Description
Book SynopsisStories 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.
Trade ReviewA timely, welcome, and innovative addition to the rich scholarship on mass incarceration...[and] immigration....This is an ambitious book, one that deftly incorporates the now rather well-known history of anti-immigrant politics, exclusionary laws and practices, nativist policies, Supreme Court decisions, and foreign entanglements. However, by placing immigrant detention at the center of his work, Young forces readers to grapple with the magnitude of why and how the United States has incarcerated millions of immigrants, as well as the experiences of those who found themselves confined behind bars. Furthermore, by profiling the experiences of immigrants who were housed in hospitals, insane asylums, and charitable establishments, Young includes institutions that might at first glance seem like a part of the history of mental health or philanthropy and not a part of the broader history of immigrant detention. * Kathleen Mapes, American Historical Review *
In Forever Prisoners, Elliott Young homes in on case studies of communal and individual detention in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. He seeks to prove how the country's two vast systems of policing and immigrant detention have been inextricably linked during this entire time period, and not just in recent decades. Over the centuries, the United States has used different places to incarcerate immigrants—prisons, islands, insane asylums, hastily-constructed camps—and maintained an historical and consistent concern about detaining foreigners. * Lori A. Flores, Reviews in American History *
Forever Prisoners offers a compelling account of the evolving immigration detention system. With thoughtful sources detailing the lives and voices of non-citizen detainees, the book reads like an intimate account of the world of individuals locked in the oppressive U.S. immigration system and the history that developed it. * Miguel Girón, Southwestern Historical Quarterly *
Throughout, Young brings complex legal, institutional, and demographic history to life through individual stories. The book is uniquely situated at the interstice of two subjects that have generated voluminous literature but have been treated separately -- undocumented immigration and mass incarceration ... this moving work humanizes immigration, past and present. * T. Mackaman, CHOICE *
Forever Prisoners is a searing indictment of US immigration policy as revealed through case studies of Chinese incarceration at McNeil Island Prison, the imprisonment of immigrants deemed 'insane; during the Progressive Era, the abduction and imprisonment of Japanese-Peruvian citizens by American agents during WW II, the indefinite imprisonment of Cuban Marielito refugees in the 1980s and 1990s, and the criminalization and deportation of undocumented immigrants under the Obama and Trump presidencies....Throughout, Young brings complex legal, institutional, and demographic history to life through individual stories. The book is uniquely situated at the interstice of two subjects that have generated voluminous literature but have been treated separately—undocumented immigration and mass incarceration....This moving work humanizes immigration, past and present. * Choice *
An altogether sobering look at a system of punishment founded on racial injustice and going strong. * Kirkus *
We have long needed a history of immigrant detention, and Forever Prisoners delivers. Drawing on archival documents as well as his own experience as an expert witness in recent asylum cases, Young brilliantly continues the dismantling of America's 'nation of immigrants' myth and instead shows how our long history of criminalizing migration has led us to build the world's largest system for imprisoning immigrants, a nation of immigrant prisons. This is an essential read for anyone invested in building a more just society. * Erika Lee, author of America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States *
Tightly organized around five compelling case studies, Young explores the broader carceral landscape of prisons, insane asylums, war camps, and detention centers that have caged non-citizens in the United States since the late nineteenth century.Full of surprising historical details and offering important insights drawing from immigration and prison studies, the book makes visible the full human and racial dimensions of this country's immigration policies, and speaks with an urgent voice to contemporary debates surrounding US immigration policy and the carceral state. * Julian Lim, author of Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands *
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. * A. Naomi Paik, author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
