The Theory and Practice of Immigration Detention Workshop: Some Comparisons

Manor Road Building, site of Friday's detention workshop

Last Friday (May 21) two Oxford University graduate students -- Stephanie Silverman (Politics and International Relations) and Evelyn Massa (Sociology) -- hosted an unusually fabulous workshop, The Theory and Practice of Immigration Detention.

It turns out that Oxford has three vibrant centers devoted to immigration studies: The Refugee Studies Centre, The Centre on Migration Policy and Society (COMPAS), and the International Migration Institute. Drawing on the support of the first two, Ms. Silverman and Ms. Massa brought together researchers and advocates from across Europe to present cutting-edge findings.

A few tidbits I thought especially interesting:

1) No Detention Regulation in England = Guards Committing Assault.
In response to my mentioning during a Q and A that the U.S. holds people in immigration jails without any regulations, an eminent British immigration rights lawyer, Frances Webber, took me aside during a break and described a similar discovery she had made in 1997, following upheaval at the Campsfield detention center, just outside Oxford. The government was charging the people in their custody with various crimes associated with a riot.

Not only did the video footage reveal it was the guards who had been smashing the televisions (and the people in the centers) but the lawyers asked the government, how, absent regulations, could the government use any force at all?

Without regulations, Ms. Webber explained to the government attorneys, any use of force by a guard constituted an assault. The government lawyers' tacit agreement with this observation was suggested by the fact that they quickly drafted regulations authorizing, and also constraining, the government's use of force in immigration detention centers.

(Also, the prison industrial complex from the US is alive and well in England: the UK's Campsfield web page lists the The GEO Group Ltd as the center's contractor; the GEO Group is also a contractor for many of the large ICE facilities.)

2) Differentiated Detention Centers.
In the U.S., Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) houses people from various criminal backgrounds in the same jails and people are distinguished within them by different colored uniforms and may or may not be segregated into different sleeping areas. This system seems designed to maximize the flexibility of bed space.

In the UK, there are different levels of detention security and these vary by criminal background. In all the centers, the visits are open, not via telephones across windows, and the guards control movement by affixing wristbands to the visitors.

Some facilities are "open" so that the detained may come and go, and even at the closed facilities, people wear their own clothes. Also, at all facilities in England people may use their own cell phones and the internet.

Not surprisingly, escapes happen. But England seems willing to tolerate this as the price of avoiding collective punishment, the effect of housing noncriminals in the conditions of penal incarceration, and worse, used in the United States.

(Joseph Anderson, someone who appears to be a US citizen and has been held at the Arizona Pinal County Jail by ICE for over two years, recently told me that in the same jail people with criminal convictions have outdoor recreation each day but those in the ICE wing are lucky if they are allowed out for an hour once a week.)

3) UK Bribes Foreign Governments.
A lawyer who testifies as an expert witness on behalf of Iranians fearing persecution if they return told me that he had recently prevailed in a FOIA request and learned that the UK was paying Nigeria 250 Euros per deportee for the purpose of obtaining travel documents. Another participant mentioned an individual who was seeking asylum from Somalia and had originally entered with Gambian papers. Despite no connection to Nigeria, the UK deported him there.

4) Less Transparency in the U.S.
England has a Freedom of Information Act but the courts there are much more likely than they are here to defer to the government's reluctance to release policy or statistical information.

For instance, the government's response to a Parliamentary inquiry was to assert "diplomatic relations" as an excuse not to release data on the numbers of criminals with life sentences being deported to respective countries:

Mr. Grieve: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many prisoners from (a) Ireland and (b) each other European Economic Area country serving mandatory life sentences have been deported or removed in each of the last five years. [320071]

Mr. Woolas [holding answer 2 March 2010]: Since 2007, the UK Border Agency has removed or deported over 15,000 foreign national offenders. Of those removed or deported, less than three in every thousand previously served a mandatory life sentence.

Information from before this period could be obtained only by reviewing individual records. This would be a disproportionate cost.

As a general rule, it is our policy not to disclose the volume or characteristics of those removed to specific countries as it would jeopardise our diplomatic relations.

The above is quoted from a Parliamentary web site that contains other interesting exchanges on British deportation practices.

If you want more information on UK deportation data, this is the government website with that information.

Presentations.
The presentations ran the gamut and without striking a wrong note, from applying Giorgio Agamben's theories to Italian detention centers (rumored to be Europe's worst) to a British physician's grim and thorough review of detainee medical care. The presenters and their talk titles are here.

