Review essay Detaining noncitizens: law, security, crime, and politics

摘要

On 29 April 2012 Greece opened its first immigration detention center. It was built to hold 1200 persons, and the authorities intend to build five more centers by the end of 2013 to contain the 6000 border-crossers who arrive each month. While EU and global finance ministers turn Greece's economy inside out, Greece's undocumented population has become a popular scapegoat for rising unemployment. Despite massive cuts to public spending, constructing detention centers provides an opportunity for politicians to (attempt to) regain some legitimacy with voters and to demonstrate its ability to govern external borders to other EU member states. Greece's investment in detention infrastructure follows the formation of EU's FRONTEX and its first multicountry deployment, the election of anti-immigrant politicians in multiple EU member states, the proliferation of detention in the EU's neighbor states, and unprecedented resourcing of immigration-related detention in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and, until recently, Australia. Used to contain, document, disperse, and redirect transboundary migrants, detention is a powerful performance of the state's claim to legitimate violence. Unfortunately, immigration detention has also become a popular spatial strategy for addressing (and constructing) a multitude of problems: drugs, crime, border-crossing, terrorism, and illegality.