Today in countries across the globe, immigration-related detention has become an
established policy apparatus that counts on dedicated facilities and burgeoning
institutional bureaucracies.
Before the decade of the 1980s, however, detention
appears to have been largely an ad hoc tool, employed mainly by wealthy states
in exigent circumstances.
This paper details the history of key policy events
that led to the diffusion of detention practices during the last 30 years and
assesses some of the motives that appear to have encouraged this phenomenon.
The paper also endeavors to place the United States at the center of this story
because its policy decisions were instrumental in initiating the process of
policy innovation, imitation, and—in many cases—imposition that has helped give
rise to today’s global immigration detention phenomenon. More broadly, in
telling this story, this paper seeks to flesh out some of the larger policy
implications of beyond-the-borders immigration control regimes.
