Expanding the penal landscape: The immigration detention phenomena

Over the last few decades, we have witnessed the proliferation of practices of migration control. These include the creation, reinforcement and development of borders; the multiplication and diversification of practices and spaces of detention; the implementation of different initiatives of supervision and control of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers before detention and after release; the use of violent practices of push-backs, strategies of containment, and spectacles of transporting migrants and asylum seekers; the prosecution of organizations and individuals supporting migrants and asylum seekers; and the amplification of deportation practices. At the same time, both people on the move and the organizations and citizens supporting them have accumulated knowledge and developed strategies to resist, manage, and overcome the aforementioned attempts to constrain human mobility. This multiplicity of practices is being analyzed from within various disciplines including, but not limited to sociology, political science, anthropology, legal geography, criminology, and migration studies.

Some of these analyses have identified the punitive nature of migration enforcement practices but these processes are frequently characterized as outside the field of “punishment”. Scholars such as Hannah-Moffat and Lynch (2012) have pointed to the need to expand “definitional boundaries of the category of ‘punishment’” (Hannah-Moffat and Lynch, 2012: 119). According to them, these boundaries “tend to neglect a number of questions about what constitutes punishment in diverse settings, and are limited in their ability to explain on-the-ground punitive practices, particularly in contexts that challenge traditional understandings of the penal realm” (Hannah-Moffat and Lynch, 2012: 119). In this vein, Bosworth, Franko and Pickering (2018: 35) argue that the term “punishment” should be fundamentally adjusted so as to include the proliferation of “bordered forms of penality” (Bosworth, Franko and Pickering, 2018: 46). Others have studied the racialized, gendered, and (post)colonial character of border and/or migration control and immigration detention (Bosworth, Parmar and Vázquez, 2018).

This international interdisciplinary workshop provides an opportunity to reflect, both conceptually and empirically, on the explosion of penal and punitive forms and consequences of border and migration control practices in the Global North and South.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Yolanda Vázquez, Associate Professor of Law, College of Law, University of Cincinnati (United States) and Alison Mountz, Professor of Geography and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada).

Contact person: ana.ballesteros@udc.es

Scientific Committee: Ana Ballesteros Pena ( University of A Coruña, Spain), Mary Bosworth (University of Oxford, United Kingdom), José A. Brandariz (University of A Coruña, Spain), Elisa García España (University of Malaga, Spain), Kelly Hannah-Moffat (University of Toronto, Canada) & Audrey Macklin (University of Toronto, Canada).

AGENDA

Monday May, 17

15.00-15.30 Welcome/introduction

15.30 – 16.45 CET LECTURE 1

Moderator: Audrey Macklin, University of Toronto (Canada)

Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada)

The Death of Asylum and Asylum’s Afterlives

16.45 – 17.00 CET Break

17.00 – 18.15 CET SESSION 1

Moderator: Ulla D. Berg, Rutgers University (USA)

José A. Brandariz, University of A Coruña (Spain)

Expanding the analytical gaze on the penal power: Immigration detention and deportation practices

Diego Boza and Dévika Pérez, University of Cadiz (Spain)

CATEs: New Migrant Detention Centres in Spain

Cristina Fernández Bessa, University of A Coruña (Spain)

Transformations of immigration detention in Spain

18.15 – 18.45 CET Break

18.45 – 20.00 EST SESSION 2

Moderator: Jessica Templeman, York University (Canada)

Carrie Rosembaum, Golden State San Francisco (US)

Anti-Democratic American Immigration Detention?

Carolina Sánchez Boe, Université Paris Descartes (France)

Expanding penal landscapes into immigrant communities: the use and experiences of electronic monitoring as an « alternative to detention » in the USA

Martha Balaguera, University of Toronto (Canada)

The integral frontier

20.00 – 20.45 CET Virtual Social Event

Tuesday May, 18

15.00 – 16.15 CET LECTURE 2

Moderator: José A. Brandariz, University of A Coruña (Spain)

Yolanda Vazquez, University of Cincinnati (US)

Reinforcing Racial Order Through Crime and Migration Policies

16.15 – 16.30 CET Break

16.30 – 17.45 CET SESSION 3

Moderator: Anita Singha, American University Washington College of Law (USA)

Ana Ballesteros Pena, University of A Coruña (Spain) and Kelly Hannah-Moffat, University of Toronto (Canada)

Risk in the immigration detention system in Canada

Souheil Benslimane, Jail Accountability and Information Line (J.A.I.L) and David Moffette, University of Ottawa (Canada)

When the State Promotes “Alternatives to Immigration Detention”: Institutional Co-optation, Condition-Based Carcerality, and Abolitionist Visions

Jona Zyfi, University of Toronto (Canada) and Audrey Macklin, University of Toronto (Canada)