(Also, I just learned that "run the gamut" refers to the medieval scale, which is pretty perfect for presentations about medieval government practices. Here's what the American Heritage Dictionary says:

[Middle English, the musical scale, from Medieval Latin gamma ut, low G : gamma, lowest note of the medieval scale (from Greek, gamma; see gamma) + ut, first note of the lowest hexachord (after ut, first word in a Latin hymn to Saint John the Baptist, the initial syllables of successive lines of which were sung to the notes of an ascending scale CDEFGA: Ut queant laxis resonare fibris Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve polluti labii reatum, Sancte Iohannes).])

Let's Drink to That!

After the workshop a bunch of us headed off to a nearby pub, The King's Arms (absolutely incredible fish and chips!) and I was able to hear more about the really interesting research the graduate students are doing, including in-depth case studies of foreign nationals in England's prisons undertaken by a U.S. student who hails from Legal Aid work in New York City. (It appears as though there is a lot more fluidity between the criminal and immigration incarceration policies compared with the U.S. For instance, in the U.K., failing to cooperate with an immigration investigation by, say, not providing fingerprints, can put you in prison for a year, whereas here it would typically lead to more time in detention.)

Another student is writing about how liberal theory does and does not accommodate practices of immigration detention, a study that is path-breaking in that takes as a conceptual problem an important but heretofore marginal fact for political theorists. Placing the nitty-gritty details of immigration policy at the center stage of serious theoretical research is absolutely the right move for advancing scholarly and public discussion of our barbaric practices.

It was clear from those conversations as well as a meeting the previous week with Professor Engin Isin (editor of the journal Citizenship Studies) and conversations with Professor Matthew Gibney and his students on Wednesday at Oxford that citizenship studies, if not immigration studies, in England are producing a lot more interesting research and analysis than on this side of the pond. One thought among my colleagues was to blame this on U.S. political science, which kills any interesting subject before it can be examined in real life; that actually seems right to me.

Citizenship studies requires developing heuristics and thinking about history and narrative; political science departments in the U.S. are terrible at this. The best scholarship on this topic in the U.S. is from law professors or those in legal studies but that has different constraints.

Finally, one disappointment was that Engin had told me Agamben's influence had diminished in England but at least two presenters relied on his work quite heavily. Happily, others were eager to wrestle with Agamben's work.
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Oh, my own contribution to the workshop was a Powerpoint presentation of my data on the detention and deportation of U.S. citizens. The information will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law. The article is pithily titled "U.S. Government Illegally Detaining and Deporting U.S. Citizens as Aliens."

I showed a photo of the ICE office in Cary, North Carolina that held Mark Lyttle, but forgot to mention that it was adjacent an Oxford University Press printing plant.

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correction, thursday: the original post misspelled Engin Isin's name. It's now corrected. Also, he has a really wonderful website, including a lovely "about" description, the updated version of W.E.B. Du Bois's version of Dusk of Dawn: An Autobiography of the Concept of Race. Engin's is an autobiography of the concept of the cosmopolitan.

ICE Deporting and Detaining US Citizens by the Thousands

For the past few months I've been interviewing lawyers, ICE agents, an immigration judge, law professors, and detainees themselves in order to document the procedures ICE is using to illegally incarcerate between 3,500 to 10,000 U.S. citizens since 2004. Many of them are held in Eloy, Arizona at a detention center pictured on the left and run by the Corrections Corporation of America.

Today The Nation magazine published an article I wrote based on that research, called "On Thin Ice." You can read the article here. Future posts will share much more information that space did not permit for inclusion in the Nation article.

I'm kinda bummed that The Nation went with the image of Peter Guzman returning to the US in its online version because the Guzman case is relatively well-known and my reporting indicates that the problem goes far beyond Guzman's experiences.

If you have any other stories to add about ICE abuses, please let me know as I have decided to write a book about this.

Rep. Steve King's (R-IA) Crime Control: Deport Native-Born Men

I was just listening to Steven King, the minority member on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law suggest that although it was a shame that Peter Guzman's mother had to go through the morgues of Tijuana looking for him, relatives in the United States have to go to the morgues, too:

I would point out there are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters that go to morgues every day in America because of the failure to enforce immigration laws. 27% of inmates in penitentiaries are criminal aliens.

At least as outrageous as trying to downplay the desperation and horror of a mother searching for her U.S.-born, cognitively impaired son in Tijuana morgues, is the insinuation that criminals are more likely to be foreign born than U.S. natives.

Only a small percentage of the total prison population are in federal institutions. Most are held in state and local prisons or jails. According to the Department of Justice, 6.7% of the entire prison population is foreign-born, but about 13% of the U.S. population is foreign-born. This means that King's own demographic of the native born is overrepresented in the prison population.

Indeed an SSRC study using census data also found that within respective ethnic and racial groups, immigrants across the board were less likely than native born citizens to be incarcerated.
Considering that men are 90% of the prison population and that King is a man, perhaps his first step in controlling crime by statistical grandstanding would be to deport himself, maybe to a quiet, remedial math camp somewhere in Europe. (The man on the right in the photo from King's webpage is King.)

No One Should Be Illegal: Oklahoma Denying Health Care to Citizens without Documentation

It is a sign of the impoverishment of this country's immigration debate that the most traction to be gained against kooks who listen to Lou Dobbs comes from instances of the state misapplying its discriminatory policies, and not the inherent unfairness of the policies even if they were to be administered correctly.

The latest example of this is a report I heard this morning (Christmas) on NPR about Oklahoma denying poor legal residents access to health benefits because of rules designed to prevent undocumented aliens from receiving aid. Here's an excerpt from an article from the Oklahoma newspaper the Muskogee Phoenix:

"A law designed to remove illegal aliens from public assistance has instead denied thousands of U.S. citizens their Oklahoma SoonerCare benefits. SoonerCare is a state program through which Medicaid services are managed. The federal Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 changed how states verify the citizenship of recipients. U.S. citizenship has always been necessary, but the new law requires documentation such as a birth certificate."

Oklahoma Health Care Authority spokesperson Nico Gomez said most of the 5,841 people whose SoonerCare benefits were terminated Dec. 1 are probably U.S. citizens:

"'The reason we can make that assumption is because that has been the pattern in other states,' he said. 'Some of the letters we sent have been returned as undeliverable.'"

More direct evidence of the law limiting benefits due citizens are the demographic features of the applicants denied. The article above states: "58 percent are Caucasian; 18 percent are African-American; 13 percent are American Indian; 10 percent are Hispanic and one percent are Asian." Among the program participants, 62 percent are children.

Equally disturbing is that not only are U.S. citizens and undocumented adult aliens being denied care, but Oklahoma politicians are trying to deny prenatal care to "illegal" fetuses (and whoever else is caught in that ugly net). In a separate development, as reported in the Tulsa World on October 10, 2007, legislators in Oklahoma are trying to reverse an Oklahoma Health Care Authority policy that will allow all pregnant women to receive prenatal care. The policy is presently in effect, but is likely to be overturned by a legislature appealing to the nativist bigots who dominate blue and red states alike. According to Randy Terrill, the policy is a "'dangerous precedent' and 'we cannot allow Oklahoma to subsidize illegal activity,'" i.e., being a fetus without a state license.
The rhetoric is another case of nationalism trumping fundamentalism, a point that was made somewhat differently by a Democrat in the Oklahoma Senate,Tom Adelson: "Anyone who professes to embrace a culture of life would not turn their back on 2,800 innocent children born each year in Oklahoma."

But enough of parsing humanity. There is no rational reason that a fetus should have more claim to health care than someone who is 80, and no good reason that someone born in Mexico City should not be allowed the legal privileges of being born in Tulsa. The argument against illegality is tautology and the argument based on cost hubris. Leaving aside the pragmatic benefits of a prenatal health program touted by the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, no computer is powerful enough to produce definitive figures on the total financial impact of removing impediments to free movement, and those who have made this effort generally find the economic arguments will not support the nativists.
(Image is from U.S. government site on history of Native American health care by federal government.)

Israel Violates International Law and Moral Decency, Refusing Targets of Genocide

Sudanese refugee held in an Israeli jail because he is a national of a country Israel regards as an enemy.

One of the reasons that Adolf Eichmann gave for the "final solution" being genocide was that Jews could not be removed from Germany in any other way, since no other country would take them in sufficient numbers, including the United States. (See Hanna Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem [1963].)

In recognition of the impediments national borders pose to victims of state violence -- serving as armed guards for the perpetrators -- the United Nations passed a resolution affirming that signatories would allow all those presenting themselves as refugees due to state persecution entry into their countries and hearings to determine the legitimacy of these claims.

In yet the latest expression of its hypocrisy, symptomatic of the untenability of the international system of nation-states more generally, Israel has just turned away thousands of refugees from Darfur, without mandated hearings and in violation of their commitments under international law. Here's some of what the Washington Post reported today.

Authorities announced that they had expelled 48 of more than 2,000 African refugees who have entered illegally from Egypt in recent weeks. Officials said they would allow 500 Darfurians among them to remain, but would deport everyone else back to Egypt and accept no more illegal migrants from Darfur or other places ....

Egyptian police told the Associated Press, however, that Egypt would send the Sudanese back to Sudan. An Egyptian Foreign Ministry official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israel had sought no assurances about the future of the refugees. "Israel just said, 'Please take them,' " the Egyptian official said.

