To lose one’s home in the world: The injustice of immigrant detention

Abstract

Forced outside of the system of modern nation-states into a regime of detention and deportation, immigrant detainees suffer an injustice that is not easily or adequately captured by the familiar vocabulary offered by contemporary liberalism. In this article, I propose an alternative strategy for articulating the kinds of injustice that these individuals suffer. I argue that the idea of metaphysical homelessness—a notion that I recover through a reading of the work of Martin Heidegger—offers a useful theoretical lens with which to identify the kinds of harms perpetrated against immigrant detainees. Purged from the polis and shuttled instead into the realm of police, they are deprived of a home in the world. This strategy is deployed as part of what I call a politics of crisis containment, a kind of politics that ensues when states find themselves confronted by troublesome individuals whose presence is deemed a threat to the existence of the community.