Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Between Exploitation and Repression: The Immigration Industrial Complex and Militarized Migration Management

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Marxism and Migration

Part of the book series: Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ((MAENMA))

Abstract

This chapter locates the emergence of an immigration industrial complex profiting from the detention and deportation of precarious migrants within the development and historical trajectory of distinct migration regimes in the United States. On the one hand, the IIC emerged as an integral component of a migration regime centered around the illegalization and criminalization of low-wage migrant and immigrant workers during the era of neoliberal capitalist globalization. On the other hand, the IIC undermines this very regulatory regime by systematically removing such workers from the labor market. I consider the possibility that this contradiction may be partially resolved through transition to a nascent regime of militarized migration management in which the state plays a more active role in the formal regulation of precarious migrants by promoting guestworker programs and various legalization schemes for certain undocumented immigrants, while denying entry to surplus populations with highly securitized borders.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 119.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    The United States also went to great lengths to interdict boats carrying Haitian asylum seekers on the high seas, and to pay for their detention elsewhere. See FitzGerald (2019). The Immigration and Naturalization Service, which had been part of the Department of Justice since 1940, was disbanded in 2003. Its “enforcement” functions were transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), while US Citizenship and Immigration Services assumed responsibility for its “service” functions. These two agencies were housed alongside Customs and Border Protection within the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS), while the immigration court system and its Executive Office of Immigration Review remain under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice.

  2. 2.

    For their part, neo-Foucaultian scholars conceptualize the IIC as a self-reproducing “economy of power.” See Doty and Wheatley (2013).

  3. 3.

    I am borrowing the term “precarious migrants” from Susan Ferguson and David McNally (2014). Nonetheless, I believe that the distinction between more transient migrant workers and settled immigrants with deep community ties remains analytically useful. I prefer to use phrases such as “migrant and immigrant workers,” but at times I use “precarious migrants” for the sake of simplicity. I use “undocumented,” “unauthorized,” and “illegalized” interchangeably.

  4. 4.

    My method and aims are thus quite different from those of the political scientists who draw on the “new institutionalism” to develop their own theories of US “immigration regimes.” See Fitzgerald (1996), Tichenor (2002), and Zolberg (2006). These authors are more interested in detailing how the idiosyncratic workings of US political institutions shape the development of US immigration regimes, whereas I wish to underscore that these seemingly chaotic and contradictory policies tend to meet the labor needs of capital in the long run. My understanding of state action is strongly influenced by Poulantzas (1978/2013). For an insightful neo-Gramscian interpretation of US immigration regimes, albeit one that does not consider the construction of qualitatively distinct regimes over time, see Bonzom (2015).

  5. 5.

    One might also look at the development of migration policy and border control in Australia over the past several decades as a precocious example of militarized migration management.

  6. 6.

    This is true even though the Trump administration pulled the United States out of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration signed by 152 representatives of the UN General Assembly in December 2018. See Feldman (in press).

  7. 7.

    See also Ferguson and McNally (2014). For a study of the racialization of the global labor market, see Persaud (2003). It is often remarked that “race” and class are co-constitutive of each other, but this implies a false equivalence between two categories that are, as Barbara Fields points out, of an entirely different order. See B. J. Fields and K. E. Fields (2012). It is more accurate to speak of the racialization of class relations, rather than the interaction of mutually constitutive but nonetheless reified categories.

  8. 8.

    From its very inception, US citizenship has incorporated important racialized and gendered assumptions. See Boris (1998).

  9. 9.

    Marx distinguishes four separate strata within the industrial reserve army (sometimes referred to as the relative surplus population): floating, latent, stagnant, and those relegated to pauperism (1867/1976, pp. 794–797).

  10. 10.

    For critiques of the ATD industry, see Borcila and Carrillo (2013); Gómez Cervantes et al. (2017), Jay (2019), and Martinez-Aranda (2020). Migrants bear the costs of the ankle bracelets themselves, sometimes paying hundreds of dollars a month to both ICE and private bond companies.

