Boats, borders, and bases: race, the cold war, and the rise of migration detention in the United States/ Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz.

Includes bibliographical references and index."Discussions on U.S. border enforcement have traditionally focused on the highly charged U.S.-Mexico boundary, inadvertently obscuring U.S.-Caribbean relations and the concerning asylum and detention policies unfolding there. Boats, Borders, and Bases offers the missing, racialized histories of the U.S. detention system and its relationship to the interception and detention of Haitian and Cuban migrants. It argues that the U.S. response to Cold War Caribbean migrations actually established the legal and institutional basis for contemporary migration and detention, and border-deterrent practices in the United States. This book promises to make a significant contribution to a truer understanding of the history and geography of the U.S. detention system overall."--Provided by publisher.Race and the cold war geopolitics of migration control -- Building the world's largest detention system -- Expanding the world's largest detention system.1 online resource

Managing migration: scaling sovereignty on islands

Island and maritime spaces between regions have become central places of recurrent crises over human migration and re-articulations of state sovereignty. Islands, the very sites where land meets water, are among the contested sites of struggle over entry and exclusion. In this paper, the Mediterranean is our main area of geographical inquiry. We explore the connections between crises of sovereignty, migration and islands, seeking to enhance connections between scholarship on migration and sovereignty. We argue that migration management and its geographical articulation on islands involve persistent reconfigurations of sovereignty, particularly evident during times of crisis over human migration. Such crises and re-articulations of sovereignty are creative uses of geography that repeatedly lead to a failure to protect human rights. To develop this argument, we bring feminist theorists of state sovereignty into conversation with political geographers. We move across scales of governance and political mobilization to show how a reconfiguration of sovereignty through regional and national management regimes leads to complex legal geographies and sovereign entanglements that migrants and advocates must navigate to claim rights

Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis

The crisis of borders and prisons can be seen starkly in statistics. In 2011 some 1,500 migrants died trying to enter Europe, and the United States deported nearly 400,000 and imprisoned some 2.3 million people—more than at any other time in history. International borders are increasingly militarized places embedded within domestic policing and imprisonment and entwined with expanding prison-industrial complexes. Beyond Walls and Cages offers scholarly and activist perspectives on these issues and explores how the international community can move toward a more humane future. Working at a range of geographic scales and locations, contributors examine concrete and ideological connections among prisons, migration policing and detention, border fortification, and militarization. They challenge the idea that prisons and borders create safety, security, and order, showing that they can be forms of coercive mobility that separate loved ones, disempower communities, and increase shared harms of poverty. Walls and cages can also fortify wealth and power inequalities, racism, and gender and sexual oppression. As governments increasingly rely on criminalization and violent measures of exclusion and containment, strategies for achieving change are essential. Beyond Walls and Cages develops abolitionist, no borders, and decolonial analyses and methods for social change, showing how seemingly disconnected forms of state violence are interconnected. Creating a more just and free world—whether in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, the Morocco-Spain region, South Africa, Montana, or Philadelphia—requires that people who are most affected become central to building alternatives to global crosscurrents of criminalization and militarization

Trauma as Displacement: Observations from Refugee Resettlement

Trauma does not have a single definition. Within Western paradigms, across humanities and social sciences, it has largely been characterized through temporal and spatial dislocation. Critical studies of trauma, however, suggest that such framings of rupture, catastrophe, and mass displacement can obscure longer term and structural forms of violence, such as colonialism and gender-based violence. This article explores the displacement, emplacement, and transitivity of trauma through the process of refugee resettlement. It is part of a broader qualitative study that traces how trauma concepts and practices are mobilized in the process of refugee resettlement, specifically for Iraqis who are resettled in the United States. This article argues that trauma is neither a one-time event that is endlessly relived and reactivated in identical episodes nor does trauma emplace a singular geography. Rather, trauma can be understood as a set of serial emplacements and displacements across multiple sites, in our case transnationally. Apart from the distress and geopolitics of war, securitized migration policies produce trauma for people who have been displaced. This trauma of family separation, however, should not be regarded merely as an extension of war-making but as an additional manifestation produced by the global refugee regime

Geopolitics of Disability and the Ablenationalism of Refuge

Although it has rarely been addressed as such, the regulation of disability within migration governance is a geopolitical issue. This article examines how refugee resettlement intersects with ablenationalism, an ideology that treats disability as exceptional, thereby shoring up the exclusionary terms of citizenship. Drawing on findings from our multi-sited study (2016–2019) of the resettlement of Iraqis to the US, we show how the fantasy of the ‘disability con’ and fantasy of the ‘bogus refugee’ feature overlapping logics. Asylum officers routinely question asylum seekers’ narrations, pointing to holes in logic, inconsistencies, embellishment, and perceptions of scripted stories as reasons for denying asylum claims. Our study shows how these moments of suspicion can double-up or intertwine for refugees seeking disability exceptions in the naturalisation process. We argue that the disenfranchisement of those who seek naturalisation on these grounds reproduces ablenationalist exclusion and shores up a geopolitics of impairment and militarised refuge