Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention

Deirdre Conlon is a Lecturer in Critical Human Geography at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research examines immigration enforcement and detention in policy and practice, their effects on migrant (in)security, citizenship and everyday life, as well as the wider reverberations of immigration control. Nancy Hiemstra is Assistant Professor of Migration Studies at Stony Brook University in New York, USA. Her research analyses the geopolitical and socio-cultural reverberations of restrictive immigration policies and practices in the United States and Latin America, with a focus on US detention and deportation.

‘This impressive and wide-ranging collection brings together leading scholars to expose the intimate economies, experiences, and processes that shape immigration detention. From the pocket money provided for asylum seekers in Danish detention centres, to the growing capacity of the detention estate across Europe, this collection traces a series of politically astute linkages between intimate experiences and global processes. By placing detention at the heart of contemporary migration, Conlon and Hiemstra have produced a volume that makes a critical intervention into debates over mobility, governance, and the politics of citizenship. In foregrounding the entangled relationships of detention, this volume contributes both a theoretically innovative focus on the intimate, whilst also calling attention to the political and ethical urgency of challenging detention across the world. Anyone interested in understanding the immigration detention industry, and in actively contesting it, will find inventive, insightful, and powerful resources in this book.’ — Jonathan Darling, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Manchester, UK‘Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra have pulled together an astonishing collection of essays which focus on the intimate economies of immigration detention and shed light on the lived experiences of being detained in several countries. The wide geographic range presented in this collection is impressive and helps give the reader a sense of the extent to which immigration detention has become a global phenomenon. The collection is theoretically and empirically innovative, providing us both with new ways of thinking about the increasingly-common practice of detention as well as new insights into the significant physical and emotional toll detention takes on migrants’ lives. The editors creatively build on concepts of accumulation and dispossession to advance our conceptual understanding of the intimate economies of immigration detention. This important set of essays brings that which is often hidden - immigration detention - to light and does so in provocative ways. This book will be a critical addition to classes on immigration, political economy, and state repression. Moreover, anyone interested in migrant rights anywhere in the world should read this volume.’ — Tanya Golash-Boza, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Merced, US ‘Intimate Economies of Immigrant Detention powerfully brings to life the best of feminist theory by showing how and why the seemingly banal, the familiar, and the everyday matter—and matter in profound ways. From the price of toothpaste immigrant detainees are compelled to pay to humanitarian efforts to "improve" what are inherently dehumanizing detention practices, this invaluable volume illuminates the messy connections between political economic processes, state practices, and experiences imprisoned migrants endure. In doing so, the book demonstrates the simultaneous hardening of various boundaries and their increasing blurriness given the myriad connections that transcend and produce them, and that they reflect.’ — Joseph Nevins, Associate Professor of Geography, Vassar College, USA.

• Foreword: On the depth and importance of intimate economiesAlison MountzChapter 1: Introduction: Intimate economies of immigration detentionDeirdre Conlon and Nancy HiemstraPART 1: ENGAGING THE INTIMATEChapter 2: Detained beyond the sovereign: conceptualising non-state actor involvement in immigration detentionMichael FlynnChapter 3: Discretion, contracting, and commodification: privatisation of US immigration detention as a technology of governmentLauren MartinChapter 4: In the market of morality: international human rights standards and the immigration detention "improvement" complexJulia MorrisChapter 5: Bearing witness and the intimate economies of immigration detention centres in AustraliaCaroline FleayChapter 6: Managing capacity, shifting burdens: social reproduction and the intimate economies of immigrant family detentionJill Williams and Vanessa MassaroChapter 7: On exterior and interior detention regimes: governing, bordering, and economy in transit migration across MexicoMario BruzzonePART 2: EXPOSING INTIMATE ECONOMIESChapter 8: Captive consumers and coerced labourers: intimate economies and the expanding US detention regimeNancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon Chapter 9: Intimate economies of ambiguity and erasure: Darwin as Australia’s 2011-2012 ‘capital of detention’Kate CoddingtonChapter 10: Pocket money: everyday precarities in the Danish asylum systemMalene JacobsenChapter 11: Health and intimacies in immigration detentionNick GillChapter 12: Intimate encounters with immigrant criminalisation in ArizonaMatthew LowenChapter 13: Intimate economies of state practice: materialities of detention in FinlandAnitta Kynsilehto and Eeva PuumalaChapter 14: The pleasures of security? Visual practice and immigration detentionAlexandra HallAfterword: Intimate economies, anomie and moral ambiguityDora Schriro