  11. 11.

    Some authors speak of a “border-security complex” rather than an IIC. While I am not able to maintain a rigorous analytical distinction between the fortification of border zones and the detaining and deportation of immigrants in this essay, these phenomena should not be conflated.

  12. 12.

    In her excellent analysis of the “prison fix” in California, Gilmore (2007) calls attention to the existence of four different surpluses: surplus finance capital, surplus land, relative surplus population, and surplus state capacity.

  13. 13.

    This is why Marx uses the terms industrial reserve army and relative surplus population somewhat interchangeably, depending on which aspect (exploitation or redundancy) he is emphasizing.

  14. 14.

    As political conflict turns more and more middle-class professionals into refugees, startups have appeared on the scene to sift through massive refugee pools with an eye towards locating individuals who may be of interest to capital as skilled workers. See Conboye (2020).

  15. 15.

    Robinson (2020) discusses the ways in which immigrants are profitable as both exploited workers and the objects of accumulation by repression, but he does not consider the potential for contradiction between these two distinct modes of accumulation. Trujillo-Pagán (2014) briefly recognizes a tension between the IIC and the interests of employers of precarious migrants, but she explains it away by pointing out that the IIC also produces migrant “illegality” in the long run. Gilmore likewise suggests that the contradiction of “tightening labor markets through deportation of reserve labor force cadres to prison or abroad … may only be an illusion when employers are able to exploit actual and implied undocumented workers’ political powerlessness” (2007, p. 77). In fact, there is a very real contradiction here.

  16. 16.

    For a critique of nativist-centric analyses of US immigration policy, see Tichenor (2002, p. 29) and Zolberg (2006, pp. 7–8).

  17. 17.

    See also Golash-Boza’s (2015) discussion of mass deportation within the “neoliberal cycle of capitalism.”

  18. 18.

    Of course, there are many other points of possible inter-capitalist conflict over migration policy. Some industries employ more migrants than others, larger firms may be better equipped than smaller ones to navigate the government bureaucracy regulating so-called guestworker programs, and so on.

  19. 19.

    For my own view on the relationship between particular stages of world capitalism and social structures of accumulation, see Feldman (2021).

  20. 20.

    Even prior to the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union (EU), the size of the EU’s unauthorized population was less than half of that of the United States, despite the EU’s overall population being nearly two thirds greater (Connor et al., 2019; Passel & Cohn, 2018).

  21. 21.

    For an excellent study of these processes from the perspective of one industry heavily reliant on undocumented labor, see Bonacich and Appelbaum (2000).

  22. 22.

    For an overview of this immigration, see Portes and Rumbaut (2014). Hart-Celler also imposed a quantitative limit of 120,000 total visas on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. Prior to this, immigration from the Western Hemisphere had only been subject to qualitative restrictions, the enforcement of which tended to vary according to prevailing political and economic conditions.

  23. 23.

    The 1976 law also annulled the exemption from labor certification requirements for parents of US citizens under the age of 21. This exemption had provided a means by which many undocumented Mexican workers, “who found it virtually impossible to get certified” (Minian, 2018, p. 70) could quickly regularize their status after having a child in the United States.

  24. 24.

    The Bracero program was an exploitative system of temporary contract labor in existence from 1942 to 1964 that had annually brought up to 400,000 Mexican agricultural workers to the United States during its late 1950s heyday.

  25. 25.

    From 1980 to January 1, 2019, nearly 35 million immigrants received LPR status (Baker, 2019).

  26. 26.

    Examples of such reforms in Mexico include the country’s admission into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1986, the entry into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, and the punishing terms of a US Treasury-led bailout of the country following the peso crisis of 1995. To give a sense of the current wait times, Mexicans who received family-based preference visas in November 2021 had, depending on their relationship to the sponsor, submitted their applications between 1997 and 2000. See https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/visa-bulletin/2022/visa-bulletin-for-november-2021.html.

  27. 27.

