Prisons, Immigration, and the Right to a Livable Life in the Anthropocene: Reading Garrett Hardin and Michel Foucault

Abstract

This essay explores the changing nature of immigration and immigration imprisonment in the United States—specifically, in the contemporary historical occasion widely referred to as the Anthropocene.¹ The long history of racial violence toward immigrants in the United States is well known. But critical work theorizing the nature of immigration and incarceration in relation to anthropogenically influenced ecological phenomena is in its infancy.² Scholars have productively made sense of the modern carceral state's expansion by locating it within the framework of race and neoliberalism, registering the collateral damage essential to Western European whiteness and a neoliberal problematic (Felli 2021; Lloyd and Whitehead 2018; Molina 2013; Harcourt 2009, 2011; Lytle Hernández 2010; Ngai 2004; Omi and Winant 1986). This scholarship has offered explanations for the relatively recent phenomenon of detaining immigrants in prisons and prosecuting them within the federal judicial system. These framings of migrant incarceration continue to effectively serve a critical function. However, I argue that the historical character of immigration incarceration is in the process of changing in the face of real and imagined Anthropocene impacts. Increasingly, immigration is the result of ecological collapse, and taking race and neoliberalism as primary frameworks for understanding forces subtending the carceral system has become critically restrictive. In what follows, I attempt to tease out an environmental genealogy from historical references within Michel Foucault's work on the relationship of land enclosures to the rise of the prison, in order to establish a larger ecological constellation in which to think the event of immigration incarceration today. I place Foucault's work in conversation with the work of prominent ecologist and white nationalist Garrett Hardin, whose concurrent pro-enclosure work on immigration and the environment inaugurated a coercive truth discourse that has come to impact not only ecological disciplines in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the environmental humanities but also current US immigration policy.

The juxtaposition of Foucault with Hardin allows me to argue the following: migration and immigrant incarceration are in the process of being produced, identified, and managed by a set of governing forces functioning in and through a constellation comprised of colonial and postcolonial enclosure acts, neoliberal resource development, racial inequalities planned around the centrality of white nationalism, and environmental concerns formed in response to Anthropocene events such as climate change. As I hope to show in these pages, the late twentieth-century governmentality of human populations is in the process of becoming a new twenty-first-century environmentality constituted by human and ecological relations. This environmentality has its origins in both the migration resulting from the preindustrial enclosure of the commons and the American environmental movement's fears of overpopulation that arose in the 1960s and 1970s. Marxist scholarship has productively articulated the impact of enclosures on economic processes, on urbanization and labor relations, and on agricultural development (Thompson 1966; Williams 1973; Harvey 2003; White 2011), but considering this constellation of forces alongside Foucault's work reveals something about the ontological nature of migration and migration's essential relationship to incarceration.

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Before turning to Foucault and Hardin, I'll briefly highlight some of the extensive contemporary scholarship addressing immigration and incarceration, and the relationship between Anthropocene forces and migration. The violent history of migration in the United States is well known, with the forced relocation of millions during the Atlantic slave trade and the forced removal of Indigenous peoples throughout the history of the nation. Racializing and policing immigrants through border enforcement dates back at least 150 years and continues throughout the twentieth century (the Anti-Coolie Act of 1862, the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Undesirable Aliens Act of 1929, the Bracero program [1942–64], and “Operation Wetback” starting in 1954, to name a few), but in the course of roughly the last forty years, the policing of borders and incarceration of immigrants has undergone an elevation from “low to high politics” (Andreas 2009). The United States now operates the world's largest immigration prison system. The number of immigrants locked up annually jumped from 8,604 in 1994 to 97,982 in 2013 (Hernández 2019), and the budget for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has “skyrocketed” from “$23 million in 2004 to nearly $700 million in 2010” (Hester 2015: 150). In 2015 there were more than 367,000 immigrant men, women, and children in ICE custody (TRAC Reports 2016).³ Federal prosecution levels are also at historic highs, and immigration-related criminal prosecutions now make up more than half the cases seen in US federal courts.⁴

Moreover, the lines between the federal prosecution of immigrants and the criminal justice system's treatment of US citizens have become increasingly blurred (Alexander 2020; Hester 2015), leading to the new phenomenon of “crimmigration law” (Hernández 2021). Incarceration constitutes an internalized outside, a set of exceptional sites existing across the nation in the form of prisons, slums, homeless camps disproportionately circumscribing people of color (Mbembe 2019; Davis 2006; Goffman 2009; Park 2013; Omi and Winant 2015). As Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2015: 139) argue, these sites are part of a surge in carceral practices that “today rival or exceed any previous period in both the proportions and absolute numbers of black and brown people held in confinement. The little-noticed development of a whole gulag of specialized immigration prisons has no precedent in U.S. History.” Scholars have productively treated these developments in terms of both race and neoliberalism. Mae Ngai (2004) and Kelly Lytle Hernández (2010) have shown that the legal/illegal divide in policing immigrants is essentially formed as a problem of race. Bernard Harcourt argues that this incarceration upsurge stems from the phenomenon of “neoliberal penality”—that is, increased incarceration is the result of neoliberalism's understanding of the proper role of the state as the entity that polices all that does not ensure economic development. The policing of those failing to support the state's economic center constitutes the legitimate location of governing, in opposition to the non-state-regulated marketplace, where the majority of unrestricted human action as economic exchange takes place (Harcourt 2009).

