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Immigration Detention in El Salvador
Nearly 40 percent of El Salvador’s population lives abroad and yet the country makes a concerted effort to remove undocumented foreigners. Although immigration detention is not properly regulated in Salvadoran law, the country has established a specialised detention facility, which holds more than a 1,000 people a year as they await deportation. […]
Immigration Detention in Honduras
Better known as the source of tens of thousands of undocumented children smuggled to North America in recent years, Honduras also has a long history detaining foreigners transiting its territory, at times with support from the United States. The country reportedly detained 2,526 migrants in 2013 and 1,198 in in 2012. […]
Immigration Detention in Nicaragua
One of the poorest countries in the Americas, Nicaragua nevertheless has specific immigration detention laws and policies and maintains a dedicated immigration detention in Managua, which it terms an albergue (or shelter). Asylum seekers can be subject to detention while other vulnerable groups, including children and victims of trafficking, tend to be housed in shelters. […]
Immigration Detention in Costa Rica
An important transit and destination country, Costa Rica began systemically applying immigration detention in the 1990s in response to migratory pressures from neighboring Nicaragua. The country currently operates two dedicated detention facilities, which have been criticized by national rights bodies for having inadequate sanitary conditions. […]
Immigration Detention in Panama
An important destination country in Central America, Panama has in recent years overhauled its migration policies in part as a response to a landmark case at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights involving the detention of migrants. Since the case was launched, Panama has adopted a new migration law, decriminalized immigration violations, and established new […]
Immigration Detention in Malaysia
Malaysia is a magnet for migrants and asylum seekers despite its poor human rights record and failure to ratify key human rights treaties. Illegal entry and stay is criminalized and migrants often serve prison sentences before being transferred to one of twelve “immigration depots” while awaiting deportation. Caning, a legacy of British colonial rule, is […]
Annual Conference of the International Social Theory Consortium, University of Cambridge
Prof. Matthew Flynn of Georgia Southern University, a GDP contributing researcher, presented his GDP Working Paper titled “Bureacratic Capitalism and the Immigration Detention Complex” at the Annual Conference of the International Social Theory Consortium, University of Cambridge, 17-19 June 2015 (http://socialtheory.org/2015-annual-conference.html). […]
Bureaucratic Capitalism and the Immigration Detention Complex
This paper argues that post-structuralist approaches to the study of immigration detention present a number of theoretical and conceptual problems. Post-structuralist analyses focusing on discourses divorced from actors present teleological problems in terms of theory. Additionally, poststructural accounts of detention centres using concepts such as homo sacer and Banoptican tend to conflate human rights and citizenship rights, […]
