Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment ― Detention, Deportation, and Border Control

The events of 2016 catapulted immigration policy to the forefront of public debate, and Donald Trump’s administration has signaled a harsh turn in enforcement. Yet the deportation, detention, and border-control policies that North American and European countries have embraced are by no means new. In this book, sociologists David C. Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to reconsider the immigration policies of the Obama era and beyond in terms of a decades-long “age of punishment.”

Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment takes a critical, interdisciplinary, and transnational look at current issues surrounding immigration in the U.S. and abroad. It examines key features of this age of punishment, connecting neoliberal governance, global labor markets, and the national obsession with securing borders to explain critical research and theory on immigration enforcement. Contributors document the continuities between presidential administrations and across countries from many perspectives, with chapters discussing Canada, Australia, France, the UK, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico in addition to the U.S. They offer macro-level analyses of deportations and border enforcement, analyses of national policy and jurisprudence, and ethnographic accounts of the daily life experience of the prison-to-deportation pipeline, the making of deportability, and post-deportation transitions for noncitizens. This book highlights new directions in critical immigration policy and enforcement and deportation studies with the aim of problematizing the age of punishment that currently reigns over borders and those who seek to cross them.

David C. Brotherton is professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His Columbia University Press books include Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives (2003); The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York Gang (2004); Keeping Out the Other: A Critical Introduction to Immigration Enforcement Today (2008); and Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile (2011).


Philip Kretsedemas is associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He is the author of The Immigration Crucible (2012, Columbia University Press) and Migrants and Race in the US (2013).