However, recent work by scholars like Neel Ahuja (2016), Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini (2017), and Romain Felli (2021, 2013) have begun to reveal that this complex history of the carceral state's response to immigration is now being reformulated and extended in relation to environmental factors—specifically, climate change. In studies produced by the World Bank, the Brookings Institute, USAID, the Department of Defense, the Center for Climate and Security, the International Organization for Migration, the Food and Agricultural Organization, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate change and related environmental factors are characterized as the main agent of migration, displacing the typical state portrayals of migration as resulting from economic and political instability. Against the multicausal background of migration, climate change now takes center stage (Baldwin and Bettini 2017).

Amid all this activity, it's important to understand that environmental migration is both real and imagined. Anthropocene drivers increasingly form the material background of twenty-first-century existence—sudden-onset events like intensified storms, flooding, and fires, coupled with slow-onset events like drought, desertification, sea-level rise, air pollution, rain pattern shifts, and loss of biodiversity (Kaenzig and Piguet 2014). An average of 21.5 million people per year have been displaced due to an ecological event since 2008 (IDMC 2016). In Central America and Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean alone there were twenty million reported cases of movement related to climate change and other environmental factors between the years 2008 and 2017 (Cantor 2018). Landscapes are already becoming uninhabitable, and this transformation is expected to get much worse. A recent study concluded that under a business-as-usual scenario, rapid heating within the space of the next fifty years would force up to three billion people to live outside the livable ecological niche in which humans have inhabited for the past six thousand years (Xu et al. 2020).

This reality, however, is increasingly inserted into neocolonial representational schemas by organizations as diverse as the World Bank and the IPCC and, moreover, leveraged as empirical evidence to promote concern for national borders and international security. Though there are definitely more numbers of people seeking to cross national borders, the fact that most current and historically recent migration is internal and not across national borders suggests that northern interests are leveraging fears of immigration for nationalist and neoliberalist ends. As Ahuja shows, rather than discussing how colonial empires impacted environments and threatened life in the past, IPCC reports reference historical scholarship on the impact of climate disruptions on empires in the past in order to characterize climate change in the present as a security threat to today's nations (IPCC 2018, 2014; Ahuja 2016). In kind, the World Bank's “Groundswell” report warns that millions of the poor will be on the move and asserts that climate migration needs to be embedded in future neoliberal national development planning (Rigaud et al. 2018). These framings of migration and environmental realities are buttressed by a militarized mentality and substantial state financial allocations to military actors. The Department of Homeland Security, to name one, now incorporates “mass migration” as a central component of its Climate Action Plans (DHS 2014). The comprehension of environmental impacts is thus politically mediated by nation-state and international actors. As Baldwin and Bettini (2017: 1) argue, it is now “commonplace in today's global political economy to argue that climate change is itself a migration crisis in the making.”

It's equally important to note that the signifier climate change often obscures more than it explains. The characterization of climate change as a crisis of mass migration can “divert attention” from northern nations’ attempts to maintain elite power by deploying neo-Malthusianism fears of the poor overpopulating the planet (Baldwin and Bettini 2017: 7). Such reductionist uses of the signifier climate change are especially noticeable in predictive modeling of future migration numbers. Additionally, migration is increasingly the result not only of climate change but also of colonial and capitalist methods of land exploitation that were never designed to be sustainable. The discourse of “improvement” associated with the enclosure of the commons has shifted global farming toward “intensive” agricultural practices favoring monocropping, GMO crops, and heavy chemical inputs. Such practices lead to biodiversity loss and eventually end the productive power of agricultural lands. Intensive agricultural is one of the coercive corporate practices that force farmers to produce cash crops at the expense of a diversity of farming practices that would maintain healthy ecosystems and a reliable nutrient-rich food source. As such, we need to situate migration figures within a history of land relations—that is, a set of historical processes that begin with European bourgeois enclosures of the land, and in turn develop into US settler colonialism, US imperial political and economic coercion of foreign agriculture, and US foreign investment designed explicitly to exploit raw material resources (oil, cash crops, lumber). Each of these developments has generated migrations in some form or another, beginning with the mass privatization of land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And each has led to the creation of unlivable spaces—in either legal, political, or environmental terms.

In coupling this complexity to Foucault's work, one has to acknowledge the great thinker's limited historical frame of reference, which is almost exclusively tethered to England and France. The differences in developments in America, Central America, and South America need to be acknowledged and developed with care, which would take me beyond the space I have available here. Nonetheless, there are distinct parallels that I think merit the connection between Foucault's work and the American and Latin American context of migration. The privatization of land in England and France led to immense disparity in land access and ownership. Vast numbers of farmers were dispossessed of their land and migrated to cities to find work, their identity as subsistence farmers subsequently recast as atomized individuals ready for the new urban labor force. By the mid-eighteenth century, just under a century after the enclosure of the commons had been legalized by the British Parliament, more than 43 percent of English land had come under the ownership and control of less than 0.2 percent of the population (Becket 1989). This phenomenon of enclosure informs land relations on a global scale in our current historical occasion. According to a UN study, a mere 2.5 percent of landowners control nearly three-quarters of all private land on the planet today (Marks and Rajagopal 2021). The discourse of “improvement” that justified enclosure acts was also manifest in the colonial Spanish and Portuguese land development practices, generating the latifundia system that still impacts present land relations in Latin America.

