Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment

Detention, Deportation, and Border Control

Philip Kretsedemas, David C. Brotherton, Philip Kretsedemas, David C. Brotherton

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780231545891
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Immigration Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

The events of 2016 catapulted immigration policy to the forefront of public debate, and Donald Trump's administration has signaled a harsh turn in enforcement. Yet the deportation, detention, and border-control policies that North American and European countries have embraced are by no means new. In this book, sociologists David C. Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to reconsider the immigration policies of the Obama era and beyond in terms of a decades-long "age of punishment."

Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment takes a critical, interdisciplinary, and transnational look at current issues surrounding immigration in the U.S. and abroad. It examines key features of this age of punishment, connecting neoliberal governance, global labor markets, and the national obsession with securing borders to explain critical research and theory on immigration enforcement. Contributors document the continuities between presidential administrations and across countries from many perspectives, with chapters discussing Canada, Australia, France, the UK, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico in addition to the U.S. They offer macro-level analyses of deportations and border enforcement, analyses of national policy and jurisprudence, and ethnographic accounts of the daily life experience of the prison-to-deportation pipeline, the making of deportability, and post-deportation transitions for noncitizens. This book highlights new directions in critical immigration policy and enforcement and deportation studies with the aim of problematizing the age of punishment that currently reigns over borders and those who seek to cross them.

1. INTRODUCTION

Immigration Policy in an Age of Punishment

PHILIP KRETSEDEMAS, UMASS BOSTON

DAVID C. BROTHERTON, JOHN JAY COLLEGE, CUNY

Over the past several decades, the U.S. government has increased its immigration enforcement powers to unprecedented levels. Annual deportations exceeded historic highs in the early 1990s, when they climbed above forty thousand per year.1 But this was just the beginning of an escalation that has continued unabated to this day. U.S. deportations exceeded 300,000 per year by the end of the George W. Bush presidency and climbed even further—to over 400,000 per year—under the Obama administration.2 These statistics do not even account for border enforcement actions, which used to make up the lion’s share of U.S. immigration enforcement actions.3

The escalation of deportations has been matched by enforcement practices that have created a new class of criminalized noncitizens. The war on drugs, which used to be the focus of federal law enforcement, has been joined by what seems to be a new “war” on noncitizens. Over the past two decades, immigration-related offenses—mostly for legal status violations—have become a growing share of federal convictions. In recent years, prosecutions for immigration violations actually exceeded—and are now on par with—arrests for drug convictions.4 As a result, Latinos have overtaken non-Latino blacks as the largest segment of the federal prison population.5 And since the early 2000s, hundreds of state and local governments throughout the United States have enacted their own enforcement-oriented immigration laws and signed on to enforcement partnerships with the federal government.6

Although these trends can be explained in light of a policy history that is specific to the United States, they are not unique to the country by any means. The national obsession with controlling immigration and securing borders has become a global phenomenon. There are striking continuities running through complaints about unwanted Roma migrants in Slovenia, unwanted Turkish migrants in Greece, unwanted flows of West and Central African migrants in South Africa, and the tide of anti-immigrant sentiment that contributed to the UK’s Brexit vote as well as the electoral victory of Donald Trump in the United States.7

The title of this book offers one way of thinking about the scale of these transformations. The punitive public culture that has come to define immigration policy can be understood as the emblematic feature of an age, a zeitgeist of the times. The idea of an age of punishment suggests a transformation on a scale that is much broader than a punitive turn in immigration policy. Immigration laws have not just become tougher; there has been a paradigm shift in the workings of the global migration regime. In order to come to grips with this transformation, it is necessary to look beyond the social fact of mass deportations and consider the broader changes that help explain why mass deportations and massive spending on border control can be rendered legible as a reasonable response to the challenges posed by international migration and that highly political construction known as “border security.”

To begin with, the present-day migration regime is distinguished by its global scale. The migration flows of the current era are more fluid and circular than they were in the early twentieth century.8 They are shaped by social networks and economic forces that do not operate simply on a national or an international scale—in other words, being limited to interactions between a “sending” and a “receiving” nation.9 Moreover, the quotidian subject of the current migration regime is now the guest worker, not the permanent settler.

The United States, for example, is still admitting more international migrants than any other nation on earth, but the vast majority of these new entrants are now issued temporary visas.10 And although many other nation-states are still attached to the narrative that they are “nations of immigration,” permanent settlement is increasingly viewed as a long-term expense, contributing to the national fiscal deficit.11 It would appear that arguments about the impracticality of replacement migration as a solution to the growing fiscal burden of aging populations have given way to migration schemes that supplement the national economy through their productivity and temporality. As some scholars have observed, the ideal migrant for many Western industrialized nations is skilled, is in the prime of his or her life, has few attachments (i.e., is unmarried or has no children), and has plans to return home—or go elsewhere—before he or she reaches retirement age.12 One example of such a migrant is the legal resident who is deported for a minor criminal infraction and, on repatriation, loses the right to Social Security despite having paid into the system for years. Another example is the high-skilled guest worker who spends a decade or more shifting from one temporary visa to another, living under the constant threat of deportation (and leaving the country before this threat is realized). These examples illustrate how deportation can be used to police and shape the behaviors of an expendable noncitizen population. This situation, in which the “integration” of noncitizens is conditioned by their expendability and in which even the most “desirable” migrants are not spared from the hazards of legal precarity, also provides a good introduction into how neoliberal economic priorities have changed the way that immigration works today.

