By centering the stories of foreign-born people subjected to imprisonment, Elliott Young's Forever Prisoners demonstrates how this particular detention regime has not only escalated in the past several decades but, more important, grows out of deep roots reaching back to the nineteenth century origins of immigration restriction. Young widens our view of what counts as immigrant detention over time and how the United States has ensnared differently outcast
groups into its varied cages — including offshore islands, mental institutions, martial detention camps, and refugee camps, as well detention centers, jails, and prisons. Forever Prisoners is crucial book for anyone interested in the convergence of prison and immigration regimes.
Elliott Young is Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII and Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border and co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas. He has also provided
expert witness testimony for over 200 asylum cases and has written for the Huffington Post, the Oregonian, and the Utne Reader.