The United States and Mexico underwent a very similar process of enclosure. In the nineteenth century, both the US South and Mexico were “waging an all-out war on the commons” (Olsson 2017; Hahn 2003, 1982). In the United States, hatred of the commons stemmed from fears of slavery and abolition: “Elite white southerners grew concerned that access to communal lands would provide the former slaves with enough land, food, and fuel to subsist beyond the cash crop economy. To guarantee their access to cheap and pliable labor, states across the former Confederacy passed fencing and stock laws during the 1860s and 1870s to privatize formerly public lands as well as restrict unauthorized hunting, fishing, and foraging on them, with considerable success” (Olsson 2017: 17). Laissez-faire economic doctrine impacted Mexico as well during the same time, when more than half of Mexico's communal, arable land came under private ownership. Such extreme inequality and access to land is, according to a recent Oxfam report, “one of the main unresolved problems of Latin America” (Guereña 2016). Through the Rockefeller Foundation and initiatives such as President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress the United States directly influenced such land developments in Mexico and Latin America (Kapstein 2017; Olsson 2017; Scott 1998). The resistance to dispossession from enclosures that occurred in England “resonate(s) profoundly with the vision of Mexico's rural cultivators” attempting to resist these developments (Craib 2004: 245). Furthermore, in terms of the connections I draw in what follows between land enclosure, migration, and the coercive mechanisms put in place to “handle” those dispossessed of land, such displacement forms the basis for incarceration based on the grounds of deviancy and criminality. As Maristella Svampa (2015: 68) argues, the enclosure of the commons in Latin America in the form of neoextractivist development by state and corporate actors has inaugurated “a new cycle of criminalization” in the twenty-first century.

I argue here that the early historical bourgeois enclosures of land and the environmental effects on the land we are seeing in the Anthropocene today share something in common: both are threshold events that inflicted fundamental transformations on land relations, making former livable means of habitation impossible. This widespread creation of unlivable space is not an unfortunate side effect of capitalism and the modern nation-state; it is an essential part of its development. Unlivability of land is the result of the early capitalist coercive mechanisms of dispossession, which transformed the people of farming communities into “deviants” (in Foucault's sense of the word), labeled as such because they had suddenly found themselves delinked from former mechanisms that sustained their existence. The current creation of unlivable space we are witnessing today is the result of the arc set in motion by this earlier event of land exploitation. Today's carceral system, as I will articulate in what follows, is a direct response to this deliberate creation of uninhabitable spaces.

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Foucault establishes a precedence for connecting the rise of the prison system to this fundamental change in land relations. In Discipline and Punish and later works the specifics of land relations are generally backgrounded because he is more interested in how the “new type of disciplinary power” targets “bodies and what they do rather than to the land and what it produces” (Foucault 2003: 35). But in his 1973 Collège de France lectures The Punitive Society, and the lectures “Truth and Juridical Power” that immediately follow, Foucault gives greater prominence to the changes in land relations that occurred during the creation of the carceral state. At key moments Foucault ([1975] 1979: 85) prominently foregrounds the war against the common lands system by the bourgeoisie:

Here we see the transformation of land from an entity characterized as a livable space, to which its inhabitants have a fundamental right, into “absolute property,” in which living on that space becomes a crime punishable by law. In this sense, we might trace “crimmigration” back to this fundamental historical occasion. The rise of “improvement”—the “transition to intensive agriculture”—makes the subsistence, common-land farming community not only obsolete but a threat. Land was the initial stage on which the new bourgeois battle for power played out. These “accepted illegalisms” (which Foucault speaks of at some length in The Punitive Society) permitted the poorest fringe to survive. These subsistence practices that were the basis of maintaining one's existence came to be criminalized. The practices came to be identified with the new illicit class of vagabonds, thieves, and deviants who deserved the greatest condemnation because they constituted a threat to the bourgeois society of market relations.

In his discussions of the countryside “peasantry” Foucault (2015: 157) briefly touches on some common land practices that continued in the early stages of bourgeois enclosures. These appear in the new politico-economic regime as a form of “rural illegalism.” Peasant life, he argues, is characterized by an array of “functional elements”: a “whole series of tolerances permitted the poorest fringe to survive: fallow land, heaths, and communal goods were so many pockets of illegalism at the heart of peasant space” (157). The “pockets of illegalism” are the last vestiges of a quickly disappearing collective farming system. Increasing numbers of subsistence farming communities had been pushed to the fringes of habitable land in the wake of privatization. It is the historical moment when habitable land, and the right to a livable life on that land, was being subjected to the expansion of a new view of land as economically attractive:

This process of dispossession was repeated during colonial settler expansion and continues into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contributing to the Anthropocene “great acceleration” of neocolonial corporate agricultural “development” in Latin America and elsewhere in the Global South. The first founding gesture of this new bourgeois order, which has constituted the horizon of existence from the eighteenth century onward, is to steadily wage war against the life and habitation rights of the peasantry by delinking then from their fundamental right to the land as an existential safeguard.

