 Welcome everybody. Thank you for coming. My name is Bridget Anderson and I'm the Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol, which is a specialist research institute at the University of Bristol. I'm really delighted to be chairing this conversation and the launch of this fantastic book, A World Without Cages published by Routledge. I was actually lucky enough to attend the workshop on immigration and prison justice that was organized by Shari and Stephanie on Decarceral Futures back in 2019. So I've had a bit of an opportunity to watch the collection grow. There's a really memorable workshop and I think memorable for one of the reasons that it's a really great edited volume because it's where theory meets practice to build politics. And I think, you know, in these kinds of fields like immigration and prison abolitionism, it's really important to move beyond critique to build justice and to kind of have ideas about what might a better world look like. So we've assembled some outstanding panelists who are really innovative thinkers and actors and I'd really like to thank them all for coming to share their ideas with us. So as warm or welcome as is possible on zoom to the part to the panelists and to all of you participants. The format is going to maximize conversations around the issues. We appreciate that some of you here wouldn't have had a chance to read the book so we're going to start with an overview of the book, followed by comments from a prison justice perspective El Jones for about 15 minutes, and then Cesar Hernandez will offer comments from an immigration or immigration perspective. And then the two editors of the book Shari Akin and Stephanie Silverman will kick off a conversation between themselves and the panelists by responding to some of the input. And then we'll have for about half an hour to hear from you with questions and comments and so on. So do feel free to put those questions and comments in the chat as we're going along and I'll do my best to keep an eye on it. So I'm going to just jump right in because I want to maximize the time we have and start by introducing Kate, Kate Mockluck, who's going to give us the overview of the book and its key contributions. Kate is a PhD student at the Baltsy Lee School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Her research is focused on issues of forced migration with a particular interest in the intersection of migration and criminalization. She completed her graduate degree in peace conflict and justice studies at the University of Toronto and then went on to work as the Toronto chapter lead for the refugee hubs pro bono legal program, and as a project coordinator for the Toronto based nonprofit Lifeline Syria, while serving with these organizations Kate has assisted with the file management and submission of over 400 private sponsorship refugee applications to the Canadian government. I'm going to do MA in geography at Wilfrid Laurier University and her thesis containment and COVID-19 in the settler state, examine the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in carceral spaces across Canada and Australia. Welcome to you, Kate, and I'm going to hand over to you. Bridget for that introduction and thank you so much to everyone for joining us today for this conversation on a world without cages. I'm going to quickly start my timer so that I keep to the time that I have. But as Bridget mentioned, I have the distinct pleasure of providing a bit of an overview of this text for those of you who have not yet had the opportunity to read it. So of course I emphatically encourage you to read it when you have the opportunity to do so. And I'm going to make some preliminary comments on the methodologies that are used, and some of the novel contributions that this text offers to us. As Bridget mentioned, it's really fascinating that this edited collection is the end result of these conversations and presentations that took place back in May of 2019 at Decarceral Futures. And I think the fact that this edited collection is the result of this kind of collaboration really speaks to some of its key strengths, mainly just how highly interdisciplinary and collaborative the end result is. And also that it truly seeks to abide by the maximum of nothing about us without us. So not only is there great diversity in terms of the authors own personal backgrounds and their disciplinary approaches, but also the lived experiences with incarceration. And I really found when reading the text that they tried to forefront the voices of people with lived experiences at every opportunity. And this without cages really seeks to understand what carceral abolition can bring to citizenship studies. So there's this effort then to marry attempts to abolish presence of penal abolition, and to abolish forms of migration control like immigration detention. And this is of course unfolding in different ways across different jurisdictions. We're based in Canada and a number of the contributors to the collection were also based in Canada. And there there are instances where some migrants who are held under migration controls are actually kept in prisons, along with people who are being held under criminal charges. And as a result of that physical overlapping, there's a very clear alignment of these agendas right of abolishing these kinds of control. And the world without cages does really definitely I think is demonstrate how even in spaces where there may not be this physical overlapping, there's clear overlapping of the logics that are driving this kind of confinement. Now I do want to emphasize something that a world of no cages does that many opportunities, which is that they never seek to privilege some identities as being worthy of better treatment than others. So you can sometimes see this in some work on immigration where people will say, isn't it so terrible that migrants are being treated this way, when they may not have even committed a crime, not withstanding the larger conversation we'll have about immigration a little bit later, but instead of world without cages is recognizing that criminals migrants, all of these different people being placed into categories are ultimately people and this form of deprivation of liberty is ultimately extremely harmful to everybody. So in writing this text, I was struck by quote that I had saved from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and those of you in the audience who've engaged with abolition literature for a long time will of course be very familiar with her but as someone who still considers themselves sort of newer to the struggle, just to bring everyone into the conversation in case you're not familiar. She's a very well regarded scholar and activist who has written extensively on the topic of abolition. Her using comes from her text on prisons, the prison system in