States and human immobilization: bridging the conceptual separation of slavery, immigration controls, and mass incarceration

ABSTRACT

Immigration controls and incarceration both comprise state efforts to limit people’s freedom of movement. Usually analyzed separately, both are part of the legacy of slavery. In this paper, I examine the British Empire’s first implementation of immigration controls against ‘coolie labour’ from its colony of British India following the abolition of slavery in 1835. I also examine the implementation of methods of control and discipline enacted against formerly enslaved people in the United States following its abolition of slavery in 1865. Just ten years after abolition, the U.S. also passed its first immigration controls, the 1875 Page Act. I argue that both immigration controls and mass incarceration were state methods aimed at weakening people’s position in the capitalist labour market and, more generally, to weaken people’s ability to realize social justice. Together, immigration and carceral controls created racialized and gendered categories of people denied access to the mythical institutions of liberal democracy: liberty, fellowship, and equality. Both also strengthened nationalism(s) through the production of a U.S. ‘nation’ secured against ‘criminals’ and ‘foreigners.’ By making connections between immigration controls and mass incarceration, I argue, we can more clearly recognize that the success of prison abolition and No Borders movements are, together, integral parts of the unfinished project to realize liberty.

KEYWORDS:

• Slavery
• mobility controls
• criminalization
• immigration policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is estimated that more than half of all people moving from Europe to the English colonies of North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came as indentured servants (Potts 1990).

2. From 1757 until the India Act of 1858, the British East India Company had ruled much of the Indian subcontinent. Transference of authority to the British Crown in 1858 ushered in the period of British rule known as the Raj. Under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, the British gained direct control over Hong Kong and Canton, Shanghai, Amoy, Fuzhou and Nigbo were opened up as nodes in the British-organized and controlled trade in opium.

3. People racialized as ‘Asians’ were also excluded from the right to naturalize until the 1940s (Haney-Lopez 1996, 44).

4. The promise of ‘forty acres and a mule’ was written by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman in January 1865 and approved by President Lincoln. Each freed family was to be allotted a plot of land no larger than 40 acres and lent a mule by the army on the islands and coastal regions of the state of Georgia. This order was explicitly reversed by President Andrew Johnson who succeeded Lincoln upon his assassination. Johnson ordered that any land allocated to freed Black people be re-titled to its previous White owners.

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Nandita Sharma

Nandita Sharmais Professor of the Sociology Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. She is the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020).