The prison system arises in the wake of this vast elimination of the commons. To illuminate this connection, we need to sharpen Foucault's reference to rights and its relation to what Foucault calls “illégalismes populaire.” As articulated above, the concept of a right to a sustainable existence available to all was countermanded: “The illegalism of rights, which often meant the survival of the most deprived . . . [became] an illegalism of property.” In line with Foucault's analysis of power—which he develops at length during this period of his research—we can recast this countermand as the first maneuver in a civil war declared by the new bourgeois regime upon the peasantry. Foucault uses the term civil war to challenge both Durkheim's inclusive sociality and Hobbes's separation of political power from the “war of all against all” that Hobbes understands to be the prepolitical condition of human existence. For Foucault, political power is not the opposite of war, not an evolutionary advancement that transports humans to civilization. Political power—that is, politics itself—begins and finds its existence within the sphere of civil war: “Civil war can in no way be seen as something external to power or as interrupted by power, but as a matrix within which elements of power come to function” (Foucault 2015: 31). Politics is a civil war waged against a community in order to establish a different type of community and in order to inaugurate a different type of subjectivity. In this particular case it is the war against the people of the commons in order to create the population of wage laborers. At the same time, in order to contain those strategies of power that arise to counter its new claim to authority, the newly established power will attempt to oversee the heterogeneous forces that constitute the general movement of power across the field of this civil war. This is what Foucault means when he states that civil war is also “what haunts power” (31). In other words, civil war takes place across a continuum of people, not all of whom are in line with the newly established order. Hence, there is a very different type of “illegalism” in action during this rise of the bourgeois order. This is what Foucault calls illégalismes populaire (“popular illegalism,” or as Burchell often translates, “lower-class illegalism”).⁶ Resistance to the state's elimination of the commons generates a multitude of illégalismes populaire.

The concept of illégalismes allows Foucault to challenge both the legal view of power relations, which frames judiciary control as centralized and ultimately linked to a sovereign authority, and the Althusserian view that frames political control in terms of repressive ideological systems, in which the escape from power comes in the form of a deliverance from ideology's illusions.⁷ Neither of these conceptual approaches to power allows for an analysis of the carceral system's origins. In contrast, illégalismes enables Foucault to trace both the uneven and contradictory developments involved in the rise of capitalism, its coconstitutive punitive measures and the multiple forms of resistance that arise in response to this development. Illégalisme is consequently systematic. As Foucault (2015: 142) states, it is a “mode of functioning of the whole of society.” Bourgeois political economy thus brings into existence a whole series of contradictory behaviors, resistances, schemes, and counterschemes that reveal an intricate web issuing from both those seeking new forms of power and those attempting to live through these changes. Foucault cites several versions of illégalismes: “illegalism of the privileged” (illégalisme privilégié), appearing, for instance, in the form of “tax exemptions”; artisan “illegalism of business” (illégalisme affairiste), appearing in the form of backroom deals between lower-class merchants and artisans seeking to avoid new ordinances; illégalisme rural, enacted, as we've seen, by the peasantry; illégalisme fonctionnel; and so on (141, 142). In the early stages of bourgeois politico-economic development, these and other illégalismes formed a continuum and flourished.

At a significant point in all these developments, the bourgeoisie could no longer tolerate illégalismes populaire (Foucault 2015: 146). As we've seen, this intolerance hinged on the question of rights. Foucault cites the activity of the Maine weavers in the United States, who were engaging at the time in a “functional illegalism” (104, 141), which enabled them to maintain their right to the tools and materials that formed a necessary part of their labor. In part because of its rural location, this right did not immediately appear as a threat. This did not hold true in the city. Foucault writes: “Compare [the Weavers] to the Port of London worker: nothing belongs to him, [but] on the other hand, he has it right in front of him” (147). Dockworkers could, without proper surveillance and policing, easily take the same right to existence they had claimed in the commons, a right that was now recoded as stealing. Thus, a new legal framework constrained the material relations of workers that had formerly been peasants. Unlike the weavers, the dockworkers could not claim a right to the material relations of their labor, for such a right constitutes a fundamental opposed to capitalism. Thus, a new regulation needed to be developed that would contain the laborer's access to this right. Foucault references this correctional development in the simplest of phrases: the workers came to be “regulated solely by the principle: ‘this is not yours’” (147). The shift in the craft industry's illegalism that enabled one to maintain an existence, to the wage labor system and no safety net, was a shift from a right as pure form to a task circumscribed by treasured objects that could be plundered at any moment—from livable life to a new form of labor configured by the horizon of all that is not yours. The transformation in these illegalisms parallels today's neoliberal incorporation of the environmental migrant as part of a new, entrepreneurial labor force (see Felli 2013). As Felli articulates, certain states on the periphery of central, “developed” states are encouraged to accept sudden and seasonal flows of migrant people as sources of cheap labor. In this fantasy, the migrant becomes empowered as an entrepreneur. However, at the same time, the migrant is kept at a distance from the borders of wealthy nations and, as such, is duplicitously regulated by the principle: this is almost yours.

