Beyond Walls and Cages: Deportations Surge Under Obama

Deportations Surge Under Obama Deportation Nation

Beyond Walls and Cages

Bridging Prison Abolition and Immigrant Justice Movements

Description and Purpose:
In the US, some 2.4 million people are imprisoned while 1.6 million migrants have been deported since 1996. On a world scale, while most people’s movement is constrained by a system of global apartheid, policing strategies are shared across national borders that are commonly used to crack down on political organizing and dissent. What are the connections between the prison industrial complex and migration policies that are symbolized by deadly cages and walls? How do these different state policies both divide and connect different groups of people across nationality, citizenship, race, class, gender, and sexuality? What work do these sturdy tools of division, isolation, and control do at this moment of economic crisis? What are the ideologies that make walls and cages seem so durable, and what cracks in these edifices can movements for social justice and liberation open up?

Making links between prison policies and migration policies is important for being able to understand and challenge white supremacy, US imperialism, capitalism, and militarization. We want to understand the ways in which the prison abolition and immigrant justice movements are opposing state violence and the creative ways in which they are working to build a world without walls and cages. How might organizing around the “right to stay” be a way of bridging communities who face economic dislocation – whether through free trade policies or gentrification – and repressive state policies alike?

What are we doing?
We are editing a book that will bring materials from people who are directly affected by these systems together with work from organizers, activists, advocates, artists, poets, and researchers. Our goal is for the book to become available from an independent press in early 2010.

In September and October, 2009, we are also taking to the road to get a closer look at the ways in which immigrant detention is building on the system of mass incarceration in the South and Southwest. How are these systems shaping the livelihoods and organizing of communities who are most affected by hyper-policing? And what changes, if any, is the current economic crisis having on these systems?

About the editors:
Jenna Loyd is a scholar-activist who is a member of the Syracuse-based Detainment Task Force, which organizes against migrant detention and raids. Matt Mitchelson is a geographer researching imprisonment and working with former prisoners. Andrew Burridge is a geography graduate student and activist working towards freedom of movement within the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and beyond.

If you are interested in learning more about or contributing to this project, please see http://beyondcagesandwalls.blogspot.com/, or contact Jenna Loyd at jloyd@syr.edu

Beyond Walls and Cages

Monday, August 2, 2010

Deportations Surge Under Obama | Deportation Nation

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