    Accrual of 180 days of unlawful presence subjects individuals who leave the country to a three-year ban on returning. One year of unlawful presence leads to a ban of 10 years. Since applicants must normally return to their own countries in order to apply for visas, these bans on reentry impose a significant hurdle for undocumented immigrants who are not exempt from the family-based preference quotas (spouses and unmarried children of US citizens and parents adult citizens) who could otherwise claim these visas, since this must normally be done at a US embassy abroad.

  28. 28.

    By 2007, Mexicans comprised 57% of the 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. A decade later, the number had fallen to 47%.

  29. 29.

    For the government’s own analysis of the failure of employer sanctions, see, inter alia, United States General Accounting Office (1999), and United States Government Accountability Office (2005).

  30. 30.

    Fernandes shows that corporate interests also played an important role in the creation of DHS in the first place.

  31. 31.

    Unsurprisingly, its current advisory board is stocked with former government officials. https://www.bordersecurityexpo.com/advisory-board/. For more discussion of the ties between private industry and government, see Center for International Human Rights (2020).

  32. 32.

    See https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/svip.

  33. 33.

    Some have framed the showdown in Arizona as an example of the drive to preserve “White hegemony” through eradication of the undocumented coming up against the interests of capital. See Díaz (2011) and Michalowski (2013). Pearce certainly sought a close relationship with nativist groups and militias operating in Arizona (see Steigerwald, 2012), and as stated earlier, the demonization and scapegoating of undocumented migrants plays an important role in legitimating capitalist globalization. It is nonetheless difficult to sustain the view that the effort to reproduce “White hegemony” was the primary cause behind SB 1070 and other anti-immigrant laws in Arizona, given the indisputably central role of a certain fraction of capital in drafting and promoting the legislation. Even border vigilante groups such as American Border Patrol, which operates its own drones on the Arizona-Sonora border, were chasing profits. Founder Glenn Spencer started a small company called Border Technologies Inc. in the hopes of landing a lucrative contract for its products with either the Department of Defense or DHS (Fernandes, 2007, pp. 185–186).

  34. 34.

    This was largely due to migrant justice groups’ calls to boycott Arizona businesses.

  35. 35.

    Since the bill had been crafted to withstand legal challenges by buttressing, rather than diverging from, existing federal law, the ruling was rather unexpected. In fact, two prominent scholars of immigration law call the Obama administration’s decision to even sue Arizona over SB 1070 “a nearly unprecedented move” (Cox & Rodríguez, 2020, pp. 149–150).

  36. 36.

    The Consequence Delivery System includes formally charging unauthorized border crossers en masse with illegal entry or illegal re-entry through Operation Streamline, transporting migrants hundreds of miles from their site of apprehension before deportation, and placing Mexican deportees on flights to their home states. A Migration Policy Institute report found that the share of Mexican deportees who said they planned on attempting to re-enter the United States fell from 95% in 2010 to 49% in 2015, while the absolute number who said they planned on returning fell 80% from 2005 to 2015 (Schultheis & Ruiz Soto, 2017; see also Department of Homeland Security Border Security Metrics Report, 2020b, pp. 26–28 and 53–56). I have avoided referencing figures for the number of deportations because these can be quite misleading without carefully distinguishing between various phenomena, such as formal removals and voluntary departures. Complicating matters further, the IIRIRA combined exclusions at the border and deportations from the interior into a single removal procedure. There is nonetheless a consensus that the number of individuals removed from the interior of the United States began to increase after 1996, and that another uptick occurred after 2006. In 2011, the number of removals from the interior surpassed those of returns for the first time. See Singer (2015).

  37. 37.

