Book Review: Boats, borders, and bases: Race, the Cold War, and the rise of migration detention in the United States

• Author: Felicia Arriaga
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1057567719826636
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

range of audiences. Students in social work, political science, law, criminal justice, and Latino/a

studies will gain a broader understanding of immigrant policing and the hidden health-related

impact.

ORCID iD

Mercedes Valadez https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2432-5067

Loyd, J. M., & Mountz, A. (2018).

Boats, borders, and bases: Race, the Cold War, and the rise of migration detention in the United States. Oakland, CA:

University of California Press. 320 pp. $29.95, ISBN 9780520287976.

Reviewed by: Felicia Arriaga, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA

DOI: 10.1177/1057567719826636

In Boats, Borders, and Bases, Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz show the complicated and

simultaneous nature of humanitarian rescue and migration control. They do so by beginning their

focus on U.S. responses, both offshore and onshore, to Vietnamese nationals, Haitian nationals, and

Cuban nationals during the Cold War. By focusing on both forces—humanitarian rescue and migra-

tion control practices—they accomplish their goal of illustrating the “entanglement and transna-

tional scope of the U.S. carceral state.” This work is divided into three parts: Part I: Race and the

Cold War Geopolitics of Migration Control begins with a look at relationships between countries,

Part II: Building the World’s Largest Detention System takes an inward turn to describe the U.S.

detention system, and Part III: Expanding the World’s Largest Detention System describes offshore

“safe havens” and the expansiveness of U.S. migration control. The concluding chapter contextua-

lizes recent scholarship that focuses on 9/11 as a significant turning point in the criminalization of

migrants while simultaneously countering this notion to further show a historically racialized and

geopolticized nature of exclusion.

Both authors have previously contributed to our understanding of migration control policies and

practices globally. This book also builds upon previous work that interrogates notions of sovereignty

across borders and is part of a 5-year study ca lled the Island Detention Project funded by the

National Science Foundation. The authors utilize a historical case study approach, turning to archi-

val research beginning in 2010 while drawing on legal scholarship, media coverage, and visits to

case study sites to explore themes of border proximity, remoteness, and pri vate profit seeking.

Moreover, the authors make an intentional effort to incorporate examples of resistance to the

processes of deterrence and detention throughout the book.

Part I describes the specific binational/bilateral country relationships between the previously

stated countries and the corresponding U.S. immigration policies that focused on separating political

refugees and economic migrant s. The authors ambitiously comp are and contrast not only U.S.

responses to migrants from Vietnam, Haiti, and Cuba but simultaneously incorporate these

responses into comparisons with other countries like Mexico and Nicaragua. Furthermore, the

authors describe how the U.S. perpetuated anti-Blackness in disparate implementation of migration

control policies in the Haitian “exception” case, yet there is limited space dedicated to analyzing

anti-Blackness and/or race dynamics within each country of origin and the subsequent migration in

the first place, but this may also be a result of a missing discussion of explicitly racialized migration

patterns in the “postcolonial immigrant” framework and a deeper understanding of the whitening/

whitewashing of US and Caribbean history.

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