“They Will Destroy Themselves Wanting Purely American”: Labor and Carceral Immigration Enforcement in the U.S. Pacific Northwest

Leah Montange

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023, vol. 113, issue 2, 409-424

Abstract: This article examines the upheaval associated with the extension of carceral immigration enforcement into a particular rural county in Washington State. Migrant workers in shellfish, cranberry, and tourism industries began to leave the county, either through the forced mobility of deportation or quasi-voluntarily, to rejoin deported family or to avoid deportation. This process simultaneously constrained the agency of undocumented workers and presented employers with a destabilized race and labor regime that they represented as a labor shortage. In this situation, the local race and labor regime was destabilized, to the detriment of local capitals. This article extends the understanding of the regulation of labor via carceral immigration enforcement, arguing for an understanding of the place-specific and conjunctural nature of the articulation of immigration control and labor regimes. Such an approach reveals how immigration enforcement’s many functions, including the sovereignty-producing and political capital-producing functions, can work in contradiction with the labor regulating, social control functions.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2104689

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