As wealth and ownership came to be progressively consolidated, and the division between those owning the means of production and those owning nothing but their labor power sharpened, illégalismes populaire became, as Alex Feldman (2020: 451) phrases it, “more threatening to the bourgeoisie.” All the former illégalismes eroded and a new division arose: “the illegalism of rights” (l'illégalisme des droits) versus the “illegalism of goods or property” (l'illégalismes des biens) (Foucault [1975] 1979: 87). Illégalismes populaire became the illegalism of theft, and the idea of a right came to be fundamentally redefined. “Right” now meant a right to illegal activity, and this came to be reserved for the upper class. Foucault writes: “The illegalism of property was separated from the illegalism of rights. This distinction represents a class opposition because . . . the illegality . . . most accessible to the lower classes was that of property . . . [of] theft.” The bourgeoisie, then, “reserved to itself the fruitful domain of the illegalism of rights”—that is, the right to forms of illegalism that enabled them to get around capitalism's “own regulations and its own laws, of ensuring for itself an immense sector of economic circulation by skillful manipulation of gaps in the law” (87). In the midst of this split emerged the need for “a constant policing” of the once widely indulged popular illegalisms, which had now been reified as the illegalism of goods/property.

The migration to the city that results from the dispossession of land therefore involves a necessary retraction of rights. This retraction of material rights would have applied to the peasants’ own skills, who would have had to have been trained in new skills since their skills in farming would be useless on the docks. Training meant that these new skills were ultimately the “property” of the trainers. Soon it would be impossible to differentiate between these newly acquired skills and discipline. One's skills were now one's ability to self-discipline, and if the ability to self-discipline dissipated, incarceration would be the solution.

One last aspect of Foucault's analysis needs to be considered before we can turn to Hardin. Amid these changes, a new form of power begins to develop, one that Foucault (2015: 110) will eventually call disciplinary, but that he first identifies as “coercive”: “What is installed is not just an ethical-juridical control, a State control to the advantage of a class, it is something like the coercive factor.” Capitalism, he argues, utilizes “coercion in setting up its specific forms of political power” (111), and these new coercive constraints introduced on the public are not established legal prohibitions organized by a state, but heterogeneous, nonsovereign, often spontaneous forces. Foucault sharpens coercive power by making a distinction between “penal” and “punitive” systems:

The penal ensemble functions by negatively imposed restrictions, through the law and its prohibitions. The punitive ensemble operatives differently, through the application of fluid and evolving forms of productive force and constraint, the ultimate form of this kind of force being the prison. Coercion and confinement are thus linked organically. But how, precisely, are they linked?

That link, as I've been suggesting, is migration. Two elements illuminate this relation. First, coercion appears on a micropolitical level in the form of paramilitary groups. Second, in “Truth and Juridical Forms” Foucault (2000: 62) states that the spontaneous rise of paramilitary forms of coercion across the social spectrum arose in response to the arrival of mass numbers of migrating people: “They were a response to urbanization, to the great movement of populations from the country to the towns.” This urbanization carried with it, Foucault argues, the dangerous threat of “mobility” (Foucault 2015: 188, 190, 192), which was integrally linked to delinquency. The dispossessed peasant, now categorized as a vagabond, was mobility's exemplary form: “Vagabondage is the element on the basis of which other crimes are to be specified. It is the general matrix of crime that contains eminently all other forms of delinquency” (45). The itinerant vagabond constituted a “new illegalism”—the illegalism of “dissipation” (188): “Thus a figure of illegalism appears that is no longer one of depredation, but of dissipation: what is at issue is not a relationship of desire to the materiality of wealth, but one of fixing to the production apparatus. This illegalism takes the form of absenteeism, lateness, laziness, festivity, debauchery, nomadism, in short, everything that smacks of irregularity, of mobility in space” (190). The migrating peasant becomes the figure of a “wild delinquency,” an entity who carries the mark of former agricultural land relations condemned as “dissipative” to the core: “a stratum of the population still close to instinct and the life of nature” (162). To the bourgeoisie, their form of livability constituted a loss of energy. Migrants were “the enemies of the very body of wealth”; they refused the new “social pact” (162).

Migration, therefore, was taken on as a problem to be solved at the microsocial level, by paramilitary groupings that formed across the lower registers of the social scale: “There formed, at relatively low levels of the social scale, spontaneous groups of persons who assigned themselves, without any delegation from a higher authority, the task of maintaining order and of creating new instruments for ensuring order, for their own purposes” (Foucault 2000: 60). This flow of paramilitary power included the new economic societies: “The great companies and great commercial firms organized police societies, private police forces, to defend their property” (62). It was a popular instrument of punitive development to which the state eventually laid claim, becoming ultimately an instrument of power the wealthy used over the poor (63). The elimination of the migrant evolved not only in reaction to the state and the wealthy but also in line with such paramilitary practices. The prison form arose out of the state's adoption of these practices of elimination. The prison, therefore, constitutes the teleological end point of a political system designed to eradicate the fundamental right to a livable existence. And this denunciation of the migrant, occurring across a social continuum, parallels the populist hatred of migrants in the twenty-first century. This leads me to the historical moment in the 1970s, when conservative environmentalists like Hardin where laying the groundwork for today's immigrant incarceration.

