Concentration camps using forced labor are alive and well today in America. But there's a lot we can do to put an end to them.
This week's episode of "Next Comes What" tackles the use of forced labor of detainees at ICE facilities around the country. Andrea Pitzer looks at the massive expansion of profit from the country's two largest detention contractors, GEO Group and CoreCivic, and details the hunger and labor strikes detainees have been conducting nationwide. She also considers the history of forced labor in concentration camps around the globe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with German genocide on Shark Island in what is today Namibia, she also describes how mandatory work was used in Soviet Russia, under British rule in Kenya, in post-Revolutionary China, and elsewhere.
In each country, the international trend of concentration camps fused with preexisting local history and culture to create different models of forced labor. In the case of the U.S., Andrea suggests that mandatory work in ICE detention rises out of the long use of prison labor. Noting that the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution left in place a slave-labor exception for convicts, she traces the way that arrests and convict leasing continued the work conditions of slavery for many Black men and boys in the wake of the Civil War, despite emancipation. Yet forced labor in ICE detention adds another layer of injustice, in that the vast majority of people held in immigration detention don't even have charges filed against them, let alone a conviction. Andrea closes the episode with a look at ways that people have fought back under extraordinary conditions in the past and are resisting now--including ideas for those looking to eliminate forced labor in the US and to abolish ICE.
0:00 Introduction – Delaney Hall strikes & forced labor in ICE detention today
3:13 Overview – A survey of forced labor in concentration camp settings
5:45 Nazi work camps – Forced labor from 1933 through WWII
6:55 Why detention makes forced labor worse – expendability, punishment, profit
9:44 Pre-Nazi precedents – Shark Island / German Southwest Africa (early 1900s)
10:33 World War I – Ukrainian Canadians interned as "enemy aliens" in Alberta
12:09 The Russian Revolution & Gulag – Forced labor under the Bolsheviks
12:26 The Gulag system – Expansion, quotas, starvation rations, the Dead Road
15:01 Post-WWII & the Iron Curtain – Western vs. Soviet models of camp labor
18:00 US domestic roots – Slavery, the 13th Amendment exception, convict leasing
22:01 Scale of deportation – The administration's 15–20 million target
24:46 Resistance – Gulag uprisings, Free Alabama Movement, the Menocal lawsuit
27:42 What you can do – Calls to action, spotlighting strikes near you
30:21 Outro
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