ABSTRACT

International migration has been described as one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century. While a lot is known about the complex nature of migratory flows, surprisingly little attention has been given to one of the most prominent responses by governments to human mobility: the practice of immigration detention.

Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention provides a timely intervention, offering much needed scrutiny of the ideologies, policies and practices that enable the troubling, unparalleled and seemingly unbridled growth of immigration detention around the world. An international collection of scholars provide crucial new insights into immigration detention recounting at close range how detention’s effects ricochet from personal and everyday experiences to broader political-economic, social and cultural spheres. Contributors draw on original research in the US, Australia, Europe, and beyond to scrutinise the increasingly tangled relations associated with detention operation and migration management. With new theoretical and empirical perspectives on detention, the chapters collectively present a toolbox for better understanding the forces behind and broader implications of the seemingly uncontested rise of immigration detention.

This book is of great interest to those who study political economy, economic geography and immigration policy, as well as policy makers interested in immigration.

chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

Intimate economies of immigration detention

part I|108 pages

Engaging the intimate

chapter 2|17 pages

Detained beyond the sovereign

Conceptualising non-state actor involvement in immigration detention

chapter 3|19 pages

Discretion, contracting and commodification

Privatisation of US immigration detention as a technology of government

chapter 4|19 pages

In the market of morality

International human rights standards and the immigration detention ‘improvement’ complex

chapter 6|18 pages

Managing capacity, shifting burdens

Social reproduction and the intimate economies of immigrant family detention

chapter 7|16 pages

On exterior and interior detention regimes

Governing, bordering and economy in transit migration across Mexico

part II|119 pages

Exposing intimate economies

chapter 8|17 pages

Captive consumers and coerced labourers

Intimate economies and the expanding US detention regime

chapter 9|15 pages

Intimate economies of ambiguity and erasure

Darwin as Australia's 2011–2012 ‘capital of detention’

chapter 10|16 pages

Pocket money

Everyday precarities in the Danish asylum system

chapter 13|16 pages

Intimate economies of state practice

Materialities of detention in Finland

chapter 14|16 pages

The pleasures of security?

Visual practice and immigration detention

chapter |5 pages

Afterword

Intimate economies, anomie and moral ambiguity