California called the Golden Goulet. And she writes, it is not only a good theory in theory, but also a good theory in practice for people engaged in the spectrum of social justice struggles to figure out unexpected sites where their agendas align with those of others. And I think a world without cages really does this phenomenally well. Bridget already mentioned this idea of practice right research as praxis and that's clear throughout a world without cages this emphasis on although this book is ultimately a scholarly academic effort. There's also all of this attention being paid to how do we translate this knowledge into meaningful practice. Not only is there clearly an identification of how these agendas align between carceral abolition and citizenship studies, but I also found that at every turn a world without cages really resist this idea of treating injustices in isolation and takes a very intersectional approach. As a result, as you're reading through the different contributions, you'll notice a number of different analytical analytical lenses. There is the contribution that takes a reproductive justice lens, another that takes a political economy lens, and another still that takes a settler colonialism lens. And so by using all of these different analytical tools, we're able to nuance and tease apart these ideas of how carceral abolition and citizenship studies fit together to an even greater degree, and also complicate certain ideas that perhaps we might take for granted in other contexts. For example, I was really struck by a conversation about birthright citizenship that occurred within the text. Often there's sort of a knee-jerk reaction for those of us amongst in, you know, migration advocacy that birthright citizenship is a positive thing. So for those unfamiliar, this would be the idea that, you know, if there was a migrating Canada who gave birth to a child, that child would get Canadian citizenship. And the positive to that is of course that they're not being born into a precarious status. But what the text cautions us is that we might be inadvertently then supporting the very category of citizenship, which is in part responsible for creating these categories of precarity that we're trying to fight against. So this tension that emerges, and it's interesting to how they talk about this tension that comes about when you align yourself with those who are perhaps advocating against birthright citizenship, but you might find yourself aligned with people who are very different political goals, often anti-migrant in nature. So by having this intersectional approach, by thinking about reproductive justice, political economy and all these other analytical lenses, we really tease apart some of these ideas that require complication in order to have a meaningful version of abolition at the end. It also continuously re-emphasizes the need to look upstream to borrow a word from the text. So a need to understand of course what's happening in these carceral spaces that is sort of the main focus and concern of the text, but what are these systems and histories that are bringing people to these carceral spaces to begin with, and understanding the ways that racism, sexism, ableism, heteronormativity are all woven into these logics and fabrics that are bringing people here. In addition to taking this approach that's very interdisciplinary in terms of the focus of what kinds of injustice are being rendered, pardon me, I'll just take a quick sip of water. The world without cages is also quite multi-scaler in its analysis. And so not only does a world without cages offer us case studies from North America, from Europe, from Asia, but it's also happening at different levels. And this is a little bit hinted at with the title, right? A world without cages, which signals something kind of collective and more globalized. But what we find is that we have case studies at the national level, which is a familiar level when you're thinking about migration control. So there's some focus on Canada, on Turkey, on Indonesia. But there's also more broadly looking at regions like the European Union. And then also taking it to a smaller scale and looking at an individual state within the United States, in this case Tennessee. And through looking at this diversity of region and scale, new sort of findings can come out as a result of that too. So not just that national policies have international implications, but really teasing apart what that can mean in certain contexts. So in a world without cages, there's a case study on Turkey and a recognition that immigration detention is being implemented, not only to serve sort of domestic goals of controlling migrants, but also to serve the goal of acting as border control, to again use terminology from the text and this idea that Turkey is trying to signal to the EU a willingness to act as a migrant controlling sort of policing state and preventing people from reaching Europe. And this of course contributes to these ongoing conversations that we've heard a lot about about Turkey seeking membership into the EU. So on a smaller scale, if we start to look at an individual state within the United States, we find that we can go again, even smaller to different municipalities but also even to individuals. So this contribution looks at the role of individual sheriffs, signing on to these contracts that are quite controversial some of you may be familiar with them the 287G contracts, which allowed local police departments to take on the role of enforcing federal immigration law so essentially acting in part like ICE agents. And as a result, you suddenly see these spaces that are far removed from the physical border of the US acting as a space of border enforcement and border surveillance, and thus ultimately also border violence. What a world without cages for me is truly about the future, even though it's spending a lot of careful time looking at the histories of these forms of oppression, and trying to bear witness to contemporary iterations. It's nonetheless doing so so that we can really imagine what a world without cages could look and feel like. And one thing that is certainly emphasized in the text is that reforms are not enough we cannot reform away. They are underpinning logics of punishment of domination of dehumanization, and the text does look at alternatives so it goes over some of these instances where alternatives to detention have been implemented. And it does find that in some of those instances, they are more humane and I'm not trying to discount the value and reducing harm, but nonetheless they offer us a reality that's a continuing of unfreedom to again borrow words from within the world. And so in order to reach true liberation we need to look to abolition. And what I take as the core message from a world without cages is that abolition is not a single