Nancy Hiemstra Explores the Economies of Immigrant Detention

When Nancy Hiemstra began research for her book, Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants (Pluto Press, 2025) in 2012, she had no way of knowing that more than a decade layer, that subject would be at the forefront of the news cycle.

But while the subjects of immigration and detention have converged in very public ways in 2025, Hiemstra - an associate professor in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in Stony Brook's College of Arts and Sciences - said the underlying issues have been around for decades.

"I've studied detention for years," said Hiemstra, who wrote her PhD dissertation on detention and deportation. "Initially I had this assumption that detention would decrease, but instead it's only grown over the last three decades, and now it's just picking up steam."

Hiemstra and co-author Dierdre Conlon, a critical migration studies scholar in human geography at the University of Leeds in England, have been working together since 2012. Drawing on this project, they've published many academic articles, and about five years ago decided to turn their important findings into a book.

"We began with the realization that detention wasn't going anywhere, and we wanted to reach a wider audience than we were reaching in academic venues," said Hiemstra.

At the time, the idea of a second Donald Trump term seemed remote.

"We didn't envision the scope of what the current Trump administration is doing right now, which is a worst-case scenario in terms of growth of the detention system in the US," she said. "Because of that this book is very timely. Unfortunately, the reason for it being timely is very distressing."

Though growing reports and public opinion polls indicate that many voters are against such aggressive immigration tactics, the mix of anti-immigrant narratives, people needing money, and localities seeking reliable income streams create a perfect environment for immigration detention coming to town.

Hiemstra first became interested in US immigration enforcement when she was planning her dissertation research in 2008.

"I was initially interested in looking at human smuggling, and that was how I framed the project," she said. "I went to Ecuador to do that research and found that people there didn't want to talk to an American about smuggling operations. So I started volunteering at an organization there, and what they needed the most help with from an English speaker was in trying to find family members. Detention was like a black hole. Once they were detained, they could be missing for weeks or even months. So I started making phone calls. From there I started looking at how this whole detention and deportation system works."

The first thing that jumped out was how much money is involved. It quickly became clear that this was an industry, and an extension of the prison industrial complex. Hiemstra then met Conlon, who had been doing research on other aspects of detention. They decided to research what they called the 'economies of immigration detention.'

Hiemstra said the US has always used immigration laws as a way to maintain particular ideas of national identity.

"A lot of those have to do with maintaining race-based ideas of the white national identity that has been present throughout US history," she said. "We've enforced immigration laws according to economic upturns and downturns, and when there are downturns, immigrants become easy scapegoats, even though they have never been the cause of economic downturn."

The seeds of today's national immigration view, Hiemstra noted, were sown in the 1980s, which saw a growth of detention.

"After a period of not a lot of immigration in the 1960s, we changed immigration laws in ways that led to changing demographics in the United States that sent a lot of people into what some scholars refer to as a racial panic around immigration," she said. "That, combined with economic downturn in the 1980s, gave the country even more of an incentive to scapegoat immigrants."

Furthering detention efforts were the concept of deterrence - that harsher immigration laws will deter future immigration - and a willing and eager prison industry, which led to the enactment of more laws opening up who could be detained. "Those trends have only accelerated," Hiemstra said.

While the concept of detention may be associated more with the Republican party today, Hiemstra noted that it is popular with both parties. "You see that logic being used by Ronald Reagan, and then later by Bill Clinton, to justify the detention of more and more people," she said. "It was during the Clinton administration that some of the key laws that made more people detainable and called for more detention infrastructure took root. But both parties and all administrations have used this criminalizing language around immigrants."

A far-reaching web of economic dependence was also created that includes food, medical, commissary and transportation companies, along with communities, who all come to see detention as a stable revenue source.

"Look at Ron DeSantis with 'Alligator Alcatraz,' with the promise from the Trump administration that they will be reimbursed," she said. "They've turned it into this 'build it and we will fill it' mentality. 'We can bring revenue into our area.' But it's horrifying. The photos of people standing next to the Alligator Alcatraz sign is so representative of racist ideas of American identity and this wholesale belief that we've got to be mean, we've got to deter people in a real dehumanization of migrants."

"If people were not making money, or if it wasn't filling other gaps in our economy, we wouldn't be doing it."

Hiemstra's hope with her book is to try to undo the assumption that immigration detention is necessary and effective.

"There are certainly other shameful parts in our history, like Japanese internment," she said. "But detaining people is not necessary, and it's not an effective way to make people follow the processes to gain legal status. It just furthers the narrative that all immigrants are criminals. But statistics actually show the opposite."

Beyond that, Hiemstra says it's critical to figure out how to remove those profit incentives.

"One of the underlying ideas of the book is that detention is growing, and that's because people are making money," she said. "If people were not making money, or if it wasn't filling other gaps in our economy, we wouldn't be doing it."

The solution, she said, will require both far-reaching and focused ideas.

"Big picture, we need to think of other strategies to help communities develop economically," she said. "On a smaller scale we can think of ways to reduce profit incentives. Make it so that there are real standards, make it so detainees are not forced to work for $1 a day as they are now. If you make facilities pay them minimum wage or require them to provide adequate food and medical care, those profits go down tremendously. At that time you'll see people start to change their way of thinking."

Hiemstra said the underlying message of the book is that these webs of economic dependence turn detention into a business, adding that in the United States, immigration enforcement is becoming a key sector in the economy itself.

"The risk is that once you get these detention infrastructures in place, once you get companies and communities and individuals dependent on detention, we're eventually going to run out of people who are undocumented," she said. "So who's next? What other legal residents and even citizens can be thrown into detention? That seems dystopian, but that's on the table now. I think we will increasingly see race-based criteria come to the force. We're creating this very hungry machine for bodies to be put through the detention and deportation ringer as revenue generators. And that's a really scary thing."

- Robert Emproto