The Role of Privatization in Canada’s Immigration Detention Centres

17.45 – 18.15 CET Break

18.15 – 19.30 CET SESSION 4

Moderator: Cristina Fernández Bessa, University of A Coruña (Spain)

Francesca Cancellaro, University of Tuscia (Italy)

Immigration detention and the Italian “Closed Ports” policy

Özgün Topak, York University (Canada)

Hotspot as a Biopolitical Borderzone: The Violence of Containment

Julia Manek, Goethe University (Germany)

Mapping Migration Detention: Estaciones Migratorias, Espacios Torturantes

19.30 – 19.45 CET Break

19.45 – 21.00 CET SESSION 5

Moderator: Stephanie Silverman, Partner, ThinkingForward and International Advisor, International Detention Coalition

Raquel Matos, Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Portugal) y Francesca Esposito, University of Oxford (United Kingdom)

From the decision to migrate to the detention experience: an intergenerational approach

Ioannis Papadopoulos, University of Portsmouth (UK)

If this ain’t detention, what is it then? On criminalizing unaccompanied migrant minors through administrative detention, under the scope of the UNCRC. The case of Greece

Dale Ballucci and Sam Ghebrai, Western University (Canada)

A Helping Hand, But Not for All: Examining the Systematic Harms of Guidelines 3

21.00 – 21.15 CET Final remarks and future plans

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Alison Mountz

Alison Mountz is professor of geography and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research explores how people cross borders, access asylum, survive detention, resist war, and create safe havens. Mountz’s books include Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (Minnesota); Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States (California, with Jenna Loyd); and The death of asylum: hidden geographies of the enforcement archipelago (Minnesota). The American Association of Geographers awarded Seeking Asylum the 2010 Meridian Award for outstanding scholarly work, and The Death of Asylum the 2020 Globe Award for public understanding of geography. Mountz directs Laurier's International Migration Research Centre and edits the journal Politics & Space.

The Death of Asylum and Asylum’s Afterlives

The Death of Asylum: hidden geographies of the enforcement archipelago (University of Minnesota Press 2020) draws on research on island detention to argue that we must shift islands from periphery to centre of understandings of the governance of migration. In the borderlands where people seek protection, the death of political asylum unfolds: at once physical, ontological, and political. Yet the story of displacement does not end there; conflict and displacement continue. Contemporary geopolitics engender both the displacements that land asylum seekers on islands, and the afterlives of their search. People displaced by US occupation, for example, make their way to Australia, but are held in detention on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus, only to then find themselves ‘traded’ or sponsored for resettlement in North America. This is but one example of asylum’s afterlives: the informal arrangements states now engage in to govern mobility. This talk explains the death of asylum and explores asylum’s afterlives, including the informal restructuring of refugee protection.

Yolanda Vázquez

Yolanda Vázquez is Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. Her scholarship focuses on the legal and structural consequences of placing immigration enforcement within the U.S. criminal system. Specifically, she examines the way in which migration enforcement influences the laws, policies, and practices of the criminal system and the consequences. One such consequence she explores is the way in which policing migration through the U.S. criminal system exacerbates racial disparities within both the immigration and criminal justice system. Professor Vázquez’ work is recognized both nationally and internationally. Along with various law review articles and book chapters, she is co-editor of the book, ENFORCING THE BOUNDARIES OF BELONGING: RACE, CRIMINAL JUSTICE, AND MIGRATION CONTROL (M. Bosworth, A. Parmar, Y. Vázquez eds., Oxford University Press 2018).

Reinforcing Racial Order Through Crime and Migration Policies

Over the last three decades, criminology and legal scholars have increasingly explored the way in which crime and migration policies influence and shape the carceral system. Although a growing number of these scholars have recognized the way in which crime and migration policies disproportionately impact migrants racialized as non-white, the use of these laws, practices and policies as a mechanism to reassert the racialized world order that systems such as imperialism, colonialism, and settler colonialism created, has been less explored. Notwithstanding the fact that the increasingly harsh immigration enforcement laws of Europe and its member states, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, have coincided with the increasing movement of those racialized as non-white, the use of these laws and policies as a global racial project remains in the shadows. But without this exploration, our understanding of the true purpose and impact will remain limited. In framing it as a reaction to the perceived threat to the growing diversity of white countries, migration and crime policies are understood, not only, to control, regulate, and reorder the movement of its nonwhite citizens, but also to serves as a means that reasserts, reestablishes, and legitimizes the racial ordering outside of the nation state.

About the event

The workshop is part of the project Governmigration: Governing irregular immigration through detention: Discourses en practices from an interdisciplinary approach. The project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 796197.

This event is being relocated because of the censure imposed by Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) for violation of academic freedom. For more information, please see CAUT Censure and https://censureuoft.ca