solution, right so it's not just about removing prisons and removing immigration detention centers. It's about crafting an entirely new world that's founded in care mongering in mutual aid in individual resistance and collective solidarity. And in some ways that can feel very overwhelming and the text acknowledges that which I really appreciate you know especially when you're rallying against these systems of settler colonialism of racism of histories of slavery. And yet, as is repeated often in the text as well it's urgent and it feels particularly necessary and urgent when you contextualize, not only reducing this harm which obviously needs to happen. But when you background that with a world that's grappling with you know the climate crisis with wars with pandemics. So in this way for me abolition is not just about the undoing of some things, but it's really about the undoing and redoing perhaps of all things. And there's something extremely hopeful about that as well. I wondered to when I was thinking through this idea of abolition as being all of these many things and not centered on just as one change. Maybe Sherry and Stephanie will comment on this later, but it struck me that the original workshop was called decarceral futures plural. And maybe it was getting to that idea to have the need to create all of these different futures in order to meaningfully achieve abolition. And I wanted to end my contribution today and hopefully that was a good way of introducing everyone to the text with some words from the text itself. So this comes from the introduction which was authored by Sherry and Stephanie. So I'm just sort of summarizing some of the ideas that they found emerged when looking at all of these contributions together and note that the contributors are thinking across the spectrum of defunding policing overhauling the criminal justice system, eradicating prisons penal abolitionism and doing away with all forms of containment carceral abolitionism. The fact of findings reaffirm that neither the prison nor the detention center is inevitable in the modern democratic order, abolishing all forms of immigration detention would open the door for the emergence of new visions of justice. And I think it's through opening that door that we really start to see what a world without cages could look like. So thank you so much for your time and I look forward to hearing from the other panelists. I was waiting for you. Sorry, I'm not very still after all these years I'm still not managing these wretched buttons. Thanks very much. Okay, that was absolutely. That was absolutely fantastic and I do think that there is something about, you know, these making about the ways in which when we think about futures and make futures that we are actually also making spaces in the present and we should, you know, like the space that we're all in now which unfortunately is virtual but yeah so I really appreciated that. And now I'd like to introduce L Jones, a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax Nova Scotia. She was a poet laureate from 2013 to 15 and she teaches at Mount St Vincent University, where she was named the 15th Nounces Chair in Women Studies in 2017. Her work focuses on social justice issues including feminism, prison abolition, anti racism and decolonization, and she's authored some fiercely fantastic prose and poetry. The movement for this audience is abolitionist intimacies in which she considers the movement to abolish prisons through the black feminist principles of care and collectivity. Understanding the history of prisons in Canada and their relationship to settler colonialism and anti black racism. She observes how practices of intimacy are imbued with state violence at carceral sites, but she also shows how intimacy is integral to the ongoing struggles for justice and liberation through the care work of building relationships and organizing with people inside. She views beautifully that abolition is not only a political movement and prisons, it's also an intimate one deeply motivated by commitment and love. Really looking forward to your comments, Al. Thank you so much and as I said I apologize I have to do this from my phone so calls may come in there's no way to block them so if I get knocked off as a call came in I'll just come back so please be patient. Good afternoon everybody I'm speaking to you from your book took Halifax Nova Scotia, the unceded and unsurrended territories of the magma people. This book is coming at a really I think important and fraud time in our activism in Canada. In the past couple of months BC has been successful in cancelling the arrangement with CBS a with the province so for those who aren't familiar. The introduction in Canada immigration detention largely takes place in provincial facilities. And so those facilities contract with CBS a to allow immigration detention to take place. So in BC there was a successful campaign from Human Rights Watch and amnesty international that demanded that the province and those agreements, thus ending the practice of provincial immigration detention. And that campaign has now moved to my province in Nova Scotia and also in Quebec. Now of course there are challenges with that because we know that the state, when we close one avenue of incarceration it's not like then they just let us all free. We know that we're going to move to other forms of detention, as is mentioned in this book there's discussions for example of electronic surveillance, and the ways that those kind of mechanisms of carcerality are coming in. I myself am currently paying for a bracelet for somebody because the option was jail or bracelet. The cost is incredibly expensive beyond obviously the ability of most families. I've said ironically that the number of crimes that are committed so that people can pay for these bracelets, you know, but I'm being ironic but of course it's quite true right that people who are ready on subsistence living now have to pay 600 plus dollars a month for electronic monitoring which comes out of your pocket. So to say that we are guardedly optimistic I think getting the provinces to end this agreement is an important one but also a challenging one as we know that as Catherine McKittrick tells us black death, and the prison will always renew itself again and again and again and Lisa Lowe as well reminds us of us that the settler colonial state will always reincarnate itself in new forms under the name of reform. People may be familiar with the letter written by Jamaican farm workers in the last couple of weeks. This has been quite some use. So, the farm ministers minister responsible for farming in Jamaica was going to come and tour farms in Canada, and in this is an incredibly courageous move. The workers on those farms, and a couple of farms in Ontario wrote an open letter. And this is of course courageous because the kind of retaliation that happens to workers when they do this is extreme. And they describe their conditions variously as systematic slavery. We are treated like mules. They compared their conditions to prison which is very relevant here and said they're experiencing exploitation at a seismic level. And people can find that letter online if you're interested. So this was in many ways an unprecedented move where a collective of farm workers address the Jamaican ministers to reveal the conditions that they're experiencing and this was of course after the death of a farm worker named Yip, who died while on the job. For those who aren't familiar with the Canadian farm worker program those who enter the program do not have a path to citizenship they have no right to healthcare education or any status in the country they come at the whim of their families and they can be removed at any time and there are multiple removals that take place so they come here eight months a year on minimum wage, under the idea that these wages are adequate in Jamaica, and they have no kind of status for path to status at all in the country. So that was actually a very important moment where those workers banded together to give us a picture of what is happening, as maybe expected the minister said they were going to he was going to tour the farms and then said publicly that he saw no problems on the farms and everything was fine so boo to him. Finally, an academic letter has been circulating demanding status for all that many educators have signed on so to say that we're in a period in Canada where migrants worker activism and anti carceral immigration activism is incredibly powerful. I come to this work through my work in prison justice I sometimes say I became an abolitionist at age 13 when I read ballad of Reading jail by Oscar Wilde and was immediately struck by the injustice of prison. In my adult life I began working with those inside prison in relationship with them the title of my book intimacy is. I don't really like this phrase working with like as if it's a chore we are I'm in relationship with friendship with love with many people who are incarcerated and we work together to organize for liberation. And in the course of that work, because of the ties between the immigration system and the criminal justice system. And really we were just thrown into also doing anti deportation activism. So the last chapter of this book deals with the case of a young man named Abdul Adi a Somali refugee who came to Canada with sister for tumor. They were taken into the government care into the child foster program as children, and they did not receive citizenship. They were taken into the government who would come with them and who is with them who identifies as their mother at various points applied to citizenship herself and they took the children off the application and said well you don't have guardianship. When Abdul turned 19 after being bounced between 31 different homes including youth care so youth jail which again shows how many children that are in the refugee system and criminalize as youth, including group homes, and of many temporary housing situations, both children, both for two men Abdul were brutally abused in all of these situations abuse of every possible kind when Abdul turned 19 years old and committed a crime he was scheduled for deportation. Miners in Canada 2017 could not apply for citizenship on their own behalf there was simply no way that he could have got citizenship and as well in our system youth crimes are treated under the immigration system as adult crime so while we have a justice act that recognizes that children are differentially responsible. When it comes to immigration consequences the very same holds are put on youth so if you commit a crime, a so called crime I don't buy into the society of crime but you know if you're criminalized, then you have a five year hold before you can even apply. Abdul was criminalized by the age of 10. And one of the first encounters he had with the police in the child welfare system was his sister was removed from one of the homes due to sexual abuse. Abdul was left there and he took the family car to go looking for his sister his only family member, and the police were called. And this is of course very common for children and child welfare. I could speak about the Abdul case for a long time. I encourage you to read the chapter. We became involved when Abdul's cellmate who is actually the nephew of a very famous case in Canada woman named Ashley Smith, who died in prison she'd been taken into prison as a youth for throwing apples at her probation officer was moved from solitary confinement to solitary confinement remained in confinement as an adult, and began to essentially stimulate herself by wrapping things around her throat in her throat to get attention, or to feel some kind of human connection, and she died in GVI a woman's prison, after she strangled herself with her sheets and the guards stood outside herself for 45 minutes and watched her die. And that is a very, very famous case in Canada. Her nephew became incarcerated. In fact, many of her family members are incarcerated. And her brother Corey who was in prison at the time when he found out about her death, very famously. You know, just freaked out on staff and they reinforced his cell with like steel and that cell is a notorious cell everyone calls it Corey cell and if you misbehave your place in the cell. Her nephew was incarcerated with Abdul and it was his call that began the activism for Abdul he said this young man is here and there's something we need to do something. And that started myself Desmond Cole Adil Abdullah he a number of people was a national movement lawyer Ben Perryman upon. We were very much jumped into this immigration work so to that point we had been doing prison work or the organizing with prisoners to organize strikes, wrongful conviction work court work, working with women, working with trans non bio energy and we were doing a kind of full service, trying to just take calls and meet needs and then we had this immigration call we all had to learn immigration law overnight, essentially, and Ben Perryman was extremely helpful in that process. That case we were actually successful, and we were able to successfully halt Abdul's deportation. I do want to say as well that this activism was led by Fatuma Abdul sister who was six months pregnant at the time which brings in this issue of reproductive justice that was in the book. She was actually supposed to be on bed rest, but you know she said I'll do anything I can for my brother and quite famously stood up in front of our Prime Minister and said, Why are you deporting my brother would you deport your own son, and then waited for his answer and this began a movement in Canada where former child refugees, former children in care without status are now suing multiple governments and Abdul and Fatuma suing our provincial government in Nova Scotia for the neglect. And it also caused a policy change in Nova Scotia they now have to ensure that you think care have citizenship. I don't have a lot of time so I can't tell you all of Fatuma story, but many people know Abdul story Fatuma story is extremely important also for its gendered aspects. She had many children removed from her by child welfare and one of her children actually died in care and has not even been given a headstone. So she does not know where that child died. She illustrates I think so many things about this system so the case of Abdul I think one reason why it became headline using Canada is it really exemplified all of the issues that this book takes on we have reproductive justice. We have the treatment of black youth. Absolutely not receive an education. We have the intersections between both the adult criminal system and the youth criminal system, the child welfare system. And of course the refugee system so all of these things came together in that case and black people in Canada responded on a huge level, because people recognize what was happening here. That was quite unusual because often of course is a stigma where people feel like these people are embarrassing us very much as the idea of the good immigrants you know the settlement the person who deserves this you know we have very much a narrative where those who are immigrants feel like they should be grateful. You know that they owe something this country and these kind of people are an embarrassment and make it harder for the good immigrants so one thing that was quite effective in that case was, it was in fact a lot of good organizations for the good settlers that agreed with us that what was happening to Abdul was egregious. I wanted to cite that. I also just to tell some more cases where these intersections take place. I've been recently working I won't say his name. But young man who was incarcerated, he had been incarcerated federally and then as happens if you, your sentence expires and your schedule for deportation, you end up being incarcerated in a provincial facility I need to speed up. You need to really quickly then we'll end. You end up re incarcerated in a provincial facility that's called gating by guys in prison. And that re incarcerations you wait for deportation is indefinite and unlimited so it's until they can deport. He ended up a stage for cancer. They did not take him to be treated as he was passing out passing blood, losing path his body weight, until the men in prison literally refused to lock up risking disciplinary consequences themselves and said you have to take this man to prison. That began I mean to hospital that began a year long or deal of us trying to get him out while battling the two intersecting systems, where he had in the meantime while returned to jail he'd been peripherally involved in a jail fight, where they heavily criminalize everybody in this fight held people on these massive charges like attempted murder conspiracy to commit everyone ended up charged with like obstructing officers that was all they got sentenced with. In this course of overcharging everybody, he ended up caught up in that and then ended up with criminal charges again on top of this deportation we had to make our way through this double system to get this man out so he could die at home. And that has been a long process. He is currently of course on an ankle bracelet that we have to pay for I have to pay security fees for police to take him to the hospital every month and they charge me for two days of salary. Three times I have to pay thousands of dollars a month, so this man can go to a medical appointment. He does not have health status. So we, it is only because his doctor is agreeing to treat him for free through a migrant health center that he's able to get treatment and one thing that's interesting about that is that one of the arguments they made to detain him was well since he's in prison he has health care. If we get him out of prison, we won't give him health care so he's safer in prison so this is actually one of the arguments made during COVID for a man with stage four cancer. Another case I also did was a young woman who was age 16, who was incarcerated, and they did not have her documents so even though she was a youth she ended up in an adult incarceration we had to fight to get her out. I just wanted to tell some of these stories in how I ended up in this work to show what these, and she was also a child welfare so as we think about these carceral systems, we see how through the lens of immigration through this lens of citizenship and who belongs and who's in and out and who's a threat. This is of course as in many countries in Canada, very much a growing idea, you know citizenship freedom we have these freedom convoys like waving Canadian flags that you know claim to be for freedom but explicitly xenophobic anti immigrants Islamophobic. We know that this discourse ties to other forms of discipline and control that we've been fighting through the abolition movement so the control of borders, then control of children, control to the health care system psychiatric institutions, policing of course, as we fight for defunding. So we see all these connections are just for 30 seconds to end. I really do encourage you to read the book. It takes an international lens we have so so making very clear that what happens in one country it moves around in this neoliberal world these strategies and immigration are not local they are in fact international and they are fed from one country to another which I think is an extremely important perspective. We have a lot of readings of the connections of slavery, coolie ism indentured labor. The ways that the post slavery world constructs migration. The status of workers the status of sex workers trans non binary people. What those who identify as woman experience so I think, as I see in my own work. We cannot understand the system without working in all other systems I fell into it through working in prison, and then found myself, you know constantly challenging these deportations in that perspective I've run out of time so I will stop now sorry to talk a little long and I look forward to the rest of the conversation. Paul L that was just really fantastic really powerful and I think kind of learning about those, how you came into it and the particularities of people's situations and struggles is actually really important and one of the things I was struck by actually that kind of connects yours and Kate's comments is is the ways in which kind of prison and criminalization kind of bolsters these ideologies of deserving us and sort of reinforces this false assumption of a relationship between deserving us and unjust and justice which I think is really really important to kind of challenge so thank you for that. And now we're going to hear from Cesar Hernandez. He's the Gregory Williams chair in civil rights and civil liberties Ohio State University where he writes and teaches about the intersection of criminal and immigration law. He has two books migrating to prison and criminalization, criminalization law, and his analysis of policies affecting migrants has appeared in media in the United States and abroad. He's passed full bright scholar and has been a scholar in residence at the University of California Berkeley and Texas Southern University. And in 2019 the Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center on a team with its challenging discrimination award. He's also a past recipient of the Derek a bell junior award by the Association of American Law School section on minority groups, which is an honor issued to quote a junior faculty member who through activism mentoring leadership teaching and scholarship has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system or social justice so very appropriate speaker over to you says are Thank you so much for it's my great pleasure to participate in this conversation and especially grateful to to Sherry and to Stephanie for editing this volume. It was an honor to be able to attend the convening that hatched the book and an honor to be a part of today's gathering so I'm actually based. I'm currently located in Mexico City, where I'm living for three years so, and just yesterday successfully finalized my migration process. So, an extremely privileged and fortunate way of doing so but nonetheless special relevance to today's conversation for me personally. But I am as, as Sherry. Sorry, I mentioned a legal scholar based in the United States. And as such, I think the notion of a world without cages to borrow the title of the book is nothing if not answerful. Whether it's in the criminal criminal legal system or in the civil and administrative immigration law enforcement context, imprisonment of course in the United States is commonplace arrest is routine conditions of confinement or harsh the present state is expansive in practice, just like in law, it's easy for government officials to deprive people of their liberty. And while most people are eventually released, they're released on terms set by others by police by prosecuting attorneys by judges and various phrases have been used to describe what's more or less the same phenomenon of extraordinary incarceration there's probably the most well known of the phrases mass incarceration there's hyper incarceration there's new Jim Crow. In the decade long political context in the United States easy to find much to criticize, but directly and directly several of the contributors to this volume go well beyond that. explicitly Michelle Brown writes about the pernicious effects of these 287 G agreements, like I mentioned earlier to seven agreements through which the federal government's immigration law enforcement entities are augmented by state and local police forces, given the decentralized nature of policing power in the United States, Brown's treatment of cooperative arrangements like these 287 G agreements is remarkably important through initiatives like these traditional criminal police agencies are transformed into immigration law enforcement agencies. The process borders effectively migrate. Instead of the international boundary being situated along a specific geopolitical mark, the power of immigration policing that reaches into communities well into the nation's interior means that borders can be and are created anywhere as border policing a spread so to has resistance Brown writes about organizing that occurred in deeply conservative politically conservative Tennessee. There a large immigration rate at a packing plant there and similar examples could come from Texas or Georgia, Florida or Iowa and other states that are consistently governed by immigration restrictionists. The borders can be dislodged from international boundaries so that they can be anywhere or everywhere at any time. Then we've reached a point in the evolution of the theoretical understanding of migration, where the border as a legal construct that has to specific geographic location is at best only a partially accurate description of the border to find a more comprehensive definition of the border, we might instead think of borders as mobile exercise of police power capable of encircling people deemed deviant. Perhaps that deviance is tied to citizenship status with orders encircling migrants, or as an indeed a sharpness contribution to the book illustrates, perhaps it is tied to enslavement, the legal status as so called truly labor and British occupied India, perhaps share coppers in the United States of the early 20th century, or people convicted of criminal offenses, more recently through various technologies, all of which are deployed to have been deployed under the authority of legal regimes. Each of these markers of deviance has distinguished the desirable from undesirable members of a community. In effect, deviance has constituted the borders of a national community on the inside are the righteous people in need of protection. On the outside the fallen dejected dangerous bodies of the enemy to paraphrase Jessica Evans's contribution about Canada. This is an amalgamation of undeserving bodies to our rightfully excluded because they perpetually pose a threat, either to the bodily integrity of individual members of the community, or worse, to the communities very existence. The stakes are, are high. So policing borders becomes necessary in that logic to the overseers whip, or the police officers baton violence, always threatened and sometimes realized is the sign that all is in order. A border without police is a border that does not exist. A community that has no border is a community that has no control. A community without control is a community that is not sovereign, without sovereignty. All that is left this chaos of a romanticized community run amok by aliens standalone border policing agencies are sorry are no exception. The tools are the same in the United States there's 10s of thousands of law enforcement agents who who work for the federal immigration enforcement or the Customs and Border Protection agencies that to primary divisions of the Federal Department of Homeland Security with responsibility for immigration law enforcement duties. Their task is to identify people who have potentially violated immigration law apprehend those individuals and forcibly remove them from the United States. In order to do this, they are bolstered by the late 20th century's policy innovation a sprawling archipelago of prisons. They're steel and concrete architecture, putting on display the brute force that the state is willing to expend to protect citizens from aliens. They're also aided by an early 21st century addition to this continuum of unfreedom and a bucket of phrase that on you may spot the place. Both ice and the Customs and Border Protection tap previously unimaginably large amounts of digitized the digitized data from motor vehicle driving records to electricity usage. They're accessible almost instantaneously through sophisticated portals that are created and maintained and then contracted to the federal government by third party private entities like Palantir and Thompson routers. The border spectacle that as like I got the scribes in the Turkish detention context is well resourced and on solid legal ground in the United States. Congress lavishes ice and comes customs and border protection with generous funding to police migrants. Courts afford immigration authorities immense flexibility and identifying an apprehending confining excluding and deporting people. And has become naturalized such that its existence is not doubted it's it's form is rarely questioned when it comes to border policing the state can exempt it to call for from an issue not contribution exempt itself from having to explain why it does just what it does. Indeed, the state's violence in defense of borders is justified so thoroughly by the migrants legal transgression that it's difficult to see the state's coercion as violence. If a migrant has violated immigration law, is it even violence to terror child from a parent to confine an entire family together to banish someone from the place they call home. As borders have migrated also means that borders can be transgressed anywhere at any moment through a variety of methods. The border shift and form and in place policing movement remain central to their vitality. The borders significant swings as movement becomes more accessible. This is the freedom of mobility that Brown says is the is at the heart of an abolitionist politics and freedom of movement in Sharma's words building building from our rent is perhaps the most elementary of all human liberties. Humanity begins with the story of mobility, escaping, escaping ancient oceans, ocean waters and some three human form and multiple versions of mobility defines conceptions of a people and Islam mobility begins with the prophet Muhammad and Christianity with the first family for Jews across the centuries mobility has been critical to survival for many migrants today it means much the same thing. As it means opportunity either way mobility remains an essential components of self realization and exercise of a ton and when the state elect to curtail even to eliminate cross border movement of people through policing, then perhaps it is right to think of actual mobility as inherently abolitionist by moving across very borders into which states invest so much to police migrants prefigure a world without police borders. Migrants do not negate the existence of borders as they merely highlight the viciousness of states in such a way that perhaps will render borders obsolete. With respect to the perspective of time, migrants are the future just as they are the past. In the words of the Columbia novelist, Laura. The future is not sedentary civilization, but mobility, we will all be moving soon. Some of us will move out of fear, the fear of death of starvation of violence, some out of despair, despair over the present despair over the future some out of love, love a family, love of a shared vision of a community. The adventure, the adventure of something new the adventure of walking unfamiliar streets, some out of a complicated mix of reasons that even they do not understand. Some for reasons that I cannot contemplate perhaps that we collect, collectively today cannot imagine because neither the past nor the present, prepare us fully for the future. It's like none of the reasons for migration should be idealized, neither the past nor the future should be romanticized indeed this collection stands firmly as a call to embrace alternatives to the present romanticization of the past that leads to a fetishization of a nation states bureaucratic ability to deliver people organize people by worse. This reason justifies migration that reason does not this person bears the good reason but not the bad that person bears the bad only but not the good. Instead of reproducing the hierarchy of reasons that fill immigration statutes around the world. This collection stands squarely alongside the migratory migratory future that the novelist with the devil sees. Perhaps the futures perhaps in which care mongering forms the basis of an alternative conceptualization of citizenship as Davis and fight to hope where solidarity with equality exists as Moffitt calls one, or where law guarantees rights on the basis of one status as a person, rather than on one's birthright in an unequal world, as I've been in audio suggest. Today is the moment in which it is imperative that we take seriously those alternative features. And doing so, I commend each of the contributors to this volume and look forward to the conversation that follows these remarks. Thank you. Thank you so much for giving us so much to think about. And before we move to some your questions and comments I want to invite sherry and Stephanie to kind of step in and maybe talk to the panelists and give us some of your their thoughts they're the contributors of this fantastic collection, the people who brought the contributors and the panel together. So sherry, a kin is associate professor of law and academic director of a new graduate diploma in immigration and citizenship law at Queens University. Her research interests include comparative migration law and policy, as well as constructions of citizenship in ethnically divided societies. As president of the Canadian Council for Refugees, a board member of FCJ Refugee Centre in Toronto and co editor of the PKI Global Justice Journal and former editor in chief of the Journal Refuge. Stephanie Silverman is a global expert in immigration detention policy and practice. She's authored over 25 articles and book chapters and her sole authored book The Detention Estate looks closely at the rise and normalization of the Canadian detention system, and is forthcoming with McGill Queens University Press, and I know her from of old from the central migration public policy and society, where we were together, I don't know maybe 10 years ago, scary how, how quickly time goes. And so sherry and Stephanie, can I invite you to make your contribution. Stephanie. Thank you everyone for coming. I wanted to also acknowledge that some of the contributors from the book, as well as the workshop, as well as the special issue and our many conversations that sherry and I have been very fortunate to have on the side of those formal avenues are present. Some have been