How to Close a Camp - by John Washington (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A call to action to defend immigrants and push back against the unprecedented rise of migrant incarceration

How to Close a Camp is a polemic and political field guide for dismantling the immigrant detention system in the United States. Grounded in concrete victories of local communities and directly impacted people and drawing on interviews with dozens of veterans of the immigrant rights movement, award-winning journalist and translator John Washington distills strategies from successful campaigns that have closed camps, blocked or slowed new ones from opening, and chipped away at the carceral infrastructure.

The stakes couldn't be higher: through conversations with the most impacted--the people currently or historically caged in the camps--Washington describes the cruel impacts of the exploding budget for ICE, the rapid militarization of American streets under the guise of immigration enforcement, and the surge in detention beds.

But since the inception of immigrant detention in the United States, there has always been a line of resistance: from the early Chinese targeted and detained in the 19th century, the Mexicans and Japanese rounded up in the mid-20th century, and the rise of family detention under Obama, those inside and out have coalesced, stood up, fought back, and often won their freedom. Despite the decades-long growth of immigrant detention, victories have been won in individual cases, as well as at the municipal, state, and national levels. Recognizing and learning from these victories is the only way to stave off increasing xenophobic and authoritarian violence.

How to Close a Camp outlines how to confront the current wave of oppression. It is a call not only to combat the camp, but to build something better in its place.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Case for Open Borders

"In the burgeoning field of border studies, The Case for Open Borders will take its place beside the works of Wendy Brown, Jason Riley, and Suketu Mehta as a forceful voice in a deeply accusatory cause. For in the end its power lies less in prompting change (at least in the imminent future) than in advancing a compassionate and almost irrefutable ethical case. While climate change compels the Global South to pour its people northward, it is the North--by far the greater planetary pollutant--that has inflicted this suffering on them yet refuses to open its gates." --New York Review of Books

"A powerful and convincing case for human solidarity and cooperation for which Washington provides a roadmap. Unlike many commentaries and books about the fraught border, he does not leave out the Indigenous communities whose homelands have existed in the area for centuries before the border was violently imposed by the United States in 1848." --Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Not "A Nation of Immigrants: " Settler-Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

"John Washington makes a strong, eloquent and even inspiring case for the relaxation and ultimately the abolition of border controls." --JM Coetzee

"John Washington's The Case for Open Borders is a compelling, empathetic argument, a far-reaching look into the origins of borders. Washington is one of our most thoughtful, creative, and humane journalists, and this new work will make people think differently about what they think they already know, about what divides and unites the world in new, surprising ways. Highly recommended." --Greg Grandin

"Perhaps the most profound book you'll read this year. Washington cleaves through all the cruel obfuscations and militaristic cant that derange our border and immigration politics and offers a better human alternative. Borders will not save us, or our rapidly broiling planet, but Washington's reportorial courage and ethical clarity just might." --Junot Díaz