scholarly journals Learning to Detain Asylum Seekers and the Growth of Mass Immigration Detention in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Smita Ghosh ◽  
Mary Hoopes

Drawing upon an analysis of congressional records and media coverage from 1981 to 1996, this article examines the growth of mass immigration detention. It traces an important shift during this period: while detention began as an ad hoc executive initiative that was received with skepticism by the legislature, Congress was ultimately responsible for entrenching the system over objections from the agency. As we reveal, a critical component of this evolution was a transformation in Congress’s perception of asylum seekers. While lawmakers initially decried their detention, they later branded them as dangerous. Lawmakers began describing asylum seekers as criminals or agents of infectious diseases in order to justify their detention, which then cleared the way for the mass detention of arriving migrants more broadly. Our analysis suggests that they may have emphasized the dangerousness of asylum seekers to resolve the dissonance between their theoretical commitments to asylum and their hesitance to welcome newcomers. In addition to this distinctive form of cognitive dissonance, we discuss a number of other implications of our research, including the ways in which the new penology framework figured into the changing discourse about detaining asylum seekers.

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-70
Author(s):  
Carl Lindskoog

Immigration detention was formally reborn in the United States when the Reagan administration reinstituted a policy of detention in 1981. And at that moment, the new detention policy applied exclusively to Haitians. Chapter 3 documents how and why Haitian asylum seekers were the first targets of the revived detention program; it considers how the Reagan administration’s concerns about surging numbers of asylum seekers and anxiety over mass migration to the United States also influenced its decision to redeploy immigration detention. Finally, this third chapter documents the government’s early efforts to construct its new detention system and the movement that emerged to resist it.


Author(s):  
Jenna M. Loyd ◽  
Alison Mountz

Chapter 2 discusses the politics of deterring asylum seekers by exploring the simultaneous efforts to find new detention space for Cubans and Haitians who had already arrived in the United States and to develop “contingency” space in the event of another mass migration. This chapter focuses on the pivotal role of military bases in the ad hoc creation of U.S. migration policy during the Carter and Reagan administrations. Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers who arrived in 1980 found themselves confined on separate military facilities from Florida to Wisconsin and Arkansas. The search and negotiations surrounding new places to detain reveal racialized imaginations and seemingly irrational investments in new places to detain. The deeply contingent and contested use of decommissioned military bases led ultimately to the search for more permanent detention space.


Author(s):  
Carl Lindskoog

In Detain and Punish, Carl Lindskoog provides the first in-depth history of immigration detention in the United States. Employing extensive archival research to document the origins and development of immigration detention in the U.S. from 1973 to 2000, it reveals how the world’s largest detention system originated in the U.S. government’s campaign to exclude Haitians from American shores, and how resistance by Haitians and their allies constantly challenged the detention regime. From the Krome Avenue Detention Center in Miami, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to jails and prisons across the country, Haitians have been at the center of the story of immigration detention. Contrary to the notion that immigration detention serves a merely administrative function, this history shows the intentionally punitive design of the modern detention regime. From its origin, immigration detention was designed to deter asylum seekers and unauthorized migrants by depriving them of their liberty; to detain and punish. And while Haitians were the first to be targeted by this deterrence-through-punishment policy, Central American asylum seekers and many others were soon ensnared in the expanding web of detention. Just as immigration detention was re-emerging in the late-1970s, taking root in the 1980s, and then exploding in the 1990s, the United States was constructing a parallel system of mass incarceration for its own citizens. Racialized mass incarceration for both citizens and non-citizens thus emerged as a critical element of social, political, and economic life in the United States in the late-twentieth century. This book explains how it came to be.


2021 ◽  
pp. 2046147X2199601
Author(s):  
Diana Zulli ◽  
Kevin Coe ◽  
Zachary Isaacs ◽  
Ian Summers

Public relations research has paid considerable attention to foreign terrorist crises but relatively little attention to domestic ones—despite the growing salience of domestic terrorism in the United States. This study content analyzes 30 years of network television news coverage of domestic terrorism to gain insight into four theoretical issues of enduring interest within the literature on news framing and crisis management: sourcing, contextualization, ideological labeling, and definitional uncertainty. Results indicate that the sources called upon to contextualize domestic terrorism have shifted over time, that ideological labels are more often applied on the right than the left, and that definitional uncertainty has increased markedly in recent years. Implications for the theory and practice of public relations and crisis management are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-195
Author(s):  
Johanna E. Nilsson ◽  
Katherine C. Jorgenson

According to 2019 data, there are 26 million refugees and 3.5 million asylum seekers around the globe, representing a major humanitarian crisis. This Major Contribution provides information on the experiences of refugees resettled in the United States via the presentation of five manuscripts. In this introductory article, we address the current refugee crisis, refugee policies, and resettlement processes in the United States, as well as the American Psychological Association’s response to the crisis and the role of counseling psychology in serving refugees. Next follows three empirical articles, addressing aspects of the resettlement experiences of three groups of refugees: Somali, Burmese, and Syrian. The final article provides an overview of a culturally responsive intervention model to use when working with refugees.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Kate Hunt

How do social movement organizations involved in abortion debates leverage a global crisis to pursue their goals? In recent months there has been media coverage of how anti-abortion actors in the United States attempted to use the COVID-19 pandemic to restrict access to abortion by classifying abortion as a non-essential medical procedure. Was the crisis “exploited” by social movement organizations (SMOs) in other countries? I bring together Crisis Exploitation Theory and the concept of discursive opportunity structures to test whether social movement organizations exploit crisis in ways similar to elites, with those seeking change being more likely to capitalize on the opportunities provided by the crisis. Because Twitter tends to be on the frontlines of political debate—especially during a pandemic—a dataset is compiled of over 12,000 Tweets from the accounts of SMOs involved in abortion debates across four countries to analyze the patterns in how they responded to the pandemic. The results suggest that crisis may disrupt expectations about SMO behavior and that anti- and pro-abortion rights organizations at times framed the crisis as both a “threat” and as an “opportunity.”


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 803-804
Author(s):  
HEINZ F. EICHENWALD

Volume III of the Handbuch der Kinderheilkunde contributes another significant segment to the encyclopedic exposition of the entire field of pediatrics, which eventually will occupy nine large volumes. Volumes II and IV have previously been reviewed in this journal. Also available at this time are Volume V (Infectious Diseases) and Volume VII (The Lungs, The Heart, Cardiopulmonary Function, The Kidneys, and The Urinary System). Volume III deals with two separate fields, immunology and social pediatrics. It contains contributions by 67 authors; most authors are from Germany but some are also from Switzerland Poland, and the United States.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-498
Author(s):  
Philip Brunell

The elimination of infectious diseases in the United States during this century has been a truly remarkable achievement. Mortality from diphtheria, smallpox, pertussis, poliomyelitis, and tetanus have been reduced dramatically. Consequently, attention turned to the conquest of diseases such as measles, rubella, and even mumps. As the expertise which was acquired in these efforts is applied to elimination of infectious diseases that produce relatively less morbidity, the wisdom of pursuing these goals is critically evaluated. Skepticism stems not only from bureaucratic considerations of cost-benefit ratios, but also from the fear that vaccines are not themselves without risks. We have been sensitized, if you will excuse the pun, by a number of sobering experiences such as the use of killed measles vaccines.


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