How Migration Makes a City
In this four-part miniseries, we spoke with six scholars whose research addresses different aspects, geographies, and approaches to analyzing and understanding the relationship between migration and urban politics and culture. In this episode, we’ll hear from collaborators Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra about their decade-long project on detention economies; Leslie Gross-Wrytzen on how migration has shaped Moroccan cities; David Kaufmann on the important but fraught role of NGOs; and Andrew Baldwin raises some important and understudied questions on the relationship between urban climate migration and property.
We could have created an entire show focused on this topic! But instead, we’re taking a wide-angled and ecumenical approach to general topics in urban studies. We hope to expose scholars, students, and practitioners of urban studies to diverse research methods and approaches to these themes. Each episode will be accompanied by a suggested reading list based on our discussions, and we welcome suggestions for future guests and topics!
Guests
Andrew Baldwin, Durham University
Deirdre Conlon, University of Leeds
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, Yale University
Nancy Hiemstra, Stony Brook University (SUNY)
David Kaufmann, ETH Zürich
Domenic Vitiello, University of Pennsylvania
Reading List
Andrew Baldwin. 2022. The Other of Climate Change: Racial Futurism, Migration, Humanism. Rowman and Littlefield.
Andrew Baldwin and Bruce Erickson. 2020. Introduction: Whiteness, coloniality, and the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(1): 3-11.
Andrew Baldwin, Christiane Fröhlich, Delf Rothe (guest editors). 2019. Anthropocene mobilities. Mobilities 14(3), special issue.
Andrew Baldwin, Christiane Fröhlich, Delf Rothe. 2019. From climate migration to anthropocene mobilities: shifting the debate. Mobilities 14(3): 289-297.
Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini. 2017. Life Adrift: Climate Change, Migration. Critique.
Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra. 2022. How subcontracting key services leads to the entrenchment of urban immigration detention in many us communities. American Politics and Policy Blog.
Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra. 2022. ‘Unpleasant’but ‘helpful’: Immigration detention and urban entanglements in New Jersey, USA. Urban Studies 59(11): 2179-2198.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2023. ‘There is no race here’: on blackness, slavery, and disavowal in North Africa and North African studies. The Journal of North African Studies 28(3): 635-665.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen & Zineb Rachdi El Yacoubi. 2022. Externalizing otherness: The racialization of belonging in the Morocco-EU Border. Geoforum.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2020. Contained and abandoned in the “humane” border: Black migrants’ immobility and survival in Moroccan urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(5): 887-904.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2018. Intimate economies of immigration detention: critical perspectives. Gender, Place & Culture 25(9): 1399-1401.
Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon. 2021. Reading between the (redacted) lines: muddling through absent presences in public information requests on US Immigration detention. ACME 20(6): 666-686.
Nancy Hiemstra. 2019. Detain and Deport: The chaotic US immigration enforcement regime. University of Georgia Press.
David Kaufmann, Nora Räss, Dominique Strebel and Fritz Sager. 2022. Sanctuary Cities in Europe? A Policy Survey of Urban Policies in Support of Irregular Migrants. British Journal of Political Science 52(4):1954–1963.
David Kaufmann and Dominique Strebel. 2021. Urbanizing Migration Policy-Making: Urban Policies in Support of Irregular Migrants in Geneva and Zürich. Urban Studies 58(4): 2991-3008.
David Kaufmann. 2019. Comparing urban citizenship, sanctuary cities, local bureaucratic membership, and regularizations, Public Administration Review 79(3): 443–446.
