Carceral Shadows
The chapter stretches across two centuries, from the antebellum period to the dawn of the twenty-first century, to reveal the blueprint of immigration control that marked, regulated, controlled, and expelled migrant peoples from the nation. This immigration control regime racially targeted Asian and Latina/o noncitizens as “racial bookends” to the twentieth century that allowed the state to associate in the public mind migration with criminality while issuing a strict legal definition that catalogued the migration of these two racial peoples as “criminal aliens,” invoking “’perpetual foreignness.” In this long survey of immigration control, the chapter considers how particular moments of economic crisis and depression, public health fears, foreign wars, and national security anxieties fed racial fears over new migrant groups that were subsequently labeled as “enemy aliens” and criminalized within an immigration control regime that resorted to carceral practices. What made this detention regime distinct from criminal law was the practice of plenary power and administrative punishment where the state enacted criminal prosecutorial power over immigration but denied due process to noncitizens.