Reading Recs on Immigration Detention

as I write my own book on the same

I have a few big articles brewing which I’m excited to share soon. But for now, given the soul-focusing crunch of writing a book in under five months (pant, pant, blow — as the LaMaze pattern goes) I’m sharing a bit about what I’ve been reading, which has been aplenty.

It’s been about ten weeks since I signed with Haymarket to write a book on immigration detention shutdown campaigns, likely to be titled How to Close a Camp. I’ve drafted seven (just about eight) chapters, have turned in two so far to my editor, and have about two to go. My deadline is Jan. 15 (another breath) which is close enough for me to start a countdown (I haven’t) and basically feels like tomorrow. What’s most hulkingly left is a chapter on ICE/Border Patrol enforcement in US cities — as in the mayhem unleashed on LA and Chicago — a synthesizing conclusion, as well as a very careful edit and a butter-knifing of the whole caboodle.

For that remaining chapter on ICE enforcement: if you’re in Chicago, LA, or anywhere else that has seen a blitz of federal enforcement and have a story, an observation, a revelation, a solution, or a tip to share, I’d like to hear from you. My Signal handle: johnw.06.

Or just reply to this email.

The Books

-Michelle Castañeda shook me out of something of a stupor with her book, Disappearing Rooms. I’ve read a lot of books about immigration and borders over the last 15 years or so. Of the multitude I’ve poured over, Castañeda has written one of the more original. Though it’s published by Duke and dripping with high theory, her clarity of thought and deep care shimmers through: she’s not entranced by her own thinking (as are too many academic writers) she’s instead applying it. Throughout, she reflects on the meaning of accompaniment and the architecture of immigration court rooms as she dissects what she calls “the back alleys of government.”

“If we want to accompany another person, it is not enough to advocate for them from a safe distance,” Castañeda writes. “Accompaniment means inhabiting the spaces they inhabit, which are generally spaces of struggle, danger, or isolation.”

-CLR James, author of Black Jacobins (which has produced some great book covers (see bottom)) wrote Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In while detained on Ellis Island in the 1950s. Given the whitewashing of Ellis Island into a beacon of welcome, it’s easy to forget that for decades it functioned as an immigration prison. James looked at America through the lens of a whale, writing one of the most sui generis and profound exegeses of Moby Dick that exist.

“Then this is the crowning irony of the little cross-section of the whole world that is Ellis Island,” James wrote. “That while the United States Department of Justice is grimly pursuing a venomous anti-alien policy, and in the course of so doing disrupting and demoralizing its own employees desperately trying to live up to their principles, the despised aliens, however fiercely nationalistic, are profoundly conscious of themselves as citizens of the world.”

-We have a lot to learn from the original abolitionist movement in the United States, attorney and activist Andrew Free told me during a recent conversation in which he recommended The Slave’s Cause. The book retells the story of the abolition movement to end slavery in the United States from the lens of abolitionists, which were initially and in large majority Black, though they have at been (with some obvious and high profile exceptions) written out of that history. “As most abolitionists understood, the story of abolition must begin with the struggles of the enslaved,” Sinha writes.

One of the more illuminating lessons from the book is how truly radical the abolitionists mostly were, fighting for the rights of women and migrants. (Even William Lloyd Garrison’s legacy has been tendered: he was not only an abolitionist, but an anti-capitalist.)

“Abolitionists were never single-issue agitators,” Sinha writes. “They linked the abolition of slavery with the plight of Native Americans, labor, and immigrants, holding no truck with nativism or racism.”

-In Immigration Detention Inc, Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon take a helpful approach to laying out the basic business model of immigration detention, as they keep a very narrow focus, using five different detention centers to analyze this particular predatory business model.

-Shimoda’s The Afterlife of Letting Go, about Japanese internment, has one of the best openings to a book I’ve read in years. His prologue, “Paper Flowers,” begins:

One evening, many years ago, but not so many years ago, a Japanese man, out for a walk in the American desert, saw a ‘rare and unusual flower’ on the far side of a barbed wire fence, and, leaning closer to look at the flower, was shot in the heart.

-And though I’ve read around the Golden Gulag, and have engulfed a few essays from and about Wilson Gilmore, I’m glad to finally have the excuse to dive in to her masterwork. Is there a better historical contextualizing of the rise of the prison industrial complex? (Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow rivals.) Golden Gulag is an extensive and incredibly well researched power-mapping — something I try (in much shorter form) in a chapter of my book.

For the beauty of it

And then, for some spiritual ballast, and for the beauty of it, I’m also reading poetry.

The first, The Gate of Memory, is a companion to Shimoda’s The Afterlife is Letting Go: a collection of poems by descendants of Nikkei (Japanese emigrants) who were imprisoned in World War II era concentration camps in the United States. I found in an early poem what I’m planning to use as my epigraph:

was the sugar so sweet you forgot the sugarcane?

-from Anne Yukie Watanabe’s “instructions to, 1942”

The second book of poems, Borderlings, from Tucson poet and environmental advocate Russ McSpadden, is a gorgeous, often haunting portrayal of the state violence imposed on the US-Mexico borderlands, as well as the resilient spirits (including McSpadden’s own) who are resisting the destruction.

From “The Road to Quitobaquito”:

the shadows of the wall cast nets woven of

rigor mortis anthem sitting, stilling, flowering away

a hymnal of high-fevered sensors surely pocked

the closed road to Quitobaquito Springs

and we played dead and hopeful in our minds

and we sat in old desert, thin dead suns with legs

with field notes scratched with details of

aquatic species of the Sonoran

Sonoyta mud turtles, Quitobaquito springsnails & pupfish

watching the last of their kind mating in a visqueen pond

And last…

here are those Black Jacobin covers: