Looking in a mirror: Asylum in the United States as a reflection of white supremacy

Objective

We contend that the asylum process in the United States exhibits how confinement, surveillance, and deportation work together to extend the primary logics of white supremacy: genocide, anti-blackness, and orientalism. We envision abolition work that uplifts not only asylum seekers but all people with lived experiences of coerced mobility.

Methods

Through the lenses of critical race, decolonial theory, and abolition, we conceptualize the asylum process beyond only one violent system that coerces the mobility of migrants.

Results

We build a theory that extends scholarly conversations about asylum processes as a system of racial/colonial surveillance, control, and state-sanctioned violence and that informs abolitionist practices.

Conclusion

In order to eradicate all forms of detention, we must build robust strategies that demolish the pillars of white supremacy and rebuild new politics that reject the notion of freedom as a reward to well-behaved people, resist coerced mobility, foster shared power arrangements in which people with lived experiences of oppression organize to help each other, and reorient a capitalist system that commoditizes and exploits people's oppression. Striving for anything less will lead to more violence.