Available From UC Press

Discussions about U.S. migration policing have traditionally focused on enforcement along the highly charged U.S.-Mexico boundary. Enforcement practices such as detention policies designed to restrict access to asylum also transpire in the Caribbean. Boats, Borders, and Bases tells a missing, racialized history of the U.S. migration detention system that was developed and expanded to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants. Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz argue that the U.S. response to Cold War Caribbean migrations established the legal and institutional basis for contemporary migration detention and border-deterrent practices in the United States. This book will make a significant contribution to a fuller understanding of the history and geography of the United States’s migration detention system.

Jenna M. Loyd is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Alison Mountz is Professor of Geography at Wilfrid Laurier University and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at the Balsillie School of International Affairs .

“Exploring where few scholars have ventured—‘remote’ sites in the United States and overseas—Loyd and Mountz greatly enrich our understanding of how the enormous U.S. border policing regime and (im)migrant confinement apparatus have arisen. Via sharp historical-geographical analysis, they powerfully illuminate the sordid intersection of militarism, racism, and national exclusion.” 
—Joseph Nevins, Professor of Geography, Vassar College

“We have been waiting for this book. Loyd and Mountz bring together multiple histories crucial to understanding U.S. practices of migrant detention and imprisonment. This book should be required reading for anyone invested in challenging the criminalization of migrants and the escalating violence of U.S. policing and imprisonment regimes.”
—A. Naomi Paik, author of Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II