Description
Immigration detention systems are expanding across the world despite their failure to deter immigration and despite the fact that they regularly involve inhuman and degrading treatment, as well as discrimination on the basis of race, gender and class. This paper investigates why by examining three factors that help us to understand why immigration detention policies continue to be pursued: (1) the ways in which detention acts as a spectacle; (2) the role of different non-state actors that encourage the expansion of detention; and (3) histories of colonialism that connect to current detention policies through their similarly racialized use of violence and incarceration. In doing so, I argue that understanding immigration detention within a framework of racial capitalism allows us to see how the contemporary political economy of immigration detention builds on longer carceral histories of empire.
