Resisting “Massive Elimination”: Foucault, Immigration, and the GIP

Abstract

In 2014, mainstream debates about immigration—a frequent topic of news headlines in the United States—shifted to the subject of what was widely reported as “the new immigration crisis”: an influx of migrant children from Central America.¹ Frequently described as a “surge,” this new topic of intense national debate occasioned the rehearsing of long-standing discourses surrounding border security, criminal invasion, and illegality. But national debate and discussion of what should be done about this “surge” also shed light on a central aspect of practices surrounding immigration rarely made visible in the media: immigrant detention. Popular culture in the United States is rife with representations of prisons—from mainstream news magazines to widely watched shows like OZ and, more recently, Orange Is the New Black. The prison seems a ubiquitous part of cultural production and consumption in the United States. But while, as Angela Davis states in Are Prisons Obsolete?, “the prison is one of the most important features of our image environment” (even as what actually happens within prisons remains largely invisible), spaces of immigrant detention are rarely represented.² For this reason, it was all the more striking when, during national discussion about the “surge,” images of Central American children in detention centers made their way to mainstream news media outlets.