Refugees from Darfur are escaping what President Bush and others have called genocide by government-allied Arab militias against ethnic African villagers. In addition, Sudan and Israel officially are enemies, and Sudan's government has said any refugees sent back from Israel would be considered as having dealt with an enemy state and treated accordingly....

srael apparently expelled them without hearings, in contravention of a refugee accord it has signed that requires countries to determine whether deportation will subject asylum-seekers to mistreatment, said Ben-Dor, the Israeli refugee lawyer.

More than half the members of Israel's parliament, including opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, signed a petition earlier this month urging Israel not to send the refugees back to Egypt....

"The expulsion is an inhumane act that violates international law," said lawmaker Dov Khenin of the Hadash party, according to the Haaretz newspaper Web site.

If even Israel cannot abide by the only meager protection available to those facing slaughter by their states, i.e., allowing them a place of sanctuary, then this seems rather damning evidence that the nation-state is a failure and it might be time to try new rules for controlling movement and membership.

The High Costs of Paranoia

The findings section of S. 1348, the version of the Immigration Bill that the Senate passed yesterday, offers eight reasons justifying the massive expenditures contemplated for tougher border control. Seven of them provide vague statements about the need of the government to control the border, defended on the tautological grounds that the government needs to control the border. Just one finding offers a concrete dollar amount as evidence of the allegedly high costs on the U.S. government imposed by undocumented aliens immigrating:

"Border communities continue to incur significant costs due to the lack of adequate border security. A 2001 study by the law enforcement coalition United States-Mexico Border Counties Coalition found that law enforcement and criminal justice expenses associated with illegal immigration exceed $89,000,000 annually for the Southwest border counties."

Ah, but this is only law enforcement costs. What about all the other costs, including welfare benefits, health care, education? An eminent scholar on this topic, George Borjas, explains in the online Encyclopedia of Economics that that because of taxes, the economic impact of immigration is revenue neutral:

Many people believe that because a comparatively large percentage of immigrants goes on welfare, the costs to native American taxpayers wipe out the gains from immigration. But this has not been the case in recent years. The numbers show why. The present value of cash welfare benefits (such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children) received by the typical immigrant family over its lifetime is $8,700. With 6.4 million immigrant households, the total cost of assistance programs for immigrants is about $56 billion.

But immigrants also pay taxes. The present value of lifetime earnings for the typical immigrant man is $380,000. With 7.6 million working immigrants (both men and women), total earnings of immigrants are at most $2.9 trillion, of which about 40 percent, or $1.2 trillion, are paid in taxes of all forms. Because 3 percent of total revenues are allocated to cash welfare benefits, immigrants pay about $36 billion ($1.2 trillion times .03) in taxes to fund welfare programs. Comparing the $36 billion that immigrants contribute to welfare to the $56 billion they consume, immigrants consume $20 billion more over their lifetimes than they contribute. Thus, the welfare system causes U.S. natives to lose about $1.1 billion per year (in present value terms). Subtracting this $1.1 billion from the $5 billion annual increase in national income, the United States benefits from immigration, but the economic gains are small.

Of course law enforcement officials would argue that these macro figures ignore the special law enforcement burdens imposed on their local jurisdictions. Leaving aside the self-interested character of the group cited in the Senate and House versions of the Immigration bill, self-described as a coalition "comprised of the County Judges, Commissioners and Supervisors of the U. S. counties located on the border with Mexico... to address challenges facing county governments located on the U.S./Mexico border"--and that the report does not assess the revenues from immigration--once you add it all up, it's clear that the federal government would be much better off simply transferring funds to state governments, as opposed to making far higher expenditures for the purpose of preventing entry. The easy back-of-the-envelope calculations below, based on official U.S. data reports, reveal the dire consequences of Congress's apparent math illiteracy. (For more, see this.)

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the costs of implementing the various policies offered in S. 1348 at $17 billion for the period of 2008-2012, or an average of $3.4 billion/year, of which just 4% would be for additional Social Security benefits, meaning $3.27 billion would be spent on enforcement bureaucracies, technologies, vehicles and weapons for the purpose of preventing immigrants entering. Assume that the national figure for law enforcement and criminal justice costs from undocumented aliens presently is at $890 million annually (ten times the Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico costs), which is on the high end of an estimate since the costs outside this region and a few others is close to zero. (The Act itself states that at least 50% of the funding must go to the "10 States with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents" Sect. 756 (7).) And assume that Borjas is right and the economic impact of immigration is revenue neutral. And, finally, accept the Congressional Budget Office estimate that the impact on Social Security is revenue neutral (because of the increase in payroll taxes).

Hmmm.... That means Congress, by its own accounting, wants to spend $3.27 billion of federal funds on law enforcement each year to prevent aliens from entering so that they can save states and counties $890 million each year in their law enforcement costs from aliens entering.

Over the course of the five years, this means that the government will be paying $11.9 billion to indulge its paranoia.s. 1348