    Researchers have long used border apprehensions as a crude proxy to measure the flow of undocumented migration into the country, leading some observers to characterize the surge in the “encounters” (i.e., apprehensions by the Border Patrol, those deemed “inadmissible” at points of entry, and Title 42 expulsions) of single adults from Mexico at the southern border in the spring and summer of 2021 to the great wave of undocumented migration from that country during the 1990s. See Fox (2021). While these numbers undoubtedly capture an important increase in attempted crossings by Mexican labor migrants, such an assessment is misleading because it ignores the significant increase in the state’s capacity to apprehend a greater share of unauthorized border crossers over the past quarter century. According to the most recent DHS estimates, the number of successful unlawful entries declined 92% between 2000 and 2018 (from 2.1 million to 173,000), with the Border Patrol detecting “an increasingly comprehensive share of all attempted unlawful border crossers.” See Department of Homeland Security Border Security Metrics Report (2020b, p. 16). These data must certainly be interpreted with great caution. It is likely that the reported increase in efficacy is at least partly due to the decline in the overall number of attempted crossings during this period, and that efficacy may decrease as attempted crossings begin to rise. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that the percentage of unauthorized crossings that were successful during the spring and summer of 2021 (which are not included in the above data) was as high as it was in the 1990s.

  38. 38.

    Some argue that the most recent wave of deportations after 2006 was in no small part a response to the massive mobilizations of millions of immigrants and their supporters in the spring of 2006 against the extremely punitive Sensenbrenner Bill (Gonzales, 2014), while others point to the 2008 Great Recession and the collapse of the construction industry in particular (Golash-Boza & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013).

  39. 39.

    For an analysis that cites Department of Labor statistics on job loss and creation in the first few months of the pandemic, see Lee (2020). When interpreting this data, however, it is important to not confuse the immediate effects of an economic crisis with long-term trends, and to recognize the limitations of viewing the labor needs of capital through the simple prism of supply and demand—that is, in abstraction from any particular migration regime.

  40. 40.

    As of 2017, two thirds of all undocumented immigrants had been living in the country for at least a decade (Lopez et al., 2021). For statistics on the country of origin of those apprehended in 2021, see Fox (2021).

  41. 41.

    As of May 31, 2022, Customs and Border Protection had expelled 2,040,653 individuals under the controversial Title 42 authority. For COVID-19 related border and immigration restrictions more generally, see Loweree et al. (2020).

  42. 42.

    It is worth noting that border militarization is a fully bipartisan issue. In fact, executives and top employees of 13 leading corporations in the “US border industry” contributed three times more to Joe Biden ($5,364,994) than to Donald Trump ($1,730,435) during the 2020 election cycle. See Miller and Buxton (2021, p. 1).

  43. 43.

    For comparison, IRCA’s amnesty program called for a probationary period of roughly one year. The US Citizenship Act would also introduce a pilot program for Regional Economic Development visas, allowing the entry of up to 10,000 additional immigrants per year whose employment “is essential to the economic development strategies of their local communities.” See Douglas (2021). This points to another important aspect of militarized migration management: an overhaul of the system of permanent legal immigration so that the interests of capital take precedence over family reunification.

  44. 44.

    Visa overstays likely account for more than half of the undocumented immigrants who have arrived within the last five years, but DHS has made significant strides in tightening up its biometric data collection (Lopez et al., 2021; US Department of Homeland Security, 2020a).

  45. 45.

    These communities often revolved around subsistence farming on communal plots of land known as ejidos. The privatization and criminalization of the social reproduction of immigrant families is an extremely important aspect of recent anti-immigrant legislation, which I have not been able to address here. For more on this, see Wilson (2000).

References

Download references

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank William I. Robinson and the editors of the present collection for their insightful comments on earlier drafts, which have greatly improved the content and presentation of my argument.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    David B. Feldman

Authors
  1. David B. Feldman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to David B. Feldman .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. New College, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Genevieve Ritchie

  2. Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Sara Carpenter

  3. Ontario Institute for studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Shahrzad Mojab

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Feldman, D.B. (2022). Between Exploitation and Repression: The Immigration Industrial Complex and Militarized Migration Management. In: Ritchie, G., Carpenter, S., Mojab, S. (eds) Marxism and Migration. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98839-5_10

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation