Part 8: On Labor and Economics

Part Eight, “On Labor and Economics” provides readings and resources for understanding the economic and political foundations of cycles of migrant labor flows to the United States and immigration enforcement, and tools for exposing the costs of the immigration detention system.

Readings

• Balderrama, Francisco and Raymond Rodríguez. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
• Bonds, Anne, “Building Prisons, Building Poverty: Prison Sitings, Dispossession, and Mass Incarceration,” in Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis. University of Georgia Press, 2012.
• Camp, Jordan. Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State. University of California Press, 2016.
• Capetillo-Ponce, Jorge, “Framing the Debate on Taxes and Undocumented Workers: A Critical Review of Texts Supporting Proenforcement Policies and Practices,” in Keeping Out the Other: A Critical Introduction to Immigration Enforcement Today. Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Feltz, Renee and Stokely Baksh, “Business of Detention,” in Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis. University of Georgia Press, 2012.
• Fernandez, Deepa, “The Immigration-Industrial Complex: Booming Business at the Expense of Immigrant Rights?” in Targeted: Homeland Security and the Business of Immigration. Seven Stories Press, 2007.
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.
• Hahamovitch, Cindy. No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor. Princeton University Press, 2011.
• Harcourt, Bernard E. The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order. Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Golash-Boza, Tanya. Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism.New York University Press, 2015.
• Greene, Judith A. “Entrepreneurial Connections: Incarceration as a Business Opportunity.” In Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment. The New Press, 2002.
• Herivel, Tara and Paul Wright. Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor. New York: Routledge, 2003; Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration. The New Press, 2007.
• Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books, 2006.

• Mauer, Marc, “What’s Class Got to Do with It?” in Race to Incarcerate. The New Press, 2006.
• Mize, Ronald L. and Alicia C.S. Swords, Consuming Mexican Labor: From the Bracero Program to NAFTA. University of Toronto Press, 2010.
• Paret, Marcel, “Legality and Exploitation: Immigration Enforcement and the US Migrant Labor System,” Latino Studies 12:4 (2014).
• Patler, Caitlin and Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, “The fiscal and human costs of immigration detention and deportation in the United States,” Sociology Compass 2017;11:e12536.
• Robinson, William I., and Xuan Santos. "Global capitalism, immigrant labor, and the struggle for justice." Class, Race and Corporate Power 2, no. 3 (2014): 1. 
• Selman, Donna and Paul Leighton. Punishment for Sale: Private Prisons, Big Business, and the Incarceration Binge. Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.
• Shull, Kristina, “‘A Recession-Proof Industry’: Reagan’s Immigration Crisis and the Birth of the Neoliberal Security State.” Border Criminologies, 2015.
• Stevens, Jacqueline. “One Dollar Per Day: The Slaving Wages of Immigration Jail, from 1943 to Present,” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 29:3 (2016).
• Walker, D.R. Penology for Profit: A History of the Texas Prison System 1867–1912. Texas A&M University Press, 1988.
• Zilberg, Elena. Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Reports

Milked: Immigrant Dairy Farmworkers in New York State, Workers’ Center of Central New York, 2017.

The Cost of U.S. Immigration Enforcement and Border Security, American Immigration Council, January 2017.

The Economic Impacts of Long-Term Immigration Detention in Southern California, IRLE at UCLA, 2016.

Banking on Detention 2016 Update, Detention Watch Network and Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), June 2016; Banking on Detention: Local Lockup Quotas & the Immigrant Dragnet, Detention Watch Network, June 2015.

“Detention Costs Still Don’t Add Up to Good Detention Policy.” National Immigration Forum, 2014.

Prisoners of Profit: Immigrants and Detention in Georgia), ACLU, 2012.

Costly and Unfair: Flaws in US Immigration Detention Policy, Human Rights Watch, May 2010.

In the News

“How a Private Prison Company used Detained Immigrants for Free Labor,” Mother Jones, April 2017.

“Thousands of immigrant detainees sue private prison firm over forced labor,” Los Angeles Times, March 2017.

“Trump’s immigration proposals will cost the country billions,” ThinkProgress, January 2017.

“American Slavery, Reinvented,” The Atlantic, 2015.

More Resources

Undocumented Immigrants’ State and Local Tax Contributions, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

Texas Prison Bid’Ness: The Business of Detention, Grassroots Leadership and Justice Strategies:

Math of Immigration Detention, National Immigration Forum

Weekly Chart: The Cost of U.S. Immigration Detention Centers, Americas Society / Council on the Americas

Immigration Detention: How Can the Government Cut Costs? Human Rights First.

5 Easy Facts About the Price of Immigrant Detention, California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance

How much it costs ICE to deport an undocumented immigrant, CNN Money.

After Attica: Found Poems on Prison Labor: