UC San Diego

This study generates a discussion between the immigrant rights movement and the prison abolition movement. The dialogue bridges contemporary migrant criminalization, imprisonment, detention, and family separation, to the longer history of imprisonment of Blacks in the U.S. It attempts to displace exceptionalist readings of migrant policing and detention and demonstrate how these population control practices are made possible through the ideological and material labor developed in response to post-Civil Rights Black rebelliousness. Specifically, it considers the criminalization of state dependency that was attributed to Black women who were marked as "breeders" of criminality. These constructions provided ideological fuel for the neoliberal transformation of the early 1970s that resulted in constructing Blacks as expendable within the U.S. labor market and reliance on imprisonment as a solution to the creation of expendable bodies. This development was accompanied with a shift in migrant labor relations, moving largely from the Bracero Program, which relied on contracted migrant laborers, to undocumented workers. The expansion of the service economy in the U.S. and changes in federal immigration legislation of 1986 increased the presence of migrant women. Nativist fears generated over the permanent settlement of migrant women and their families drew from existing tropes about Black motherhood and criminalized migrants, in large part through the notion of "public charges." Similar to Blacks, the response is increased reliance on the criminal justice system, which resulted in Latina/o migrants constituting the largest ethnic group in federal prison. Drawing from the experiences of jailed, imprisoned, detained, and deported migrant women gathered through an interdisciplinary research methodology consisting of ethnography, archives, media discourse analysis, and interviews, this dissertation demonstrates that migrant women's criminalization is central in regulating racial neoliberal labor relations. Their criminalization constructs them as irrecuperable subjects, separating their productive form their reproductive labors. A critical feminist conceptualization of U.S. captivity is advanced in this study and it accounts for the centrality of migrant women's bodies in maintaining U.S. global dominance. Nativist discourse marks migrant women's bodies as the origins of an external racial threat. Immigration control policies serve to contain, and in the case of incarceration and deportation, dispose of "the threat."