coming in and out and we just appreciate your making the time to continue this conversation with us. And yeah, I was just thinking more about how the workshop was, you know, better than I could have expected. Like, with someone with very high expectations because as we all know it takes a long time to put together an academic workshop, and that that sherry and I hadn't visaged it as the beginning of other sort of forms of exploration and it's just so nice to be continuing this and the readers or the commenters on the book and also Bridget have been doing exactly that again and like they've been taking the book as a as a piece and then expanding out. So, I really appreciate how Kate gave us such a great overview of the book and how we are trying to bring these disparate conversations together. And there are pitfalls and challenges but also, you know, lovely kind of synergies that came out of that. I appreciate El's comments about sort of the factual situation and the very individual and personalized toll of these greater systems that Kate had been describing so I thought that was really interesting. I hadn't heard the term gating before so I'm going to have to look that up and add it to my sadly expanding vocabulary. And throughout when Cesar always speaks very well, I was very taken with this idea of the romanticization of the past. And I think our friends like in more of the historical sociology side are really bringing us new insights into that as well because I certainly have been learning a lot from this kind of continuous revision of history and as we keep going back and looking at where these things came from and I just myself spent a long time immersed in the history of Canadian detention policy in trying to write this book that British the Bridget mentioned. And just sort of these hidden in plain sight, which is something that I've been trying to do a lot of my own work but I've seen it more and more in history and I think that in the law sherry and Cesar and others are really showing us how that was done as well. And just want to find out comment just about the word alternatives. Like everyone's talking about these alternative futures but for me it's almost like the word has been sullied by alternative to detention. So, so I'm just interested in this kind of word practice like how do we take back this word or do we give it up and find a better word. And just in Canada to meant to come off of well and others are saying about these freedom convoy protest people may have heard about it outside of Canada. But I was people I've been talking to been saying that almost as though the flag itself is now associated with with the protests and so the question is do we try to take back the flag or do we do something else and so I wonder if it's the same with alternative like this word like do we do something else when we think about like new futures do we leave the word alternative to the side. And so yes thank you for your contributions and those are just some of my thoughts. Can I can I just add if we're going to talk about new words. I also wonder about community. Because I think communities. So that was just a bit provocative in the, in the collection I noticed that people use community quite often, and actually what does community mean. It's one of those words that's very kind of warm and fuzzy but then sometimes the way it gets mobilized is really scary. So that's just another one to add to our kind of thinking about our vocabularies. Anyway, sorry, abusing my chairing sherry. No, that's actually a perfect segue and I really do want to reiterate everything Stephanie said in terms of our, our note of thanks and appreciation to everyone on this panel for such thoughtful observations. Maybe I'll just spring off the question. You've identified Bridget and Stephanie you set out for us about our vocabularies. It's something that is woven through the book, but really urgently needs to be foregrounded today is the need for more careful vocabulary, aligned with the goal of abolitionism. The legislative detention is government speak for recreating the carceral state outside of the prisoner detention center with all of its attendant harms and abuses. And I do think, you know, for example, the, the success in BC around ending provincial detention. What's important doesn't get us to where we need to go. Right, because immigration holding centers, you know, are ever present there's a brand new one in BC with expanded capacity. And then even when people are released under an alternative detention framework in the Canadian context or elsewhere. The carceral state is ever present because of that ankle bracelet because of restrictions on mobility. You know, even people who are released are subject to not just ankle bracelets and that kind of surveillance, but significant curtailment of their liberties. We have to go beyond the focus on the carceral space as prison or detention center. We have to start looking at the root causes, and how the violence of the state is exercised in relation to these ultimately social problems like talking about racism, enslavement indentured labor, poverty, mental health problems. Whether we're looking at the prison or we're looking at immigration detention, the number of people locked up or denied their liberty simply because they're struggling with addictions. And then on to addictions, which is ultimately a mental health issue with the brute force of violence. There is something wrong with that picture. A colleague of ours, Simon Wallace just presented a very interesting study at a conference Stephanie and I attended a few days in which, just in one short month last summer, he looked at all the detention cases that had been adjudicated in Canada, and found that the vast majority of detainees were not actually new entrants, but folks seeking entry into Canada. They were people who've been in Canada years and sometimes decades and fell out of legal status. Right. And I think that's a very interesting observation because it, you know, it really highlights that when we're talking about immigration detention, just as when we're talking about prison in the criminal law context. We need to understand what the actual reasons the state deploys, you know, for locking people up and denying their liberty as Cesar was commenting you know this notion of who is deserving of unfreedom. We need to actually deconstruct that it's a huge challenge. So, ultimately, I think every presentation today underscored the fact that abolitionism is not utopian. It's practical politics as our friend Bridget would underscore, and we need to get there. And I really look forward to the conversation that hopefully ensues from now to help us get there. Thank you everyone. Thanks, Sherry. So does anyone who hasn't yet spoken want to say anything have some comments or question I'm going to stop recording now. So