Boats, borders, and bases: race, the cold war, and the rise of immigration detention in the united states

Discussions about U.S. migration policing have traditionally focused on enforcement along the highly charged U.S.-Mexico boundary. Enforcement practices such as detention policies designed to restrict access to asylum also transpire in the Caribbean. __Boats, Borders, and Bases__ tells a missing, racialized history of the U.S. migration detention system that was developed and expanded to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants. Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz argue that the U.S. response to Cold War Caribbean migrations established the legal and institutional basis for contemporary migration detention and border-deterrent practices in the United States. This book will make a significant contribution to a fuller understanding of the history and geography of the United States's migration detention system. The United States currently maintains the world’s largest migration and deportation system. Yet there has been no systematic account of its construction. Boats, Borders, and Bases traces the rise of detention through Cold War efforts to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants from arriving in the United States by boat. Caribbean migration and deterrence efforts are related to much-better-known policies that have shaped the U.S.-Mexico boundary. This account situates both the Caribbean and U.S.-Mexico boundary within maritime and territorial grounds of U.S. empire. Drawing on extensive archival research, this account brings together histories of refugee resettlement, asylum, and criminalization to explore the racialization and interrelations in these policies. The turn to criminalize migration in the 1980s built upon both domestic crime politics and efforts to prevent the arrival of asylum seekers. The location of detention facilities in relatively remote places is not determined by formal policy or proximity to international boundaries, but rather by the contingent outcome of political negotiations. Boats, Borders, and Bases shows how the location of migration detention commonly builds on prison and military geographies. The expansion of jails, prisons, and restructuring of military bases contributed to the expansion of migration detention space Discussions about U.S. migration policing have traditionally focused on enforcement along the highly charged U.S.-Mexico boundary. Enforcement practices such as detention policies designed to restrict access to asylum also transpire in the Caribbean. Boats, Borders, and Bases tells a missing, racialized history of the U.S. migration detention system that was developed and expanded to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants. Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz argue that the U.S. response to Cold War Caribbean migrations established the legal and institutional basis for contemporary migration detention and border-deterrent practices in the United States. This book will make a significant contribution to a fuller understanding of the history and geography of the United States’s migration detention system. "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