Biden's First Year in Office, Understanding E-Carceration, DeSantis Wants Florida to Become a 287(g) State, Migrants in Detroit, What I'm Reading, and More
Tomorrow marks one year since Joe Biden took office as President, which means we’re going to see a flurry of report card-style evaluations of Biden’s performance on immigration.
NPR is reporting this morning on immigrant rights activists who supported Biden’s bid for president but now feel let down by the lack of meaningful progress on immigration reform. The National Immigration Forum’s “One Year In” report takes a more neutral approach and focuses on forward-looking policy proposals. Aline Barros at VOA accurately points out that despite big promises on the campaign trail, “much of the immigration policy architecture of the Trump years endures.” The Migration Policy Institute is set to host a virtual event this morning called “Biden at One: Assessing the Administration’s Immigration Record.“
If you follow immigration closely, these reports will feel like reading cliff notes to a book you read. But if you don’t follow immigration closely, or you want to catch up on everything that happened in the past year, these reports can provide very helpful summaries. I’m not going to wade into the fray of evaluating Biden. I’d rather talk about other things. Such as the following…
In this Issue:
“Understanding E-Carceration” Book Release with Ruthie Gilmore and James Kilgore
Governor DeSantis Wants Florida to be a 287(g) State
MPI Finds Detroit Home to Many Middle Eastern Immigrants
PolitiFact Hiring Lead Immigration Reporter
What I’m Reading: “Island of Hope” by Megan Carney
Research Finds Cars Are More Important Than Citizenship for Wages
1. “Understanding E-Carceration” Book Release with R.W. Gilmore and James Kilgore
Haymarket Books hosted a book release talk yesterday afternoon with geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore and author James Kilgore on Kilgore’s new book “Understanding E-Carceration.” The term e-carceration refers to the various forms of electronic monitoring that are now being used to surveil, track, and manage a variety of people in the United States today, from those who have served prison terms to migrants who are awaiting their court hearings.
A growing genre of academic and popular literature has sought to conceptualize e-carceration (what we in the immigration world would call alternatives to detention) not as a break from mass incarceration and jail time, but a new form of geographically diffuse carceral technology that is part and parcel of prison assemblages. In his talk, Kilgore puts it this way: “Electronic monitoring is not an alternative to incarceration, but an alternative form of incarceration."
The talk is up on YouTube already. If you’re interested in immigration, you may also be interested in understanding more about the continuities between the immigration system and the criminal justice system that this discussion provides.
2. Governor DeSantis Wants Florida to be a 287(g) State
Florida already has about 50 jurisdictions enrolled in 287(g) agreements, most of them signed during the second half of the Trump administration. But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants more. Two recently-proposed bills in the Florida legislature that DeSantis is pushing would make it mandatory for counties in Florida to enter into 287(g) agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and would require counties to honor ICE detainers, share information with federal immigration authorities, and proactively participate in immigration enforcement. The bills would also further restrict cities’ ability to pass laws and policies known as “sanctuary city” policies that aim to restrict local immigration enforcement. A federal judge already blocked similar proposals to restrict sanctuary city-style policies last year, saying:
“Based on the evidence presented, the court finds that plaintiffs have proven by a preponderance of the evidence that SB 168 has discriminatory or disparate effects on racial and ethnic minorities.”
But Ron DeSantis appears to believe that his straightest path to the White House is to imitate Trump’s anti-immigrant brand, so regardless of whether these bills hold up in court, Florida seems set to remain a hot spot for immigration restrictionism for the time being. Joe Biden, for his part, has been reported as saying that DeSantis doesn’t represent a real threat due to his “dull personality.”1
3. MPI Finds Detroit Home to Many Middle Eastern Immigrants
A new report from the Migration Policy Institute, written by Laura Harjanto and Jeanne Batalova, provides a detailed look at immigrants from what is called the MENA part of the world. MENA is an abbreviation for Middle East and North Africa (pronounced “mee-neh").
The report provides much of the usual demographic data you would expect but includes one observation that I find interesting. Detroit continues to receive a large number of recently-arrived immigrants and refugees from the MENA region. I taught briefly at the University of Michigan-Dearborn with my colleague Dr. Maya Barak (check her work out here), where the rich and vibrant presence of Middle Eastern migrants was evident across the city.
In fact, I remember at the time that my students (many of them present or future police officers themselves), told me then that the city was home to the first female police officer who wore a hijab, including while on duty. I wanted to check to provide some evidence of this and found not only that this was true at the time (see this report from 2016) but that a military officer who works for the Air Force JAG (Judge Advocates General) in Detroit has also become the first woman to wear a hijab in the military.
To me, this suggests not only that migration continues to remake norms in interesting ways (these women are working in law enforcement and the military, after all), but that this cultural syncretism is happening in the Midwest.
4. PolitiFact Hiring Lead Immigration Reporter
I’m not in the immigration journalism business, but it’s nice to see that PolitiFact is hiring for an immigration reporter that will find and interpret complex immigration data. Might I suggest that that person check out trac.syr.edu at some point during their orientation process?
5. What I’m Reading: “Island of Hope” by Megan Carney
I recently started reading Dr. Megan Carney’s new book “Islands of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean.” Carney is an anthropologist at the University of Arizona and her book examines the reception of Mediterranean migrants on the island of Sicily at a time with Sicilians (and Italians) themselves were scapegoated for the economic woes of the European Union. The book examines the complex solidarities and tensions between migrants and local residents from a very human perspective, yet still very rooted in a critical understanding of the systems and structures that shape these communities’ experiences. I’m assigning this to students in my immigration course that starts in less than a week (yikes!).
6. Research Finds Cars Are More Important Than Citizenship for Wages
One of my projects for the first quarter of 2022 is to review over a decade of writing drafts, literature notes, field notes, and more—essentially my personal digital and physical archives—to pull together material for some major writing projects this year. In the course of that work, I have been coming across research articles that shaped my thinking early on in graduate school.
One of the articles published in Urban Geography2 involves a study of the effects of various factors on wage increase. The finding that stuck out to me when I read it the first time was that car ownership had a more significant effect on wage increase than citizenship. Here’s the direct quote from the article:
“Citizenship increases the weekly wage by 1.33 times and owning an automobile increases weekly wage by 1.45 times when other variables are held constant.”
I think this finding is important because of the way that citizenship can be treated as an inherent good, an obligation for immigrants, and a benefit to be guarded. These conceptualizations of citizenship are, in my view, ideological in the sense that they obscure the social and material realities of life in the United States.
In fact, as this research shows, citizenship itself is not as much of a good, if we are measuring that good in terms of basic wage advantages, as simply owning a car. Or to put it another way, the social and laboring geographies of the United States are built more with automobile ownership in mind than with citizenship in mind.
It’s a simple finding, but one worth contemplating. If citizenship is such a cherished good in the U.S., why doesn’t citizenship alone confer more economic, social, and political benefits? Or does it? Feel free to chime in with additional data or perspectives.
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I can’t imagine that Joe Biden emerges unscathed from a fight over “dull personalities”.
Clark, W. A. V., & Wang, W. W. (2010). The Automobile, Immigrants, and Poverty: Implications for Immigrant Earnings and Job Access. Urban Geography, 31(4), 523-540. doi:10.2747/0272-3638.31.4.523.