Forever Prisoners

How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System

Elliott Young

Provides a broad historical frame for immigrant incarceration with individual lives and circumstances highlighted.
Shows that the rate of immigrant incarceration in the early 20th century is similar to today.
Reveals the many locations in which immigrants have been locked up, including immigrant detention centers, insane asylums, INS enemy camps, and prisons.

Forever Prisoners

How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System

Elliott Young

Description

Stories of non-US citizens caught in the jaws of the immigration bureaucracy and subject to indefinite detention are in the headlines daily. These men, women, and children remain almost completely without rights, unprotected by law and the Constitution, and their status as outsiders, even though many of have lived and worked in this country for years, has left them vulnerable to the most extreme forms of state power. Although the rhetoric surrounding these individuals is extreme, the US government has been locking up immigrants since the late nineteenth century, often for indefinite periods and with limited ability to challenge their confinement.

Forever Prisoners offers the first broad history of immigrant detention in the United States. Elliott Young focuses on five stories, including Chinese detained off the coast of Washington in the late 1880s, an "insane" Russian-Brazilian Jew caught on a ship shuttling between New York and South America during World War I, Japanese Peruvians kidnapped and locked up in a Texas jail during World War II, a prison uprising by Mariel Cuban refugees in 1987, and a Salvadoran mother who grew up in the United States and has spent years incarcerated while fighting deportation. Young shows how foreigners have been caged not just for immigration violations, but also held in state and federal prisons for criminal offenses, in insane asylums for mental illness, as enemy aliens in INS facilities, and in refugee camps. Since the 1980s, the conflation of criminality with undocumented migrants has given rise to the most extensive system of immigrant incarceration in the nation's history. Today over half a million immigrants are caged each year, some serving indefinite terms in what has become the world's most extensive immigrant detention system. And yet, Young finds, the rate of all forms of incarceration for immigrants was as high in the early twentieth century as it is today, demonstrating a return to past carceral practices.

Providing critical historical context for today's news cycle, Forever Prisoners focuses on the sites of limbo where America's immigration population have been and continue to be held.

Forever Prisoners

How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System

Elliott Young

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Building the Largest Immigrant Detention Regime on the Planet
Chapter One: Chinese at McNeil Island Federal Prison in the Late Nineteenth Century
Chapter Two: Nathan Cohen, the Man Without a Country
Chapter Three: Japanese Peruvian Enemy Aliens during World War Two
Chapter Four: "We Have No End." Mariel Cuban Prison Uprising in Oakdale and Atlanta
Chapter Five: "A Particularly Serious Crime." Mayra Machado in an Age of Crimmigration
Conclusion: Indefinite Detention from Guantanamo, Cuba to Jena, Louisiana
Notes
Index

Forever Prisoners

How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System

Elliott Young

Author Information

Elliott Young, Professor of History, Lewis and Clark College

Elliott Young is Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII and Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border and co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 200 asylum cases and has written for the Huffington Post, the Oregonian, and the Utne Reader.

Forever Prisoners

How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System

Elliott Young

Reviews and Awards

"We have long needed a history of immigrant detention, and Forever Prisoners delivers. Drawing on archival documents as well as his own experience as an expert witness in recent asylum cases, Young brilliantly continues the dismantling of America's 'nation of immigrants' myth and instead shows how our long history of criminalizing migration has led us to build the world's largest system for imprisoning immigrants, a nation of immigrant prisons. This is an essential read for anyone invested in building a more just society." - Erika Lee, author of America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States

"Tightly organized around five compelling case studies, Young explores the broader carceral landscape of prisons, insane asylums, war camps, and detention centers that have caged non-citizens in the United States since the late nineteenth century.Full of surprising historical details and offering important insights drawing from immigration and prison studies, the book makes visible the full human and racial dimensions of this country's immigration policies, and speaks with an urgent voice to contemporary debates surrounding US immigration policy and the carceral state." - Julian Lim, author of Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

"By centering the stories of foreign-born people subjected to imprisonment, Elliott Young's Forever Prisoners demonstrates how this particular detention regime has not only escalated in the past several decades but, more important, grows out of deep roots reaching back to the nineteenth century origins of immigration restriction. Young widens our view of what counts as immigrant detention over time and how the United States has ensnared differently outcast groups into its varied cages — including offshore islands, mental institutions, martial detention camps, and refugee camps, as well detention centers, jails, and prisons. Forever Prisoners is crucial book for anyone interested in the convergence of prison and immigration regimes." - A. Naomi Paik, author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary