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The first broad history of immigrant detention in the United States,
Forever Prisoners narrates the stories of immigrants locked up by the US government from the late nineteenth century to the present, showing how criminality has become conflated with undocumented migrants.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Building the Largest Immigrant Detention Regime on the Planet
- Chapter One: Chinese at McNeil Island Federal Prison in the Late Nineteenth Century
- Chapter Two: Nathan Cohen, the Man Without a Country
- Chapter Three: Japanese Peruvian Enemy Aliens during World War Two
- Chapter Four: "We Have No End." Mariel Cuban Prison Uprising in Oakdale and Atlanta
- Chapter Five: "A Particularly Serious Crime." Mayra Machado in an Age of Crimmigration
- Conclusion: Indefinite Detention from Guantanamo, Cuba to Jena, Louisiana
- Notes
- Index
About the author
Elliott Young is Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII and Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border and co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 200 asylum cases and has written for the Huffington Post, the Oregonian, and the Utne Reader.
Summary
Stories of non-US citizens caught in the jaws of the immigration bureaucracy and subject to indefinite detention are in the headlines daily. These men, women, and children remain almost completely without rights, unprotected by law and the Constitution, and their status as outsiders, even though many of have lived and worked in this country for years, has left them vulnerable to the most extreme forms of state power. Although the rhetoric surrounding these individuals is extreme, the US government has been locking up immigrants since the late nineteenth century, often for indefinite periods and with limited ability to challenge their confinement.
Forever Prisoners offers the first broad history of immigrant detention in the United States. Elliott Young focuses on five stories, including Chinese detained off the coast of Washington in the late 1880s, an "insane" Russian-Brazilian Jew caught on a ship shuttling between New York and South America during World War I, Japanese Peruvians kidnapped and locked up in a Texas jail during World War II, a prison uprising by Mariel Cuban refugees in 1987, and a Salvadoran mother who grew up in the United States and has spent years incarcerated while fighting deportation. Young shows how foreigners have been caged not just for immigration violations, but also held in state and federal prisons for criminal offenses, in insane asylums for mental illness, as enemy aliens in INS facilities, and in refugee camps. Since the 1980s, the conflation of criminality with undocumented migrants has given rise to the most extensive system of immigrant incarceration in the nation's history. Today over half a million immigrants are caged each year, some serving indefinite terms in what has become the world's most extensive immigrant detention system. And yet, Young finds, the rate of all forms of incarceration for immigrants was as high in the early twentieth century as it is today, demonstrating a return to past carceral practices.
Providing critical historical context for today's news cycle, Forever Prisoners focuses on the sites of limbo where America's immigration population have been and continue to be held.
Additional text
By centering the stories of foreign-born people subjected to imprisonment, Elliott Young's Forever Prisoners demonstrates how this particular detention regime has not only escalated in the past several decades but, more important, grows out of deep roots reaching back to the nineteenth century origins of immigration restriction. Young widens our view of what counts as immigrant detention over time and how the United States has ensnared differently outcast groups into its varied cages — including offshore islands, mental institutions, martial detention camps, and refugee camps, as well detention centers, jails, and prisons. Forever Prisoners is crucial book for anyone interested in the convergence of prison and immigration regimes.
