Books on the topic 'Migrant detention centres'

This volume brings together academics, activists, and artists to explore how LGBTQ migrants and their allies, friends, families, and communities (including citizens and noncitizens) experience and resist dynamics of illegalization, detention, and deportation at local, national, and transnational scales. No book-length study of illegalization, detention, and deportation has centered LGBTQ migrants or addressed how centering sexuality and nonnormative gender contributes important knowledge. Some one million LGBTQ-identified migrants live in the United States, and more than one quarter of them are undocumented. Young people at the forefront of advocating for legalization have borrowed the LGBT movement’s tactic of “coming out of the closet” to proclaim themselves “undocumented and unafraid.” Julio Salgado’s artwork sparked a nationwide mobilization of UndocuQueer as an identity, and queer migrant networks have emerged around the nation, working both independently and in coalition with diverse migrant communities. Our collection fills a gap in queer and trans migration scholarship about illegalization, detention, and deportation while deepening the critical dialogue between this scholarship and allied fields including: immigration and racial justice scholarship about legalization, detention, and deportation; anthropological and sociological studies of families divided across borders by immigration law; scholarship linking prison and border abolition; and debates on queer necropolitics. It intentionally engages the fault lines between epistemology and power as a means to reframe understandings of queer and trans migrant illegalization, detention, and deportation.

This GSoD In Focus aims at providing a brief overview of the state of democracy in Africa and the Middle East at the end of 2019, prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, and then assesses some of the preliminary impacts that the pandemic has had on democracy in the region in the last 10 months. Key facts and findings include: Africa • In 2019 alone, 75 per cent of African democracies saw their scores decline, and electoral processes in Africa have failed to become the path for political reform and democratic politics. The reasons are many, including weak electoral management and executive aggrandizement. • The key challenges to democracy brought about by the pandemic involve the management of elections, restrictions on civil liberties (especially freedom of expression), worsening gender equality, deepening social and economic inequalities, a disruption to education, deterioration of media integrity, disruption of parliaments and an amplified risk of corruption. These challenges exacerbate and accelerate long-standing problems in the region. • Despite the challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic might galvanize governments to reinforce public health and social protection mechanisms, rendering the state more able to cushion the impact of the crisis, and enhancing its legitimacy. The Middle East • The Middle East is the most undemocratic region in the world. Only 2 out of 13 countries in the region are democracies. The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened the economic and social problems of the region, which could exacerbate the pre-existing democratic challenges. • Freedoms of expression and media were severely curtailed in many countries in the region prior to the pandemic. In some cases, COVID-19 has aggravated this. Countries have closed media outlets and banned the printing and distribution of newspapers, under the pretext of combating the spread of COVID-19. This has restricted citizens’ access to information. • Migrant workers and internally displaced people have been disproportionally affected by COVID-19. A significant proportion of the infections in the region have been in impoverished migrant and refugee communities. In the Gulf region, curfews and lockdowns have resulted in many migrants losing their livelihood, right to medical attention and even repatriation. Migrants have also faced discrimination often being held in detention centres, in poor conditions, as part of governmental efforts to curb the number of COVID-19 infections among citizens. The review of the state of democracy during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 uses qualitative analysis and data of events and trends in the region collected through International IDEA’s Global Monitor of COVID-19’s Impact on Democracy and Human Rights, an initiative co-funded by the European Union.

In Detain and Punish, Carl Lindskoog provides the first in-depth history of immigration detention in the United States. Employing extensive archival research to document the origins and development of immigration detention in the U.S. from 1973 to 2000, it reveals how the world’s largest detention system originated in the U.S. government’s campaign to exclude Haitians from American shores, and how resistance by Haitians and their allies constantly challenged the detention regime. From the Krome Avenue Detention Center in Miami, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to jails and prisons across the country, Haitians have been at the center of the story of immigration detention. Contrary to the notion that immigration detention serves a merely administrative function, this history shows the intentionally punitive design of the modern detention regime. From its origin, immigration detention was designed to deter asylum seekers and unauthorized migrants by depriving them of their liberty; to detain and punish. And while Haitians were the first to be targeted by this deterrence-through-punishment policy, Central American asylum seekers and many others were soon ensnared in the expanding web of detention. Just as immigration detention was re-emerging in the late-1970s, taking root in the 1980s, and then exploding in the 1990s, the United States was constructing a parallel system of mass incarceration for its own citizens. Racialized mass incarceration for both citizens and non-citizens thus emerged as a critical element of social, political, and economic life in the United States in the late-twentieth century. This book explains how it came to be.

Indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico face harrowing experiences of violence before, during, and after their migration to the United States, like all asylum seekers. But as Shannon Speed argues, the circumstances for Indigenous women are especially devastating, given their disproportionate vulnerability to neoliberal economic and political policies and practices in Latin America and the United States, including policing, detention, and human trafficking. Speed dubs this vulnerability "neoliberal multicriminalism" and identifies its relation to settler structures of Indigenous dispossession and elimination. Using innovative ethnographic practices to record and recount stories from Indigenous women in U.S. detention, Speed demonstrates that these women's vulnerability to individual and state violence is not rooted in a failure to exercise agency. Rather, it is a structural condition, created and reinforced by settler colonialism, which consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of occupation and capitalist exploitation. With sensitive narration and sophisticated analysis, this book reveals the human consequences of state policy and practices throughout the Americas and adds vital new context for understanding the circumstances of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.

In recent years social scientists have been interested in the growth and transformation of global cities. These metropolises, which function as key command centers in global production networks, manifest many of the social, economic, and political tensions and inequities of neoliberal globalization. Their international appeal as sites of financial freedom and free trade frequently obscures the global city underbelly: practices of labor exploitation, racial discrimination, and migrant deferral. This chapter explores some of these global tensions, showing how they have shaped the strategies and technologies behind urban crime prevention, security, and policing. In particular, the chapter shows how certain populations perceived as risky become treated as pre-criminals: individuals in need of management and control before any criminal behavior has occurred. It is demonstrated further how the production of the pre-criminal can lead to dispossession, delay, and detention as well as to increasing gentrification and violence.

Drawing on fieldwork in two British immigration removal centres (IRCs), this chapter discusses staff accounts of race and racism in detention. Designed as places to expel unwanted foreign citizens, IRCs are highly racialized institutions as nearly all residents within them are members of an ethnic minority. What is it like to work in such places? How, if at all, do staff members internalize or promote ideas about race and racialization? What happens when the staff members themselves are migrants or second-generation British citizens? How do they view and interpret ideas of race? What is their status within the workforce? By focusing on staff accounts rather than detainees, this chapter seeks to widen our understanding of the ways in which these institutions of confinement maintain, reinforce, and maybe sometimes disrupt ideas of race and belonging in British society.