Abstract
In Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States, Jenna Loyd and Alison Mountz intervene in the literature on “crimmigration,” border policing and detention, and the intersection of race and immigration analysis. They analyze the historical transformations of the border beyond the physical space between Mexico and the United States to account for the expansion of deterrence, detention, and deportation in and around the Caribbean through a historical comparative study of Haitian and Cuban attempts to migrate to the United States and obtain refugee status from the period of the Cold War to the present day. In doing so, the authors re-center the history of the current state of immigration policy (culminating in the immigration policies of the 1990s and early 2000s) squarely within both anti-Latinx policies in the southwest and anti-blackness in the United States.
As geographers, they focus on local spaces of control, particularly detention centers in Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, and New York. Their analysis is also transnational in order to include Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the waters between the Caribbean and Florida, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Bahamas, and other sites where U.S. Coast Guard boats, detention centers and holding sites, tent camps, and processing centers collectively worked, as they argue, to deter and detain migrants before they reached the U.S. mainland. These latter strategies, in effect, left potential migrants and asylum-seekers in almost permanent states of “legal liminality” (to use Menjívar’s term) or legal limbo offshore, always with the possibility of eventual deportation (“voluntary” or coerced).
Through case studies divided by chapters, the authors reveal how the collective strategies of local politicians and U.S. presidents, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Coast Guard, and political allies in the Caribbean laid the groundwork for offshore detention and deportation of potential migrants and, in the United States, the use of jails, retired military bases, and privately run detention centers as a way to sequester migrants and refugees and keep them from successfully “reaching” the United States to make the case for their residency.
The authors make an important contribution to the history of border policing in the United States and expand this history beyond the U.S. nation-state to what they call “transnational carceral spaces” (p. 16) in and around the Caribbean. Students and researchers in the fields of Immigration, Criminology Studies, and Latinx and Black Studies will find this work particularly useful.