Domenic Vitiello. 2022. The Sanctuary City: Immigrant, Refugee, and Receiving Communities in Postindustrial Philadelphia. Cornell University Press. [open access]
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Deirdre Conlon
The other way in which municipalities have been altered in in very profound ways, has been that the you know, detention facilities are now a necessary source of revenue in order for City budgets to operate to function to provide schools to provide parks to provide facilities that we take for granted or we assume to be part of what a kind of municipal government is supposed to. The dependency upon immigration detention contracts and subcontracts is now, you know, part and parcel of how those governments, how those municipal governments and local governments, actually function. There's one of the meetings of the county legislators in Essex County, where, you know, there's been ongoing debate about the use of immigration detention and the facility the use of the county facility at Essex. But one of the attendees at one of these county legislature meetings asked one of the elected officials, if I take my kids to a zoo, am I supposing we are visiting something that was built using money from $117.00 per night per detainee, and the response from the elected official was explicitly to confirm that ICE money is certainly part of it.
Emily Holloway
You’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast from the journal Urban Affairs Review. You just heard from Deirdre Conlon, an associate professor of geography at the University of Leeds, who has spent the last decade with her collaborator Nancy Hiemstra untangling the complex webs of what they call “detention economies” in American cities. I spoke with Deirdre and Nancy about how these networks influence the fabric of urban life, like the zoo in Essex County you just heard about. Prison infrastructure, including migrant detention facilities, are often touted by local and regional policymakers as surefire job creators and economic buoys. And, as Nancy and Deirdre point out, this tendency also ends up influencing the legal infrastructure around incarceration too. This relationship may be familiar to those of you who have read Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s 2007 analysis of California’s prison economy, Golden Gulag. Nancy dug into these dynamics for us.
Nancy Hiemstra
The rise of kind of the carceral economy, the carceral industries in the United States, is completely linked to deindustrialization and kind of federal withdrawal of support to states and local governments. And so with the kind of carceral economy that was expanding with laws and more infrastructure that kind of brought more money to local economies and you know, they kind of reached a point where that was nearly maxed out, right? And so there is even traced in board meetings of these big prison companies like Core Civic and GEO Group. You know this like ohh well, now let's work on immigration detention. And there was a concerted effort to shift to lobbying for harsher immigration laws and a bigger emphasis on detention. And so in terms of kind of a federal carceral infrastructure that's going on. In a lot of the where we're looking at in New York and New Jersey, especially with county facilities
Emily Holloway
So, and maybe to connect this back to Deirdre’s anecdote about the Essex County Zoo earlier – how do you see this playing out in terms of economic development or restructuring?
Deirdre Conlon
So I mean, I think that that really gets to the way in which there is this massive dependency which is very hard to unravel or to get away from once it has been established, so those are some of the ways I think that the fabric of the of the city has changed. And on top of all of that, of course, are the questions about, or the issues around, sort of people the arguments that we see in prison economies, for example, that that, you know, detention provides jobs for deindustrialized kind of neighborhoods and regions of the country, for example.
Nancy Hiemstra
Yeah, I mean, I just to add to that, I think there is there's the reality of financial dependency. And I think there's also a myth about it because a lot of the jobs for local people in these facilities do not pay well. If you… I was just recently looking up some of the kind of online reviews of employers for some of the facility for some of the companies that run the foodservice, the medical service, etcetera, and they get horrible ratings like a lot of people are like don't work at for the food service in whatever jail because they treat you like crap and you don't get overtime. And so part of it is just a myth of dependence. Because a lot of the profits, they're not distributed equally among community members, right? They might go some to fund the community services. But in terms of the argument that these provide good jobs for our community that just often does not play out. But a lot of people believe that they do.
Emily Holloway
So we have an example of how migration – or really, migration policy – can shape urban space through the infrastructure of incarceration, borders, and policing by transforming our relationship to everyday public goods and services – like parks, or that zoo – into one that depends on the circulation and detention of migrants. I spoke with Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, who you heard from earlier in the series, about the dynamics of migration on urban space.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
So yeah, so urban space became this really interesting place where bordering, played out. And I guess I should say for a moment here that I really think of border both as a site or a place, but also as a process. And so we have two things happening at the same time. We have places where bordering the process takes place where people are either included or excluded, their mobility is limited in particular ways or their mobility is facilitated in particular ways, but it's also a place where these logics obtain and where they are rewriting or organizing the landscape.
