Abstract
In Islands of Sovereignty, Jeffrey Kahn provides a multilayered and theoretically sophisticated explanation of the ways the US government transformed asylum screenings, legal procedures, and the geographies of its southern border to exclude Haitians in the late-twentieth century. In the 1970s, a network of migrants, lawyers, and activists used the courts to halt deportations as Haitians’ petitions for asylum were vetted by judges. Many were successful. These legal victories eroded over the next decades, as the United States developed a program of interdiction at sea, which moved migrant processing into Coast Guard cutters and the Guantánamo Naval Base. Haitians were now rejected for asylum in perfunctory screenings by low-level bureaucrats before they could access favorable legal terrain on land. Kahn deftly traces this transformation and its ramifications for conceptualization of US power and the nature of the border itself. The fact that such interdiction policies were replicated by numerous other governments adds to this story’s urgency. The book is multidisciplinary in the true sense; chapters move between legal studies, political philosophy, public policy, history, and ethnography. As such, the scholarly stakes are higher than a deep reading of US immigration policies. Kahn uses these policy transformations to make larger claims about the built-in tensions between law and unchecked sovereign power and the real and imagined geographies of the nation-state.
The earliest Haitian refugees were forced to navigate migration policies steeped in Cold War logic and the international reputations of the Duvaliers. While François Duvalier’s rule (1957–1971) was marked by diplomatic tension but overall US support for his anti-Communism, Jean-Claude Duvalier (1971–1986) was praised for making Haiti safe for foreign capital in the form of light manufacturing. When Haitian immigration increased in the 1970s, US opponents claimed that the era of political repression had ended with these economic shifts; any newcomers were economic migrants undeserving of asylum. This dichotomous logic ignored the continuing political repression under Jean-Claude and ignored the role that US foreign policy and capital played in destroying Caribbean livelihoods. Although US migration policies could not fathom the existence of a Haitian refugee, judicial activists began to win individual asylum screenings by demonstrating political violence and echoing the distorting binary language that informed the law.
In the 1980s, long-standing strands of anti-Haitianism converged with other political crises and transformations to destroy these spaces of asylum. The Mariel boatlift brought Cubans to South Florida and further politicized migration. Likewise, moral panic tied to the AIDS crisis grafted onto long-standing associations between Haitians and disease, which Kahn explains with acute historical nuance. Soon, the White House developed a strategy to interdict Haitians at sea, using Coast Guard cutters and the Guantánamo Naval Base as sites of US jurisdiction beyond judicial oversight. Migrants could now be processed and rejected quickly before technically “entering” US soil, thus disqualifying them from any meaningful kind of asylum hearing. Kahn’s meticulous tracing of the legal processes behind migrant interdiction provides anthropological insights into genres of legal writing and the webs of legal citation that will interest anyone who navigates law, government archives, or public policy.
Interdiction at sea also transformed the nature of the US border by separating its previously overlapping territorial, judicial, and policing components. In other words, migrants were detained and screened in ships and military bases that counted as US soil even when those sites were beyond US territory itself. One of the book’s major themes is that such policies and bureaucracies created new expanded geographies of state power. The irony is that to maintain the fiction of a territorially bounded nation-state, borders were extended outward—belying that fiction in attempts to secure it. These new geographies challenge the notion that the sea is an opaque lawless frontier. Surveillance technology, mapping, and casual language of oceanic “highways” represent efforts to conquer it, though no simple analogy exists between sea and land.
Kahn demonstrates that migrant interdiction at sea was crucial for the development of global migration deterrence and an important case for understanding the ways that state sovereignty may assert itself even against legal limitations or in defiance of the rights associated with liberalism. For example, the border’s disjuncture has become even more pronounced as the War on Terror pushes security beyond territorial edges. The use of the Guantánamo naval base to prevent migration and to indefinitely detain terror suspects is one clear example of the way that interdiction served as a blueprint for destroying rights with legal procedure.
This book is a must read for anyone studying global migration or post-Cold War US foreign policy, especially in the context of US migration policies toward Central America. However, its dense theoretical nature, which is a strength, will make the text impossible for most undergraduates to read. Instructors should save this excellent book for their graduate seminars.