Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention

Critical perspectives

Deirdre Conlon, Nancy Hiemstra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317478874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

International migration has been described as one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century. While a lot is known about the complex nature of migratory flows, surprisingly little attention has been given to one of the most prominent responses by governments to human mobility: the practice of immigration detention.

Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention provides a timely intervention, offering much needed scrutiny of the ideologies, policies and practices that enable the troubling, unparalleled and seemingly unbridled growth of immigration detention around the world. An international collection of scholars provide crucial new insights into immigration detention recounting at close range how detention's effects ricochet from personal and everyday experiences to broader political-economic, social and cultural spheres. Contributors draw on original research in the US, Australia, Europe, and beyond to scrutinise the increasingly tangled relations associated with detention operation and migration management. With new theoretical and empirical perspectives on detention, the chapters collectively present a toolbox for better understanding the forces behind and broader implications of the seemingly uncontested rise of immigration detention.

This book is of great interest to those who study political economy, economic geography and immigration policy, as well as policy makers interested in immigration.

1Introduction

Intimate economies of immigration detention

Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra1

International migration has been described as one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century (Betts, 2015). The movement of people across borders has profound social, cultural, economic and geopolitical ramifications. While a vast literature explores the complex nature, scope and significance of migratory flows, surprisingly little attention has been given to one of the most prominent responses by governments to human mobility: the practice of immigration detention. This volume is grounded in the conviction that immigration detention – often hidden from public view – requires scholarly attention equal to that given to the more visible and better known dimensions of international migration. The contributions to this volume together offer a timely intervention in a developing field of inquiry, providing much needed scrutiny of the ideologies, policies and practices that gird the troubling, unparalleled and seemingly unbridled growth of immigration detention. While previous scholarship has examined the growth in detention at the macro level, a distinctive characteristic of this volume is its attention to micro-level processes. Through careful consideration of the intimate economies of immigration detention – that is, the complex systems of micro and macro relationships that enmesh in the realisation of detention and lived experiences of being detained – the contributors collectively prise open the concealed worlds of immigration detention, shedding necessary light on the costs and implications of an increasingly prevalent form of human confinement.

Intimate economies of detention expansion

Immigration detention is growing exponentially in disparate sites around the world, in terms of overall numbers as well as capacity, as Alison Mountz notes in the Foreword to this volume. In the United States, for instance, the detention system has grown by 75 per cent since 2003, so today an average of 33,000 migrants are detained on a daily basis and over 400,000 annually” (Detention Watch Network [DWN], 2015; see also Miroff, 2010). In the United Kingdom, the number of migrants detained annually increased by a total of 10 per cent between 2010 and 2014, to approximately 29,000 (Home Office, 2014), with the capacity to detain up to 3,915 people per day (Migration Observatory, 2015). Australia detains approximately 8,400 individuals per year, with as many as 3,624 people in custody per day in 2014 (Australian Government Department of Immigration and Border Protection, 2015). Across European Union member states, 570,660 individuals were held in various types of detention centres in 2011 (Migreurop, 2013).2

These trends promise to continue in response to recent upswings in migration flows. Current turmoil, particularly in the Middle East, has resulted in a 47 per cent increase in asylum applications in European states in the one-year period between 2013 and 2014 (UNHCR, 2015). Recently, there has been a notable increase in US/Mexico border crossings particularly by women and unaccompanied children from Central America. The standard state response to such developments entails expanding the capacity to detain people. As destination countries such as the US, UK, Australia and EU member states aim to stop migrants from ever entering their territorial borders, they push for immigration detention in transit countries (Hyndman and Mountz, 2008) as well as offshore (Mountz and Loyd, 2014; Mountz, 2013). We therefore see detention systems developing in, for example, Mexico, Turkey, Nauru, Indonesia and Central American and North African states.

