarity that moves beyond a primarily labour‐based analysis, thereby contributing to the momentum of recent scholarship on the spatialisation of precarity, not only in relation to asylum migration, but also in legal and social contexts more broadly.…”