The Migrant's Jail

October 15, 2024
The forbidding role of imprisonment in the nation's treatment of migrants. This study examines the last century or so of migrant incarceration in the United States as it makes the case that the expansion of the government's imprisonment powers has produced human rights violations on a mass scale. Using case studies to chart this troubling history, Nofil explains how a complex network of institutions has formed in response to both real and imagined threats of an unregulated flow of migrants into the country. In chapters dedicated to such topics as the detention of Chinese immigrants in New York in the early 20th century or of Caribbean refugees in the Gulf states in the late 20th, she sets forth the human costs of a booming carceral industry. Local officials, we learn, routinely profit from relationships with federal immigration authorities, incentivizing the construction of larger and larger jails and disincentivizing alternate methods of managing undocumented migration. We come to understand how this flawed system evolved and how crucial events, such as the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1929 Undesirable Aliens Act, contributed to its cruelties and inefficiencies. Also compelling are the accounts of how those caught up in the system have used the courts, as well as the media, to petition for fairer treatment. Though immigrant jails have become "sites of coercion and neglect," Nofil explains, they have also been sites of resistance "where migrants lodged legal claims, plotted escapes, organized with aid groups, and fought for the right to stay in the United States." The American treatment of migrants, she rightly concludes, lacks basic accountability at the local, state, and federal levels and is badly in need of reform if its grievous human consequences are to be addressed. An insightful and alarming history of the nation's failures in detaining and deporting migrants.

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