The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration

I read The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration a few days after Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the forty-seventh president of the United States. Books like this one are needed more than ever as many of us brace for the uncertain yet promised inequities that lay ahead, especially regarding the future of migrant livelihoods and expansion of the carceral apparatus.While substantial scholarship on the history of migrant incarceration has been published in the last few years, including Detain and Punish (2019), Forever Prisoners (2021), The Deportation Machine (2021), Detention Empire (2022), and my own The Shadow of El Centro (2021), The Migrant’s Jail is a welcome and needed addition to these studies. Nofil’s book uniquely examines the changing and growing system of jails that confined migrants for more than a century.Nofil does a fantastic job of moving back and forth between a local and national history of migrant incarceration. This review will mainly center on the strengths of examining this long history through the lens of racial capitalism: The author does not explicitly name or detail this concept, but it encapsulates the story that unfolds throughout the book.The Migrant’s Jail starts by examining the incarceration of Chinese migrants during the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. From the start, Nofil points out that Chinese migrants were racialized as “a separate race, with customs, habits, and bodies that made them fundamentally unassimilable and dangerous” and links this racialization with capitalist profit motivations (17). Racializing migrants paid money. As Nofil explains, the Franklin County Sheriff made a dollar a week per federal prisoner held at Franklin County Jail. The funneling of federal money to local communities since the nineteenth century quickly expanded the carceral state and, as Nofil argues, turned migrants into commodities.While immigration officials would have the public attribute overcrowding to increased migration to the United States and support expanding the resources available to immigration services, it was the financial incentives for holding migrants in jails that explained the overcrowding that Nofil documents. Incarcerating migrants has been a money-making scheme for a long time, as is made clear throughout the book. In turn, overcrowding further expanded the migrant detention economy, as it resulted in the creation of migrant-specific incarceration facilities. Racial logics, such as racializing migrants as dangerous and needing confinement, further provided the immigration control machine with the rationale for justifying its expansion.A particularly cruel discourse circulated about Chinese migrants at the turn of the twentieth century. Immigration officials claimed that Chinese migrants were “ideal prisoners” who were happy to be captive due to societal stereotypes that rendered them “docile, subservient, and effeminate” (29–30). While immigration officials describe migrants as content and passive, Nofil demonstrates that their resistance threatened the system to the point that officials feared migrants being released on bail (57). Engaging in hunger strikes, gaining the trust of officials to plot escapes, threatening suicide to gain freedom, and mobilizing attorneys and embassies, confined migrants were anything but passive.The year 1910 was a turning point in the history of migrant incarceration, as the Mann Act, which made “prostitution or debauchery” a felony, resulted in the incarceration of a greater number of white women (61). While the Progressive Era saw a new generation of people challenging confinement, there was also a growing societal double standard about folks better fitted for incarceration. As Nofil shows, “Locals, politicians, and the courts . . . expressed serious discomfort when women, children, and European migrants” were incarcerated, while nonwhite migrants continued to be racialized as criminals (63).Mexican migrants, for example, were positioned as “a faceless ‘wave’ of cheap labor, that could be removed via informal proceedings rather than legal deportation” during World War II (88). While deporting Mexican migrants across the border might have been more efficient and economical, Nofil also suggests that Mexicans were viewed as difficult to contain. For example, La Tuna, the country’s first federal jail, which opened in 1932, was known for a high number of escapes.Moving to the Florida region of the 1970s, Nofil centers on the racialized incarceration of Haitians and Mariel Cubans. Immigration officers, the media, and politicians framed Haitians as “the illegitimate asylum seeker,” a “disruptive, racialized threat who used the refugee system as a legal loophole,” and Mariel Cubans as a “dangerous and unassimilable” due to their acts of defiance inside spaces of detention (119, 147). Haitian women were gendered and racialized with suspicion about their reproductive potential. The federal government weaponized the anti-Blackness of these falsehoods to convince the public that they could help solve these supposed dangers by further expanding the resources at the disposal of immigration officers and further militarizing immigration enforcement.Nofil ends where the book began by asserting that the logics of migrant incarceration continue to center on the construction of racialized migrants as a “commodity that could sustain cash-strapped communities and enrich local leaders” (202). The Migrant’s Jail is an important read, especially at this moment, as it historicizes the dangers of racializing migrants, especially when immigration services weaponize this racism and thereby expand and grow the resources at their disposal to bring about further cruelty and caging.