So once migrant people are rounded up by border police at the fences or you know where they could launch boats to head toward Europe and they're dumped in these cities in the Moroccan interior with nothing, with just the shirts on their back, they often camp right where they're dumped at a city bus stop or in an urban park or somewhere that's often very centrally located and very visible.
Because of their dispossessions, because they've been taken away from the place where they were, because they were rounded up and carried off without any of their possessions, they have limited resources or no resources, and they have to hustle, as they say, to get by. So they'll often beg at city streets, camp in empty lots, you know, under tents, practice, you know, try to find either day labor, which often puts them in competition with Moroccan laborers, or operate in the illicit or informal economic sphere, or practicing sex work or dealing drugs, selling black market items.
And so it's actually quite an effective way to both contain people to limit them from traveling because they don't have any resources to do it anymore and to maintain their otherness, which is a different kind of border within the Moroccan social consciousness, in ways that perhaps are maybe even more influential than what happens, you know, at the fences or at sea, that those processes don't really concern your average Moroccan citizen as much, but having folks dumped in the middle of a city and living in the midst of Moroccans often is part of that process of sort of reinscribes these exclusions, reinforcing support for certain kinds of border violence and is quite effective and at the same time this organized abandonment that is orchestrated by the state devolves their care to these same people, so Moroccan citizens are quite welcoming in many cases, quite generous with folks. They give money to people who beg at street corners or outside of mosques.
But you know, all of that care is put on an already taxed citizenry. Unemployment is really high, and there's a lot of poverty in these same urban spaces where migrants are dropped off. So all of that, you know, contributes to producing this border and urban space. And it's out of sight. And in addition to devolving this care to Moroccan citizens, it also devolves it to NGOs. And this whole migration industry has emerged as a way of capitalizing on, you know, competing for funds from European donors and so on to provide for these migrants.
Emily Holloway
This is an interesting case to compare against what Nancy and Dierdre are looking at with the detention economies framework. To be certain, the private companies that profit from carceral institutions and infrastructures are not the same thing as NGOs in European cities. But in both cases, these are responsibilities that have basically been offloaded from the state. I spoke with David Kaufmann, who you heard from last time, about what role NGOs play in migration policy and services, particularly in Switzerland where he lives and focuses much of his research.
David Kaufmann
So imagine if you're in a smaller town and a new face is there and then you are kind of more recognized than if you're in a big city and so that's why they are there and mostly they work. So they have to work. They don't get any social assistance. And they work for a long time and there and they just make a living. They're in a very precarious situation of where they live and house. And then there are some NGOs that do legal counseling for them that also help them to some degree. And then after five or normally after the 10 years they think, OK, do I qualify for a hardship clause and then they can try to do it with the help of NGOs and lawyers and can kind of apply for a hardship clause. Else, I mean, they have kids in schools, the schools are not allowed to share the data. Also, the hospitals are not allowed to share the data of the migration officials and the local police, these are called firewalls. Also in the whole literature, so that basic services basic human needs are protected. And this data is not shared with anyone. So there are some rights that they have, but it's just a way to survive and at some point they're hoping that they get a hardship clause.
So they're kind of seen as intermediary actors between refugees and city authorities or authorities in general, and I see it in two ways. So on the one way there are intermediary actions in providing services. At some point they're providing kind of basic human services like food, shelter, legal aspects and health. And when the city is kind of not willing to or in cases of hardship or during COVID, NGOs are very, very important also for irregular migrants sometimes, but they also kind of doing parallel parallels what we call parallel service In the name of cities financed through cities, cities are not kind of they don't have the rights to directly engage with irregular migrants, so they kind of fund NGO's, give them money for their services. And they also know that they are using a lot of these funds for irregular migrants, so they have like an ambiguous relationship with the city.
