Immigrants as Prime Deliveries, Immigrants as Financial Ghosts
The Necrocapitalism of Immigration
A few weeks ago, Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, told the crowd at the Border Security Expo1 that he wanted to see a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
The Border Security Expo, as you might be able to guess, is the kind of convention-center-swallowing multi-day extravaganza that brings together private prison corporations, tech companies, the Border Patrol union, police departments, and defense contractors (one of the Expo’s sponsors, BAE Systems, has a “controversies” section on Wikipedia that covers such delights as 1) illicit arms dealings 2) cluster bombs 3) massive payments to Agustin Pinochet. Very cool.). All of this, of course, and the people who will eventually hire these corporations—the Todd Lyons, the Tom Homans and the Kirstie Noems.
The whole thing was a massive celebration of the amount of federal money that is about to rain down on the military- and prison-industrial complex—a celebration made explicit by Homan in his keynote speech.
“We need to buy more beds, we need more airplane flights and I know a lot of you are here for that reason. Let the badge and guns do the badge and gun stuff, everything else, let’s contract out,” he said.
And then you have Lyons’ comments, which I want to spend a little more time on, which makes explicit the industrialization, the monetization of the business of deportation.
Way back in 1995, Amazon began as a garage-founded outfit, funded by Daddy’s wallet after Jeff Bezos read an article that e-commerce was the next big thing. In the beginning, Amazon was an online book retailer. Why books? Not because Jeff Bezos was a bibliophile or because he wanted to spread literacy across the online-connected world. No, books were a suitable first product because there was plentiful demand, cheap cost-per-unit, and a tremendous variety of titles in print.
During this time, Bezos deliberately undercut the prices of his competitors, taking losses to gain customer loyalty, using the massive amount of business his site generated ($20,000/week within two months) to leverage better shipping rates, better wholesale rates from publishers, to alter entire industries to serve his desire for ceaseless growth. Now Amazon sells everything, will ship to anywhere, and will do it for cheaper than anyone else. He started with books because it was easy, because it let him build a shipping and storing and packing infrastructure, and now Amazon’s logo is an arrow stretching from A-to-Z because it wants to claim universality.
Let me say that again: Amazon started with books because they were cheap and plentiful, and because it let them build an infrastructure to sell things online faster and cheaper than anyone else.
And once more: They are starting with immigrants because there are many of them and the political will is there, and it is allowing them to build an infrastructure to incarcerate and deport faster and cheaper than anyone else.
Lyons’ comments speak to a casual dehumanization of immigrants and to the intersection of capital and immigration. However, beneath his comments, there is also a suggestion to the idea, floated around the higher levels of the Trump administration, beginning to be visible out in the blatantly illegal incarcerations of green card holders and the deportations of people without orders of deportation, that this is a system that is coming not just for undocumented people, but for anyone who might dissent from this administration.
Now, if only that was the only place this week where this intersection of capital, immigration, and a growing sense of foreboding was in the news this week.
The names of over 6,300 people who had received Temporary Protected Status (TPS) under the Biden administration were moved to the Social Security “death master file”—the massive database the Social Security administration uses to track people who have died and whose social security numbers have been deactivated.
Temporary Protected Status is granted to people from countries facing armed conflict, a natural disaster, or some other form of theoretically temporary but massive disruption in day-to-day life—a kind of half-assed asylum program in which to funnel people who might have a claim. As of September of last year, during the last days of the Biden administration, the U.S. offered TPS to people from 16 countries, the list of which should give you an idea of the kind of upheaval and disruption people are fleeing from: Venezuela, Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, Nepal, Cameroon, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Burma, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan.
TPS has been a big area of concern for this administration—if you visit the website for TPS right now, it states that this administration is “committed to restoring the rule of law with respect to Temporary Protected Status (TPS),” arguing that the use of this perfectly legal humanitarian program is actually an example of federal overreach. (It’s not!) The administration has tried, time and again, to end TPS for groups like Venezuelans (order stayed by a judge) and, shockingly, Afghans and Cameroonians (just 4 days ago, hopefully there is a challenge in the works).
Rendering TPS recipients’ social security numbers invalid is just another workaround for ending the program itself. People with legally obtained social security numbers, who have legally been able to work and bank and receive government benefits have been suddenly, drastically cut off from these things. The goal of this action was to make life so difficult here in the U.S. that, again, perfectly legal migrants would self-deport, returning to home countries they had left.
What’s truly chilling, though, is how the administration talks about this decision. According to the New York Times, the decision was announced to Social Security administration staff like this: Their “financial lives,” Leland Dudek, the Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner, wrote in an email to staff members, would be “terminated.”
Martin O’Malley, the previous commissioner of the Social Security administration also described it as “financial murder.”
And now I want to introduce a new term—it’s the one that appears in the subhead of this email, one that’s fairly new to me, but one that immediately clicked into place the first time I heard it. “Necrocapitalism.” In the article for Organization Studies where he coined the term, Dr. S.B. Bannerjee describes it as “contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death.” In other words: a form of capitalism where wealth is accumulated due to dehumanization and death, the one feeding into and encouraging the other like a horrible ouroboros.
I’m betting you, like me, have immediately gotten the picture and are ticking off examples on your fingers—but just in case, here are some. Private prisons? Necrocapitalism. The U.S. healthcare system? Necrocapitalism. Government responses to COVID-19? Deeply, deeply necrocapitalistic.
And yes, comparing the deportation of migrants to Amazon Prime deliveries and committing financial murder against immigrants are both first-order examples of necrocapitalism—in different ways, and with different weights and effects on people’s lives, but both underscoring the ways in which money and death are fundamentally intertwined in the U.S. immigration system.
Things have been this way for a long time—private prisons have held undocumented people for years, with new beds incentivizing further arrests, companies from Wayfair to Amazon have made money off the suffering of people locked up in these prisons. Something I’ve found, over my time working in immigration, is that when things are a certain way for a long time, you can forget there are alternatives.
So indulge me for a moment: imagine a world in which lucrative government contracts were doled out to support immigrant life, rather than immigrant death. If instead of looking for the most efficient, cheapest way to deport people, we spent government resources on finding the most efficient cheapest way to make sure people had enough English to get by, day-to-day. Imagine the economic growth we all would have if instead of taking away migrants’ abilities to work we spent that energy creating robust jobs programs that, along the way, fixed the major infrastructure issues in this country, helped us achieve low-cost childcare for working parents, and closed the healthcare shortage. Imagine, instead of detention centers, welcoming centers to help people get oriented after long, difficult journeys to the U.S. Imagine a functional guest worker program that allowed people to easily enter and exit the country without fearing for their lives every time they crossed a borderland designed to kill them.
Necrocapitalistic policies feed us the idea that there isn’t enough to go around—that suffering is necessary to make the global economy work, that death is an unfortunate byproduct of the way things are. It lies to us and tells us we’re lucky not to be slipping down the rungs of economic and political stability towards that same death ourselves ourselves—so get your nose to the grindstone and keep at it, you don’t know when necrocapitalism will come for you.
There is another way.
As a note, Jerod Macdonald-Evoy, the Arizona Mirror reporter that originally covered the expo and brought Lyons’ comments to national attention, may very well be a master of the absolutely neutral-yet-factual observation. Every line of this piece is both absolutely damning and yet absolutely neutral.