Arresting movement: The history of German immigration detention beyond the camp

Abstract

Across the globe, immigration detention has been marked by physical and psychological abuse. Researchers and activists alike have sought to understand why a seemingly administrative practice such as immigration detention is so violent. To answer this question, the existing scholarship situates immigration detention within the space of legal exceptionalism where the safeguards of regular law do not apply. This, the literature argues, causes the violent nature of immigration detention. In contrast, I provide a different genealogy of immigration detention by tracing its history through vagrancy and anti-Roma laws and the use of prisoner-of-war camps in World War I and how they gave rise to the institutionalization of immigration detention targeting Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe in 1920s Germany. This brings to the fore the colonial, capitalist, and racist underpinnings of immigration detention and reveals that immigration detention was designed to exclude or exploit the “racial other” and is thus by default violent. What this ultimately shows is that immigration detention is not a space of exception which allows for the inhumane treatment of those inside it, but rather that processes of racialized dehumanization render people excludable from the state's legal protections and allows for the abuse they experience in immigration detention.