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The author presents her book, "The Migrant's Jail," which Princeton University Press describes as "a century-long history of immigrant incarceration in the United States." Registration requested.
About the book (from the publisher):
Today, U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains an average of 37,000 migrants each night. To do so, they rely on, and pay for, the use of hundreds of local jails. But this is nothing new: the federal government has been detaining migrants in city and county jails for more than 100 years. In The Migrant’s Jail, Brianna Nofil examines how a century of political, ideological, and economic exchange between the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the world’s largest system of migrant incarceration. Migrant detention is not simply an outgrowth of mass incarceration; rather, it has propelled carceral state–building and fostered intergovernmental policing efforts since the turn of the twentieth century.
From the incarceration of Chinese migrants in New York in the 1900s and 1910s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in Gulf South lockups of the 1980s and 1990s, federal immigration authorities provided communities with a cash windfall that they used to cut taxes, reward local officials, and build bigger jails—which they then had incentive to fill. Trapped in America’s patchwork detention networks, migrants turned to courts, embassies, and the media to challenge the cruel paradox of “administrative imprisonment.” Drawing on immigration records, affidavits, protest letters, and a variety of local sources, Nofil excavates the web of political negotiations, financial deals, and legal precedents that allows the United States to incarcerate migrants with little accountability and devastating consequences.
About the author:
Brianna Nofil is a historian of the modern United States, with a focus on migration, incarceration, and law. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2020 and holds B.A.s in History and Public Policy Studies from Duke University. Brianna’s dissertation received the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Immigration & Ethnic History Society. Her research has also received the Kathleen Preyer Prize from the American Society for Legal History. Her work has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, the Goizueta Foundation at the University of Miami Cuban Heritage Collection, and others.
Presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
AGE GROUP: | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Humanities | Civic Life | Author Talks | *Registration Requested |
TAGS: | NEH |
