Abstract
Immigration is increasingly considered a security issue. Particularly after 9/11, it became a prominent part of the national and international security agendas. Within this context, in the last years, immigration detention facilities have proliferated in receiving countries.
The main purpose of this chapter is to analyse immigration detention centres in light of the “abyssal thinking” proposal, theorised by the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos and other critical approaches on the subject developed by authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Loïc Wacquant, among others.
I argue that immigration detention centres are spaces conducive to human rights violations and places, as Santos states, where “non-citizens” can be treated as “dangerous colonial savages” (Santos, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 78:62, 2007).
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
See, for example, an interesting application of the “abyssal thinking” to the Quilombos context (Águas 2011).
- 4.
We can also identify expressions of what Santos terms as “return of the colonizer” and “indirect rules” in the privatisation of detention centres, a growing and profitable business which aggravate detainee’s vulnerable situation, as we will see later.
- 5.
For a detailed list of legal instruments relevant to migration, see “Appendix B”, Global Migration Group (GMC) 2008.
- 6.
Changes that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) proposed to carry out in 2–3 years.
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- 8.
In Portugal, an asylum seeker cannot be detained.
- 9.
Testimony of a woman detained in UHSA (http://www.jrsportugal.pt).
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“Refugee from Democratic Republic of Congo who was detained in 2011 with her younger sister in a county jail in New York alongside criminal inmates” (Human Rights First (HRF) 2011, p. i).
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Statutes and Legislative Materials Cited
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Cases Cited
Moncrieffe v. Holder, No. 11–702 (Apr. 23, 2013)
Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473, 1490 (2010)
Demore v. Kim, 538 U.S. 510 (2003)
Zadvydas v. United States, 533 U.S. 678 (2001)
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Cardoso, K. (2016). “Immigrants as Detainees”: Some Reflections Based on Abyssal Thinking and Other Critical Approaches. In: Guia, M., Koulish, R., Mitsilegas, V. (eds) Immigration Detention, Risk and Human Rights. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24690-1_12
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