The neoliberal restructuring project was first implemented in the nations of the global North and was extended to developmentalist policies that have been applied to the nations of the global South.13 Among other things, this restructuring project has been concerned with shrinking social welfare expenditures, incorporating a business model of fiscal management into the public sector, and boosting supply-side growth strategies that reduce restrictions on the flow of investment capital and make labor markets more flexible and amenable to the needs of entrepreneurs.

One consequence of these transformations is that the costs and benefits of all things are assessed on an increasingly restricted time frame and according to how well individuals can adapt to their immediate circumstances. Welfare assistance becomes geared toward putting people immediately back to work—even if this means placing them in low-wage jobs that keep them trapped in a cycle of welfare recidivism.14 Economic restructuring in the industrialized West has also created a new stratum of precarious labor that is temporary, non-benefited, low paying, and typified by freelance or work-from-home arrangements. These labor market conditions, which are experienced by citizens and noncitizens alike, have been accompanied by a new kind of legal precarity that is specific to noncitizens. The rise of visa admittances and the growth of the unauthorized migrant population coincide with the shift toward labor market casualization and the escalation of public sector downsizing from the 1980s onward.15

It may seem ironic that this drive to reduce public expenditures and control the “fiscal burden” of the noncitizen population has culminated in the largest publicly funded immigration enforcement apparatus in modern history (both in the United States and transnationally).16 This is an area of study that needs to be much better incorporated into work on the political economy of security; however, David Harvey’s analysis of neoliberalism offers some helpful insights.17

Harvey insists that neoliberalism has, on balance, been more concerned with devising coercive strategies for capital accumulation than with the utopian goal of creating an “open society” (which entails the free flow of migrant labor, among other things). Harvey, along with other scholars of neoliberalism, also notes that neoliberal capitalism is distinguished by its reliance on a more proactive and interventionist mode of state regulation.18 Although neoliberal restructuring is geared toward downsizing public spending and social services for lower-income populations, it also channels unprecedented levels of public resources into state-corporate partnerships and securitization strategies, which are used to expand the reach of market forces. The end result is a unilaterally structured market economy that is backed by the authority of a strong state. As it concerns immigration policy, this means that migrants can be recruited in large numbers while also being policed by a state-funded enforcement apparatus that removes noncitizens who are deemed unproductive or deleterious to economic growth. But the means–ends rationality guiding this process is also prone to excess and cruelty, and it’s not unusual for the goal of securitizing migration flows to clash with the relentless drive for maximizing profit and productivity. This is one reason why get-tough immigration policies are often blamed for undermining the economic benefits of immigration. But as many immigration scholars have pointed out, get-tough enforcement practices have evolved from the same paradigm of economic growth that has been guiding immigration policy for the past several decades.

Kitty Calavita has traced this relationship between immigration enforcement and pro-growth immigration policies to the 1940s, focusing on the first temporary labor arrangement brokered by the U.S. and Mexican governments. Her groundbreaking account of the Bracero program treats immigration enforcement as a strategy for regulating legal flows of temporary migrant labor and the flows of undocumented migration that grew alongside them.19 Calavita explains how border enforcement operations of the Bracero era were adapted to fluctuations in the labor market supply of migrant workers, with removals increasing when there was a perceived surplus of laborers, and removals decreasing during periods of employer demand for this labor. Katherine Donato and Douglas Massey offer another insight into the way employers can benefit from get-tough enforcement.20 Their research on the outcomes of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986) has shown that “employer sanctions,” intended to discourage the hiring of unauthorized migrants, actually enhanced the control of employers over these workers, without effecting a decline in the numbers of these migrant workers. In contrast, King, Massoglia, and Uggen have argued that unemployment rates of native-born citizens have more to do with immigration enforcement trends than with the size of the surplus noncitizen population, suggesting that native workers, not employers, are the primary beneficiaries of these practices.21

Nicholas De Genova has provided a different explanation, which suggests that it is too limiting to think about deportation as a “reward” for native workers, a “benefit” for employers, or even a punishment for “bad” immigrants.22 De Genova’s work focuses on the mechanics of deportability (the real but unactualized potential to be deported) and not just on the sociopolitical fact of deportation (i.e., the tally of those who are actually deported). He argues that deportations exert a disciplinary pressure on the “good” immigrants who are still living and working in the host nation, reminding them of their potential to be deported. Other scholars have offered complementary explanations of how immigration enforcement is used as a public theater to send signals to a broader citizen and noncitizen audience.23 But it is worth emphasizing that deportability describes a regimen that is more concerned with managing the subjectivity of the migrant than it is with managing public opinion. Consistent with a Foucauldian understanding of disciplinary power, the aim is to cultivate a new (more productive, self-regulating) kind of person. Jonathan Inda offers a supporting analysis when he explains how immigration enforcement inculcates a prudential mind-set in the migrant, which is intended to encourage law-abiding behavior but can also discourage the migrant from exercising his or her legal rights (e.g., choosing not to participate in a vote for a union bargaining unit or press complaints about workplace safety violations).24 Whereas earlier theories explained how immigration enforcement adapts to the ebb and flow of labor market demands or political pressures (including moral panics25), theories of deportation as a disciplinary regimen describe a mode of coercion that acts on its subjects continuously—because its aim is the transformation of subjectivity itself.

David Brotherton and Luis Barrios offer another insight into these enf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series List
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction: Immigration Policy in an Age of Punishment
• Part I: Controlling Borders and Migrant Populations
• Part II: Producing Deportable Subjects
• Contributors
• Index