Detention has thus become a primary response to human mobility in a substantial – and growing – swath of countries across the world. Detention policies and practices develop, travel and vary from region to region (Nethery and Silverman, 2015; Ceccorulli and Labana, 2014), revealing detention to be flexible and adaptable to a range of geographic and political contexts (Mountz et al., 2013; Loyd et al., 2012; Hall, 2012; Martin and Mitchelson, 2009). The range of specific rationales given by states for detaining immigrants include: to verify identity, to examine requests to enter a state, to ‘house’ asylum seekers at various stages of a request for refuge, and in order to deport persons whose immigration status is deemed irregular. Common to each of these situations is that for migrants whose status is in question in some way, free movement is curtailed, day-to-day activities are circumscribed or monitored, and liberty is restricted (see Aierbe and Baylac, 2013). While immigration detention originated as an ‘improvised response’ (Migreurop, 2013, p. 81) to migration flows and governments often frame it as an administrative procedure, it is simultaneously a fundamental tool for managing migration, securing borders, asserting sovereign power and assuaging conservative and capricious voters.

There is a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship as well as advocacy sector research examining the driving role of privatisation in contemporary human mobility and, specifically, the global expansion of immigration detention. Attention to privatisation and migration broadly considers the influence of private actors and institutions. Salt and Stein (1997), Kyle (2000), Castles and Miller (2003), Spener (2009), and Mountz (2010), for instance, call attention to the range of legal and illicit intermediaries that are involved in facilitating migration. In their edited collection, Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg Sorensen (2013) examine privatisation as it intersects with different dimensions of the migration process including state actors and practices; border enforcement; the security industry; and informal as well as clandestine networks. In doing so, they highlight the complexity of migration in the current era. Hernández-León (2008, p. 154) refers to the constellation of agents involved in facilitating migration as constituting the ‘migration industry’. Clochard and Rodier highlight the growth of ‘opportunities’ for private groups across European states in what they describe as a ‘border security economy’ (2013, p. 69). Another body of scholarship examines privatisation and immigration enforcement, with attention to matters of security (Fernandes, 2007; Bigo, 2002), devolution (Coleman, 2009) and the impact of localised immigration controls in the US (Varsanyi, 2008). Golash-Boza (2009) describes the private actors involved in implementing immigration policies in the US as forming the ‘immigration industrial complex’, which functions with similar logic and dynamics to the prison and military industrial complexes.

There can be little doubt that privatisation has been key to the ‘geometric expansion of immigration detention’ (Doty and Wheatley, 2013, p. 427). In the US private prison companies operate 62 per cent of detention beds (DWN, 2015). The UK boasts the largest number of privatised migrant detention centres in Europe with 73 per cent of detainees held in privately run facilities (Mason, 2013) while Australia’s entire immigration detention system is run by private companies (Mason, 2013; Flynn and Cannon, 2009). Additionally, a wide array of services – including food services, medical care and transportation – within both private and government-operated detention facilities are subcontracted to private as well as non-profit entities (Conlon and Hiemstra, 2014; Mitchelson, 2014; Tyler et al., 2014; Doty and Wheatley, 2013; Feltz and Baksh, 2012; Dow, 2004). As Flynn and Cannon observe, privatised detention ‘encompasses a diverse range of relationships, including the contracting of services to non-governmental organisations and differing configurations of private ownership and operation of detention facilities’ (2009, p. 3). All in all, privatisation ensures ‘profits for the companies involved while incentivising the incarceration of immigrants’ (DWN, 2015, p. 1). Prior research illuminates detention privatisation at the macro level, for instance, attending to large-scale corporate involvement; government daily ‘bed rates’; the influence of political lobbying in the expansion of detention; and the devolution of government operations to local authorities and third sector entities.