When Foucault embarks on his genealogical investigation on the prison and the rise of the carceral society, scholars in the environmental sciences begin to grapple with the problem of population and migration. In the formative stages of the US environmental movement, several prominent figures in the natural and social sciences establish a discourse of population control based on concerns for overpopulation and environmental limits (Ehrlich 1968; Meadows et al. 1972; Hardin [1974] 2012). Hardin is one of the most prominent figures in this debate. His “Tragedy of the Commons” thesis had a significant impact on modern environmentalism and environmental scholarship. It is one of the most anthologized essays, taught across fields of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and has been characterized as an “academic blockbuster.”⁸ In a survey of biologists, Hardin's thesis was the most frequently cited as having the greatest career impact (Kennedy 2006). His claim—that only through privatization can we avoid ecological disaster—was quickly adopted by a sizable portion of environmental scholars and activists and continues to be accepted as scientific fact by many today. In 1974, the year before the publication of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Hardin published a follow-up essay, “Lifeboat Ethics,” which directly coupled overpopulation and environmental concerns to immigration issues.

A direct line can be traced between Hardin's theories and US national security policy. The US Department of Defense has been militarizing Anthropocene environmental concerns since the 1990s, and Hardin's criticisms of the commons stand at the center of this environmentality discourse. His anti-immigration theories are considered foundational by think tanks like the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) (Kolankiewicz 2015; Kolankiewicz and Beck 2001; Beck 1996). CIS founder John Tanton corresponded with Hardin over immigration issues, and Hardin's theories are often cited in CIS reports (O'Connor 2018). These ideas inform the policy work of people like Jon Feere, a CIS legal policy analyst who served as senior adviser to acting ICE director Thomas Homan under the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021. Tanton's associate Stephen Miller served as senior adviser to the president during the same time. Hardin's theories are also echoed in Robert Kaplan's influential 1994 article “The Coming Anarchy,” which widely popularized the military framing of migration and climate change. This militarized approach to environmental concerns and migration also influenced the Clinton and Obama administrations.⁹

Hardin's essay is especially interesting for several reasons. One, it appears during, and as a reaction to, the first wave of US environmentalism. The earliest environment concerns in the 1960s and 1970s generally focused on enacting policy that would impose limits on economic development and resource use. Publicly active scientists like Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner made the effects of toxins and pollution known to a broad audience. They, in turn, influenced economists like Barbara Ward and Kenneth Boulding, who wrote about the impacts of economic development on the environment and the need to reorganize the economy in order to incorporate ecological limits. Boulding's influential essay “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth” and Ward's book Spaceship Earth, both published in 1966, popularized the trope of “Spaceship Earth,” which rallied activists around the need for collective, national and international cooperation. Adlai Stevenson, a friend of Ward's, used the phrase Spaceship Earth in an oft-cited speech given to the Economic and Social Council of United Nations the year before. Boulding himself was influenced by Progressive Era political economist Henry George, who had argued that all economic value derived from the land and its natural resources, and that these belonged equally to all members of society. These and other statements, centered around the organizational trope of Spaceship Earth were part of the new truth discourse of the environmental movement, which sought to counter the positivist truth of industrialization and economic development. The concern for limits quickly became enmeshed in a dehistorized neo-Malthusian discourse. The issue of overpopulation had been raised before among certain environmental scientists (Hardin himself had edited a collection of essays on the topic in 1964), but it was the publication of Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb in 1968 that extended the issue to a broad audience of scholars and environmental activists. It was in the midst of these debates that Hardin presented his “Tragedy of the Commons” thesis—in his presidential address at the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1968. His paper was published in essay form that same year in the journal Science.

The essay is very much a product of the Cold War. Hardin opens by referencing the nuclear arms race before proceeding to tell us a tale of the commons, a system he identifies as “inevitably” leading to tragedy. Hardin specifically deploys the term tragedy as Whitehead understood it: as the “futility of escape . . . made evident in the drama” (Whitehead [1925] 1948: 11). He theatricalizes the space of the commons through the use of war game theory, comparing it to the no-win situation of tic-tac-toe. Caught in the commons, a “rational herdsman” will seek only to “maximize his gain,” competing with other rational herdsman, until the resources of the ecosystem are depleted: “Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin” (Hardin 1968: 1244, 1248). The only solution is to enclose the commons. Acts of enclosure, Hardin argues, bring humans into the realm of moral “responsibility,” tacitly assumed to be the distributed among competing individuals. Having one's own enclosed property ensures that the individual will not destroy it.

Most interestingly, Hardin invokes a specific form of necessary power if this individual responsibility is to make its way across a broad sociopolitical system. He writes,

As we've seen, “coercion” is a key term that Foucault develops when describing the origin of the punitive system. It is telling that Hardin grounds his ethico-political solution to resource use in a judicialized program of compulsion rather than a collective network of mutual cooperation. The grounds for this lie in his linking the “rationality” of the herdsman—that is, the poor tied to the land—to “tragedy”: the herdsman cannot act otherwise.

