Skip to main content
University of California Press

Boats, Borders, and Bases

Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States
by Jenna M. Loyd (Author), Alison Mountz (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $95.00 / £80.00
Publication Date: Mar 2018
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9780520287969
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 22
Request an Exam or Desk Copy(opens in new window)RightsLink(opens in new window)Read an Excerpt(opens in new window)
Recommend to your Library (PDF)(opens in new window)Rights and Permissions

About the Book

Discussions about U.S. migration policing have traditionally focused on enforcement along the highly charged U.S.-Mexico boundary. Enforcement practices such as detention policies designed to restrict access to asylum also transpire in the Caribbean. Boats, Borders, and Bases tells a missing, racialized history of the U.S. migration detention system that was developed and expanded to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants. Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz argue that the U.S. response to Cold War Caribbean migrations established the legal and institutional basis for contemporary migration detention and border-deterrent practices in the United States. This book will make a significant contribution to a fuller understanding of the history and geography of the United States’s migration detention system.

About the Author

Jenna M. Loyd is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Alison Mountz is Professor of Geography at Wilfrid Laurier University and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at the Balsillie School of International Affairs .

Table of Contents



Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction

PART ONE. RACE AND THE COLD WAR GEOPOLITICS
OF MIGRATION CONTROL

1. “America’s ‘Boat People’”
Cold War Geopolitics of Refuge
2. Militarizing Migration
The Politics of Asylum and Deterrence

PART TWO. BUILDING THE WORLD’S LARGEST DETENTION SYSTEM

3. “Not a Prison”
Building a Deportation Hub in Oakdale, Louisiana
4. “Uncle Sam Has a Long Arm”
War and the Making of Deterrent Landscapes


PART THREE. EXPANDING THE WORLD’S LARGEST
DETENTION SYSTEM

5. Safe Haven
The Creation of an Off shore Detention Archipelago
6. Onshore Expansion
Consolidating Deterrence through Criminalization
and Expulsion
7. Post-9/11 Policing
Back to the Future

Coda

Notes
References
Index

Reviews

"Although this book makes a much-needed contribution to critical geography, migration, race, criminology, and legal scholarship, it also nicely complements recent work-like From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America, which seek to identify the rise of migrant detention throughout the US. This book takes that task one step further by theorizing spaces and processes of deterrence and detention beyond the interior of the US while making an even broader contribution to research on multijurisdictional patchworks."
— International Criminal Justice Review
"Long-neglected by scholars of mass incarceration and migration alike, the U.S. immigration detention system is attracting increasing concern and media attention in the Trump era. Much of this coverage, however, lacks historical context. A majority of scholarship on migrant detention focuses on the explosive growth of the system since 9/11 and on the US-Mexico border as a primary enforcement site. Boats, Borders, and Bases contributes to an emerging body of scholarship that fills gaps in these narratives by illuminating the deeper and less visible Cold War and Caribbean roots of the contemporary detention system."
— Criminal Law & Criminal Justice Books
"A book with an urgent ethical and legal purpose."
— Religious Studies Review
“Exploring where few scholars have ventured—‘remote’ sites in the United States and overseas—Loyd and Mountz greatly enrich our understanding of how the enormous U.S. border policing regime and (im)migrant confinement apparatus have arisen. Via sharp historical-geographical analysis, they powerfully illuminate the sordid intersection of militarism, racism, and national exclusion.” 
—Joseph Nevins, Professor of Geography, Vassar College

“We have been waiting for this book. Loyd and Mountz bring together multiple histories crucial to understanding U.S. practices of migrant detention and imprisonment. This book should be required reading for anyone invested in challenging the criminalization of migrants and the escalating violence of U.S. policing and imprisonment regimes.”
—A. Naomi Paik, author of Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II