“They Will Destroy Themselves Wanting Purely American”: Labor and Carceral Immigration Enforcement in the U.S. Pacific Northwest

Abstract

This article examines the upheaval associated with the extension of carceral immigration enforcement into a particular rural county in Washington State. Migrant workers in shellfish, cranberry, and tourism industries began to leave the county, either through the forced mobility of deportation or quasi-voluntarily, to rejoin deported family or to avoid deportation. This process simultaneously constrained the agency of undocumented workers and presented employers with a destabilized race and labor regime that they represented as a labor shortage. In this situation, the local race and labor regime was destabilized, to the detriment of local capitals. This article extends the understanding of the regulation of labor via carceral immigration enforcement, arguing for an understanding of the place-specific and conjunctural nature of the articulation of immigration control and labor regimes. Such an approach reveals how immigration enforcement’s many functions, including the sovereignty-producing and political capital-producing functions, can work in contradiction with the labor regulating, social control functions.

本文研究了将监押移民执法扩展到美国华盛顿州某农业县所导致的剧变。通过驱逐出境或半自愿强制性流动, 贝类、蔓越莓和旅游业的移民工人开始离开该县, 重归被驱逐的家庭或免于被驱逐出境。这一过程, 也限制了无证工人的作用, 给雇主带来了不稳定的种族和劳工制度（即, 劳动力短缺）。这动摇了局地的种族和劳工制度, 损害了局地资本。本文扩展了对基于监押移民执法的劳工管制的理解, 号召对移民控制和劳工制度的局地化和联合本质的理解。本文揭示了许多移民执法功能（包括主权生产功能和政治资本生产功能）与劳工管制和社会控制功能的矛盾。

Este artículo examina el alboroto asociado con la extensión de las formas de reprimir con cárcel la inmigración en un condado rural particular del estado de Washington. Los trabajadores migratorios de las industrias de mariscos, arándanos y turismo empezaron a abandonar el condado, bien por movilidad forzada de expulsión, o de manera casi voluntaria, para reunirse con sus familias o para evitar la deportación. Este proceso restringió simultáneamente la agencia de los trabajadores indocumentados y presentó a los empleadores un régimen racial y laboral desestabilizado, que ellos representaron como una escasez de mano de obra. En tal situación, el régimen racial y laboral local fue desestabilizado, en detrimento de la economía local. Este estudio amplifica el entendimiento de la regulación laboral por medio de la aplicación del régimen carcelario de inmigración, abogando por la comprensión de la naturaleza específica del lugar y la coyuntura de la articulación del control migratorio y los regímenes laborales. Este enfoque revela cómo la diversas funciones de la aplicación rigurosa de las leyes migratorias, incluyendo las funciones de producción de soberanía y de capital político, pueden trabajar en contradicción con las funciones de la regulación laboral y social.

Key Words:

• carceral geography
• deportation
• immigration enforcement
• migrant labor
• race and labor

关键词:

• 监押地理
• 驱逐出境
• 移民执法
• 移民劳工
• 种族和劳工。

Palabras clave:

• aplicación de la legislación migratoria
• deportación
• geografía carcelaria
• raza y trabajo
• trabajadores migrantes

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Michelle Buckley, Deborah Cowen, Emily Gilbert, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Kanishka Goonewardena, and Rachel Silvey for their reading and engagement with this article. Thank you to the Labour and Economic Geography Research Cluster at the University of Toronto for workshopping an earlier version of this article. Three anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal also made generous and generative comments that improved this article.

Notes

1 All interview participants are referred to with pseudonyms; identifying details have been omitted or altered.

2 Throughout Pacific County, the most common terms used by the English speakers to refer to Mexican-origin and Latinx populations are Mexican and Hispanic. Spanish speakers I talked with referred to themselves and others as Mexicanos/as or Latinos/as. I refer to those who were born in Mexico and living in Pacific County generally as Latinx. The “x” at the end of the word is a convention for demarcating gender neutrality. I also occasionally refer to people as Mexican or Mexican-origin where I am specifically referring to a person’s country of origin and citizenship.

3 2010 was the most recent census when I conducted field work, and for the period of time that this article addresses. It is likely that the Latinx population surpasses the official statistics, because members of this group with high levels of precarious or irregular immigration status might avoid responding to censuses.

4 According to my analysis of data provided by ICE to the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) and Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), in Fiscal Year (FY) 2015, interior arrests in the Seattle Field Office Region on average accounted for 61.9 percent of the size of NWDC’s mandated minimum population, given average lengths of stay that year. In FY 2016, interior arrests accounted for 60.3 percent of the size of NWDC’s mandated minimum population; in FY 2017, it was 74.8 percent.

5 ICE arrests in Pacific County continued at a slower pace through the rest of 2019 and 2020, and virtually stopped with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leah Montange

LEAH MONTANGE is the Bissell-Heyd Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in American Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1A1, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research addresses the relations between human life and state power in contexts of bordering, detention, and labor—contexts where freedom, unfreedom, and mobility are at stake.