Sometimes or some NGOs are purely, or cooperating a lot, with the cities and they're the funding goes a lot of cities. Some are kind of saying no, we're stepping in because the city is doing nothing so, but they are very important in this service. And also, legal services to take the role as kind of advocates for irregular migrants. So that's the service aspect. The political aspects is similarly in this regard. So they are kind of in a difficult position between cooperation and cooperation, what it's called in the literature, so cooperation, they need good relationship with the city authorities, they need to be the advocates and going to City Hall and they need to be seen as the main responsible partners for irregular migrants because they don't have a voice. On the other hand, if they collaborate too much, they also feel OK, sometimes they are Co-opted because I don't stand behind the policy or the practice of the authorities.
Emily Holloway
Activists and advocates of migrants have to walk a very fine line to preserve access to resources and the ear of politicians and administrators but also to ensure that their clients aren’t steamrolled by the system. Deirdre talked about the efforts of a few of these organizations, some of whom have had some success in recent years.
Deirdre Conlon
The Detention Watch Network, that is, you know, linking up organizations of various different sizes of various different kind of scopes across the country and they've been, I mean they've been doing that for years and years and years. But I think that one of the things that I've seen or maybe just been paying more attention to in the last number of years is that they're also doing a number of educational events and webinars and things of that nature that allow people to kind of connect around issues of profit making and the sort of systems of exploitation and extraction that that we are writing about, that people are kind of fighting in different communities around the country. So I think that that would be certainly be one of the larger umbrella organizations that I think is absolutely pivotal to this campaign. There's also a number of examples of communities, a group, or a series of groups in Atlanta, but working in the prison system over a period of a number of years. Who took a – for want of a better way of putting it – maybe a kind of a sustainability focus in their effort to end the use of prison in municipality in a city region. And the argument that they made was essentially that in order for us to have a sustainable community, we need to think about education and we need to think about healthcare and we need to think about, you know, other aspects of life and social reproduction. And in doing that they were able to link up different services and different sectors and different advocates and activists in different sectors who can propel that fight.
And so those are kind of at the forefront, we'll say, of these kinds of developments, so it's happening both in local uh areas as well as kind of broader national levels as well through these umbrella organizations like DWN.
Emily Holloway
But of course, as Nancy points out, just as capital is mobile, so is the detention infrastructure supported by it. And even though one detention center may close, communities in other states or cities end up being the hosts for these facilities instead.
Nancy Hiemstra
While we think that these activist movements and sanctuary movements around at the local and state level around detention are very important and they need to keep doing what they're doing, it's also important to remember that for many of these, in many of these states, when they have closed the county or they have ended immigration detention in their county facilities, those immigrants are just transferred elsewhere and they're often transferred to states that are much less friendly, like New Jersey, New York. They provide some pro bono degree of pro bono representation for immigrants in court. They're moved to places where they don't have access to that, they aren't near families, right. They're with judges much more likely to make negative decisions in immigration court. So there are plenty of states saying great, send me these people! So that goes back to Dee’s point about an abolitionist argument and framing underlying it all to recognize it can't just happen at local and state levels to really be successful.
And I'll just add here that I think, you know, whatever these national efforts and organized activist organizations are, they are up against just a massive financial force. So while I know organizations like Detention Watch Network and Freedom for Immigrants and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee services. They go to Washington and do national level lobbying. But they have pennies to spend compared to the millions of all these huge companies and equity firms and all of this. So I mean, I think where our work, where we hope that it comes in and especially this, this book, this more popular oriented book that we're working in, contributes to the discussion is to think about, you have to kind of dismantle and remove those financial incentives, right? So if even, like the Biden administration is coming out along and supporting the case of companies like Core Civic, who runs the Elizabeth Detention Center? You know that they're kind of influence is so strong. And so we have to think about how can we change the detention system and who makes money so that a lot of those financial incentives are removed, right. So I mean, as an example of during the Trump administration, who Trump was very openly pro prison, pro detention. There are certain detention -- there's what are called the national detention standards that are supposed to ensure that there is kind of a minimum level of care and safety in detention facilities, Trump essentially cut those in half and made them very vague and even more. I mean, not that they were super effective to begin with, but even a minimum level of security was just slashed, and I'm sure that – I suspect that behind that, was a lot of lobbying by these companies. And the Biden administration has not restored the previous level of detention standards, even though it would be very easy to do that just by federal executive decree. So I think in there you see kind of the workings of these, the financial influence driving kind of the staying power of detention and the continued expansion.
