The place of ‘race’ in understanding immigration control and the detention of foreign nationals

Abstract

This article develops thinking about ethnicity and difference and its relationship to contemporary immigration control and detention. I argue that current detention practices and debates about migration and border control can best be informed by a broader historical conception of ‘racism’, which reflects connections of power, subjugation and exploitations articulated through racism, to those associated with class, gender and religion. The influence on current immigration control policies of colonialism is not sufficiently reflected in the literature on race and immigration. I argue that the detention of foreign nationals can be explained to an extent by historical processes that encourage use of criminalization and racism to embed marginalization, the purest expression of which is physical removal through deportation. The article also seeks to better connect debates about race and marginalization within and between borders, which can in turn help to understand why prisons and detention centres are disproportionately filled with poorer, often non-white foreign nationals.

Keywords

Colonialism Frantz Fanon immigration detention racism xeno-racism

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