To date, there has been limited scrutiny of the deep and broad impacts of detention, privatisation and devolution at the micro level, that is to say within and around detention centres and as they affect the internal operation, day-to-day experiences, social fabric and wider dynamics of immigration detention. Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention: Critical perspectives brings together an international collection of scholars whose work engages these pressing issues. In addition to offering insight into detention systems in specific geographic contexts, the contributions to this volume deepen understanding of the ramifications of the expansion and proliferation of immigration detention regimes around the world by examining the manifold ways that detention reverberates in individual, social, cultural, political and economic spheres. As a whole, we conceptualise these chapters as exemplifying an approach that illuminates the ‘intimate economies’ of immigration detention. While this ‘intimate’ perspective may appear jarring in the context of detention regimes, we contend that it is not only important, but essential to the critical study of immigration detention.

Ideas connected to ‘intimate economies’ of detention evolved out of a themed session focusing on ‘micro economies’ of detention at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (Tampa, Florida, April 2014) organised by the co-editors. This session sparked substantial interest from conference participants for the ways in which it pushed analysis beyond that fostered by typical macro-scale approaches. As conversations continued and ideas developed, we recognised the additional potential of an ‘intimate’ frame for identifying and scrutinising the range of micro-scale processes and practices where privatisation and devolution have taken hold and impact detention, as well as their overlap with the macro scale. An intimate lens, we suggest, is powerful precisely because it conveys attention to the personal at close range, while simultaneously allowing multiple approaches to and perspectives on the study of immigration detention.

The polyvalence – and critical utility – of intimacy is evident in the distinct yet overlapping interpretations employed by chapters in this volume. Some contributors draw on work that engages closely with the inside and inner workings of immigration detention. In this sense, intimacy invokes a sense of the physical closeness and knowledge that develops between entities in near proximity (see Berlant, 1998, 2000). Contributions thus evoke intimacy associated with being familiar and proximate to detention. In addition, chapters demand intimate attention – understood to refer to focused scrutiny – to the broad and growing networks of relations and practices that comprise detention. They also expose various ways – from deeply personal and problematic spheres to detached, remote and profit-focused realms – in which detention is experienced and its effects materialised. Our framing thus draws inspiration from Pain and Staeheli, who characterise intimacy as ‘a set of spatial relations […] a mode of interaction [… and] a set of practices’ that extend from the ‘proximate, personal and interpersonal’ to ‘spatial relations that are distant, interactions that are global, and practices that traverse institutional and national realms’ (2014, p. 345).

An intimate economic lens draws on Wilson (2012), who proposes that intimate economies describe aspects of life that are typically excluded from considerations of ‘the economic’, yet are linked to processes of production and exchange in complicated ways and through complex relationships. An intimate economic perspective on immigration detention, then, also allows for attention to the increasingly tangled associations between government and corporations; private, public and non-profit sectors; and how the ensuing webs influence ideology, policy, practice and experiences related to detention. Framing these investigations vis-à-vis intimate economies thus augments calls from geographers and other social scientists to attend to the ways in which the ties of intimacy register and reverberate beyond the personal and the everyday at scales from the domestic to the global (Pratt and Rosner, 2006). An intimate economic approach to detention, therefore, entails analyses of production and social reproduction, or what Katz describes as the ‘messy, fleshy stuff of everyday life’ (2001, p. 711), yet also takes account of the ricochet beyond individual, subjective, and proximate spheres to social, cultural, political and economic realms beyond detention (see Conlon and Hiemstra, 2014).

Engaging and exposing the intimate

Together, the contributions to Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention: Critical perspectives provide crucial, critical insights into detention by scrutinising at close range the increasingly complex, tangled and proximal relations between the multiple actors subject to and involved in operating and managing immigration detention. The volume includes an array of perspectives and brings together original work from scholars and advocates whose research examines detention in the US, UK, Australia, Finland and Denmark, as well as case studies from Mexico, Central America, South Korea, Libya and the United Arab Emirates. Contributors productively extend both understandings and the significance of an intimate lens on immigrat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• Part I: Engaging the intimate
• Part II: Exposing intimate economies
• Index