Deirdre Conlon
Yeah. And just to add, you know a couple, a couple of thoughts here. You know, I think we know as scholars and thinkers that contradiction is at the heart of capitalism and it is about kind of moving into the spaces of contradiction that makes and allows capitalism to work and to work effectively. So that's essentially what we see playing out here. But I also want to just kind of echo and add to the point that Nancy is making and that is that part of the message that we want to try to get across with our work and with the latest iteration of our work is really to think about what the implications are of detention economies for ending immigration detention, so it's not enough to end immigration detention in a particular county or in a particular state, because what we know is that immigrants get moved to other facilities in other states where detention is still taking place. It's not enough to call for the end of detention without also calling for a systemic changes that allow for migrants to come safely to the United States, that grant asylum seekers work permits in ways that don't end up making them wait for years and years in order to get those work permits. So you know it's a more systemic argument, which is completely In line with an abolitionist framework that that we want to make clear through the detention economies framework that that we're calling for, right. So it's sort of a cautionary tale really about how these contradictions get articulated and get utilized by capitalism and the sort of the longer term project that everybody needs to get on board with if we are going to end this problematic system.
Emily Holloway
There’s another unintended consequence of migration in cities that Andrew Baldwin brought up during our conversation. He pointed out that at the intersection of dynamics like migration, climate change, race, and urban change there’s a really critical but overlooked factor at work.
Andrew Baldwin
And that is that coincident with the emergence of the urban policy turn and debates around climate change and migration that I mentioned earlier, The National League of Cities, which is a Washington, DC based organization, also produced a report on climate change and human migration, again with a similar kind of remit, which was to convince or to encourage urban policymakers in the United States to think about what you know climate change and migration would mean to their cities.
So for some cities, that's, you know, Buffalo and Duluth often get cited as the places where you will have a lot of immigration from wealthy people from California and Florida and elsewhere selling up and relocating. You will have in places like Houston and Orlando and Atlanta, large numbers of Caribbean and coastal migrants moving to these cities, so-called climate migrants.
I mean, this probably goes without saying in the US context, but you know, there's we need to think, I think people working in urban sociology in the US need to think really carefully about what's going on in that space and I instantly go to Cheryl Harris's “Whiteness as property.” And you know, the idea that climate change and migration discourse in the wrong hands becomes a technology that will allow, you know, for policymakers to consolidate property values in white locations and or work out, you know, policy mechanisms that will continue to enhance the value of those real estate investments at the expense of poor communities, black communities, Hispanic communities in the United States, and that probably goes without saying. But I think it's just worth putting it out there, because even while the discourse on climate change and migration invokes a kind of ethical responsibility, yes, of course we need to help those who will be displaced by climate change. It also comes with a lot of unstated historical baggage that requires a lot of very careful scrutiny.
Emily Holloway
Whether you are an experienced researcher studying migration, urban space, borders, or any of the other related topics we touched on in this series, or if you’re new to some of these ideas and themes, you can probably tell that we weren’t able to cover everything. Migration is an incredibly complex phenomenon with so many different dynamics at play that it would have been reckless to account for all of them. But we do hope that we introduced some new ideas and new scholars to you, and maybe in a way that helped you think about the relationship between cities and migration differently.
That’s it for this series, but check back in next year, as we celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Urban Affairs Review with a look back at the political, social, and economic forces that shaped the discipline of urban studies over each decade from the 1960s on.
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to the Lindy Institute at Drexel University and the Editors at UAR. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was written, hosted, and produced by me, Emily Holloway. Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Please visit our website, urbanaffairsreview.com, for more information about the journal and the show, and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. See you next time.