It is often pointed out that Hardin makes no reference whatsoever to the substantial scholarship on the commons. Nor does he point us in the direction of any actually existing commons. Consequently, some have criticized his thesis. Nobel Prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom devoted her life to proving Hardin wrong, showing that the commons system can, has, and does work to ensure that resources are not overused. Her extensive work has revealed that a host of collective mechanisms are operative in existing ecological commons around the planet that successfully ward off environmental degradation (Ostrom 1990). These and similar efforts are important. But I think these arguments are somewhat off target. Specifically, such arguments overlook Hardin's main concern, which is not the commons or the environment per se but population and migration—specifically, the growing population of the so-called developing world. After all, Hardin's only cited source on the commons in his essay is the British economist William Forster Lloyd, whose main concern was population as well, and who argued that only through enclosure could population be kept in check.

Hardin's condemnation of the commons and his concerns for population take on their most politically conservative and aggressive formulation in his philippic “Lifeboat Ethics” essay (1974). The essay appears two years after the concerns for overpopulation and limited environmental resources have received their most pronounced articulation in the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth report. Hardin capitalizes on growing international concerns for resource limits and population. Hardin ([1974] 2012: 299) tells us that his metaphor of the lifeboat is meant to directly correct the popularity of “spaceship ethics,” which he argues leads inevitably to “the tragedy of the commons” and the “destruction of the environment.” He argues that the United States has a dangerously “generous immigration policy” (298). As a corrective, he turns again to the simplistic mathematics of war game theory to stage another tragedy. He suggests we envision a “wealthy lifeboat” (that is, a northern nation like the United States) filled with fifty people, containing only enough room and resources for ten more. The fifty in the boat see one hundred people swimming toward them “begging for admission . . . or handouts” (298). The only solution is to deny help to those hoping to be let on board. More emphatically, the solution is their elimination. Here, the origin of vast numbers of the poor seeking entry into the wealthy lifeboats is implicit: their “tragic rationality.”

Here we have in a nutshell an argument for mass planetary incarceration. In one location (the United States and other “responsible” countries) we find the majority of the world's food and resources, a space supposedly made possible by the recognition of ecological limits and wise resource use. In the other we find the prison house. Why name this a prison? In his April 1972 interview about his visit to New York State's Attica Prison, Foucault poses the question: What is the prison for? And in the space of a few sentences he takes us on a whirlwind trajectory of his genealogical inquiry into the origins of the prison. When the Auburn and Philadelphia prisons were constructed, he states, their makers believed these installations would produce “‘virtuous’ men”: “Now we know, and the administration is perfectly aware, that no such thing is produced. That nothing at all is produced” (Simon [1974] 1991: 27). Why, then, spend so much time on this institution? Attica, he tells us, is “a machine for elimination,” but an elimination machine of a peculiar kind. The installation functions like a “great trick,” a “sleight of hand,” operating as a “circular mechanism” in a double act of elimination: the prison “breaks up, crushes, physically eliminates” its inmates. The prison takes this elimination one step further: it eliminates its inmates by “freeing” them, by “sending them back to society.” And the “state in which they come out ensures that society will eliminate them once again, sending them [eventually back] to prison” (27).

Foucault describes here what we might characterize as an ultimate form of discipline, or of disciplinary coercion's absolute inverse. The “great trick” describes not the production of “useful,” “docile bodies” but the pyschopolitical formulation of discipline's necessary obverse—that is, the making of an invalid life. Invalid life is a life pitilessly designed to illuminate what a social system needs to simultaneous seek out (and in that act, create) and then repeatedly eradicate at various levels in order to function. Unlike the generalized notion of “exclusion” (Foucault [1975] 1979: 308)¹⁰ which is linked to a sovereign authority and a “social consensus of rejection” (Foucault 2015: 3), elimination arises out of the forms of “illegalisms.” Specifically, elimination names the solution to the “delinquent” who emerges out of all the former illegalisms as the ultimate asocial “criminal-enemy” (36). Unlike exclusion, elimination names the primal action within which elements of political power come to function. One must avoid elimination at all costs, which means: being subjected, and subjecting oneself, to all the multiple and moving forms of coercion that make possible the ongoing flows of power that, in turn, make up the matrix of society, crudely exemplified in Hardin's lifeboat.

Hardin's “lifeboat ethics” is thus a coercive argument for establishing specific forms of live as invalid. He attempts to justify the violence of his little lifeboat theatrical disaster by foisting upon it the pure science of computational mathematics.

Putting aside the crudeness of what passes for thought here, we find operative in these sentences what I shall call a punitive rhetoric of coercion. Clumsily couched behind Hardin's math lies the attempt to redefine the precapitalist, commons system understanding of “equality.” The forthright declaration “of exactly equal quality” is precisely the inverse of the quality of an equal right to a livable existence given to all in the space of the commons. In this theater of lifeboats livability disappears. It is replaced by survival, a condition of existence that not only appears as self-evident when set against the axiomatic nature of ecosystem limits but also comes to stand in as the very apolitical, organic basis of existence. Survival replaces all other concerns as the starting point of existence, veiling the primordial right to a livable existence. In this sense, the poor swimming toward the wealthy lifeboat have placed themselves beyond the space of survival. They have become invalid and, as such, exist only to be eliminated.

