Call it Alligator Auschwitz, not Alcatraz
It's a concentration camp, not a Disney World ride. And it's potentially the kick-off of large-scale, government-sanctioned slave labor in the United States.
Sure, the original Alcatraz was an island prison that was impossible to escape (due to the San Francisco Bay’s strong current, not ravenous wildlife). But that is not the sole provenance of the new migrant prison camp’s official nickname. The Republican Party is actually marketing t-shirts and baseball caps with the camp’s logo on them! It’s a way of trivializing something that should deeply terrify us all: the government is building concentration camps in the United States. And among other things, those camps are likely to be a source of cheap (if not free) labor for industries that are already dependent on cheap immigrant workers, including the agriculture, food processing, construction and hospitality industries.
We Already Have Involuntary Servitude in the United States. And It’s Legal.
We tend to think of the Thirteenth Amendment as having abolished slavery in the United States. And while it did make chattel slavery and involuntary servitude illegal, it also included a pretty significant exception.
Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment provides as follows:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." [Emphasis added.]
As the Freedom Network USA explains, “The punishment clause exception has contributed to a profit-driven prison-industrial complex under which private companies and government entities capitalize on cheap or unpaid prison labor. Some of the most common forms of prison labor include cleaning, doing laundry, food service, working with machinery, and cutting hair.”
Moreover, “[w]orkers earn pennies per hour, over half of which is used to pay for room and board, court costs, and other prison maintenance fees. 70% of incarcerated people are unable to afford basic necessities with their prison wages; a $3 tube of toothpaste or $5 stick of deodorant can take days of work to afford.”
Many People are Sounding the Alarm. We All Need to Listen.
, a renowned scholar of authoritarianism (who along with his wife, Marci Shore, also a renowned scholar of authoritarianism, has relocated from Yale University to the University of Toronto), wrote speculatively but pointedly about this in a recent Substack post.
“With the passage of Trump's death bill, we face the prospect of many great harms, including an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States.
“Concentration camps are sites of tempting slave labor. Among many other aims, the Soviets used concentration camp labor to build canals and work mines. The Nazi German concentration camp system followed a capitalist version of the same logic: it drew in businesses with the prospect of inexpensive labor.
“We know this and have no excuse not to act.”
cited Snyder and amplified his concerns on July 5, writing, “Scholars of authoritarianism are sounding the alarm over the new law. Timothy Snyder warned that the extensive concentration camps that Trump has called for and the new measure will fund will be tempting sites for slave labor. Undocumented immigrants make up 4% to 5% of the total U.S. workforce. In agriculture, food processing, and construction, they make up between 15% and 20% of the workforce.”She continues, “Comparing the detention camps to similar programs in other countries, Snyder warns that incarcerated workers will likely be offered to employers on special terms, a concept Trump appears to have embraced with his suggestion that the administration will figure out how to put workers back in the fields and businesses by putting them under the authority of those hiring them. Trump has called the idea ‘owner responsibility.’”
Similarly,
of The New Republic elaborates on Snyder’s thesis by writing, “If you’re the type of person who wants to round up thousands upon thousands of people and detain them in inhumane conditions and give them four or five square feet of private space and feed them slop and treat them like animals, isn’t there inevitably going to come a time when you think: Why should these people be sitting around doing nothing all day?”He also points out that “[o]n his July 1 visit to the Everglades camp with Governor Ron DeSantis and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump was asked about detainees participating in some kind of work program. The question starts at 5:43 of this video. As ever with Trump, he starts and stops sentences midway and it’s hard to follow. But he talks about ‘farmer responsibility’ and ‘owner responsibility.’ He seems to be describing a system whereby farmworkers and others would live in detention camps but be released to work on farms or in hotels. ‘They’re not getting citizenship,’ he said, ‘but they get other things.’ He didn’t specify what those ‘things’ were. So something is in the works.”
And while
didn’t address the prospect of forced prison labor in the post linked above, he astutely analyzed the “capacity” problem facing a government that is keen to arrest and detain as many immigrants as possible, comparing it to the Nazis’ methodical planning of what came to be the Holocaust.Gordon writes, “The Trump administration faces what officials like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller describe as a ‘capacity’ . . . issue—how to handle the millions of undocumented immigrants and others rounded up within the United States. This approach perversely plans for mass detention by building extensive infrastructure first, then filling it—a kind of supply-side authoritarianism. Disturbingly, administration officials stand to profit financially from these policies, entwining personal gain with the machinery of state repression.”
“Owner Responsibility”
Tellingly, though there have been plenty of ICE raids on worksites thought to be employing undocumented workers — and while some of those raids might even have included requests to employers that they provide documentation that they are not knowingly employing unauthorized workers — I have not seen any headlines about the government arresting and prosecuting employers of unauthorized foreign workers. (Correct me if I’m wrong, please.)
Instead, the government appears poised to potentially reward employers in sectors dependent on foreign labor by offering them the services of imprisoned immigrants — arresting and detaining those hardworking immigrants, only to rent them back to their former employers at a discount.
It’s reminiscent of the prison chain gangs of yore, mostly in southern states. Can you see the throughline? Slavery > sharecropping > Jim Crow > mass incarceration > forced labor > large-scale migrant detention > more forced labor > capitalism wins!
Two adages we must always keep in mind: (1) first they come for the immigrants, and (2) always follow the money.
Soon to be a forced labor camp. In his own words.
thank you - I couldn't quite put into few(er) words my disgust with this -
"it's a concentration camp, it's not Disney World ride" - exactly