“Survival” is therefore fundamentally different from “livable.” Survival is essentially an oppositional concept. It obtains its meaning in and through a relation to an entity or a condition embodied as a threat. It is the condition of existence generated by a politically imposed state of war. This imposition of a connatural state of war (the “civil war” in which power-politics occur) is precisely what Hardin is attempting to accomplish in both his essays. Once this war is established as the connatural state of reality, as a mathematical axiom, survival becomes the first and last logical step of existence. The only way to avoid losing this war, which is the same as saying the only way to continue the war, is to put a politics of enclosure in place, made possible through mechanisms of coercion.

What Hardin enables us to see about the political regime of the carceral world of the present is its essential mission: the mandate to eradicate the fundamental right to the commons.

What Hardin argues we must put in place, what, in fact, has been put in place with the mass incarceration of immigrants, is precisely the elimination of the specific nonpositive identity, or property, of a sustainability available to all.¹¹ Being available to all is a scandal to a policing order that wishes to maintain its punitive identity, which is the identity of those who wish to transform livability into the civil war of “survival”—frankly, a disingenuous term for living at the expense and death of others.

Hardin ([1974] 2012: 303) claims “immigration creates a commons.” Let us affirm differently by saying yes! from two complementary dispositions. First, the critical: the elimination of the commons is the founding “ecological” gesture of the punitive system—of environmentality—generating in turn the coercion of forced migration and the birth of the prison. Second, the generative: the commons is the condition for the possibility of livability—the ontological site in which migration is not an effect of survival but a character of life. The transformation of the basic right to a livable existence into the lifeboat ethics of survival puts in place a set of restraints designed to limit the ability of a people to live. In Hardin's sordid theater the capacity for life is all one-sided. The question of ethics is never in the hands of the poor, of the peasants. Only those in the wealthy boats experience the privilege of being faced with ethical dilemmas: “What should the passengers on a rich lifeboat do? This is the central problem of ‘the ethics of a lifeboat’” (298). Rights in this coercive drama are the property of the wealthy, who have attained their condition by accepting what Hardin calls “responsibilities”: “Where human survival is at stake, the acceptance of responsibilities is a precondition to the acceptance of rights” (303). In this so-called ethics fabricated on the knife-edge of a one-sided civil war, the ability to live is taken out of the hands of the poor and placed in the hands of the civilized. Hardin's invocation of “rights” as only given after taking on “coercive” “responsibilities” matches term for term the essential redefinition and subsequent transfer of rights to the wealthy we saw occur in the early stages of bourgeois power as described by Foucault.

Hardin's establishment of a moral responsibility based on coercion thus tellingly aligns with the coercive, punitive system Foucault identifies as the condition for the possibility of the prison. Hardin's “responsibility” should thus be seen properly in light of this concept of illégalisme and the power matrix of civil war that incorporates, breaks apart, and securitizes the various ways mobile humans attempt to survive. The growing presence of immigration prisons can only be properly thought in relation to this history, to the erasure of what Rob Nixon (2011: 151) has termed “ecosystem people.” Who are ecosystem people? They are the people that generate the condition of survival for “responsible” people. They provide the raw resources for the Western and northern world. They depend on their survival on seasonal migration, on farming practices connected to deep historical and cultural relations to the land that have little to do with the production of high yields and cash crops designed by a coercive global market economy. They depend on a commons system that makes possible a right to a livable existence. Immigrants, and their incarceration, thus constitute the limit of the social in Anthropocene America. Immigration is America's internal antagonism—the contradiction that comes into being and is set into motion so that the wealthy can be born.

Coda

In 1994, to discourage migrants from crossing the Mexican border, the United States introduced a new immigration policy known as “Prevention through Deterrence.” The Machiavellian wisdom of this policy originates with the desire to phase out border patrols and border walls. The logic proceeds as follows: if historically frequented border crossing points, which are located near urban ports of entry, are closed off, migrant flows will be forced elsewhere. US immigration authorities found this elsewhere in the Sonoran Desert—an unpopulated region where environmental conditions are hellish and nearly impossible to survive. To illustrate: it takes three to five days to cross the Sonoran Desert, and temperatures can reach up to 177 degrees Fahrenheit. As Jason De León (2015: 84) describes it, the Sonoran Desert is “a remote deathscape where American necropolitics are pecked onto the bones of those we deem excludable.” This transformation of an ecosystem into a prison is a bellwether for the coming politics of the lifeboat. Sonora is the ultimate space of elimination—a wasteland transformed into the ideal prison house. It is a gambit waged by a government recoiling in the face of the Anthropocene.

At the end of the half dozen or so years that Foucault devoted to thinking the origins of the prison, he gave a talk entitled “What Is Critique?” In it he presents us with a right, the right to question acts of governing, a question that is also an affirmation: “We identify a perpetual question which would be: ‘how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them,’” and not “at the cost” (Foucault 1997: 28, 29). This right is invoked from an ontologically insecure position (it is a resistance to the coercions that form a subject) and, as such, shares something fundamental to the original right to a livable life found in the space of the commons. In the age of climate change, a right to a livable existence, a right associated with all, is encircled by forces against which one appeals: we do not want to be governed like that, not at that cost. Affirming these rights, which means delinking the current understanding of rights from the ontological horizon of “what is not yours,” is the task of making life livable in the Anthropocene.

Notes

References