Drawing upon an analysis of congressional records and media coverage from 1981 to 1996, this article examines the growth of mass immigration detention. It traces an important shift during this period: while detention began as an ad hoc executive initiative that was received with skepticism by the legislature, Congress was ultimately responsible for entrenching the system over objections from the agency. As we reveal, a critical component of this evolution was a transformation in Congress’s perception of asylum seekers. While lawmakers initially decried their detention, they later branded them as dangerous. Lawmakers began describing asylum seekers as criminals or agents of infectious diseases in order to justify their detention, which then cleared the way for the mass detention of arriving migrants more broadly. Our analysis suggests that they may have emphasized the dangerousness of asylum seekers to resolve the dissonance between their theoretical commitments to asylum and their hesitance to welcome newcomers. In addition to this distinctive form of cognitive dissonance, we discuss a number of other implications of our research, including the ways in which the new penology framework figured into the changing discourse about detaining asylum seekers.

中文翻译：

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学习拘留寻求庇护者和美国大规模移民拘留的增长

本文通过对 1981 年至 1996 年国会记录和媒体报道的分析，考察了大规模移民拘留的增长。它追溯了这一时期的一个重要转变：虽然拘留最初是一项临时行政倡议，但遭到立法机关的怀疑，但国会最终负责巩固该系统，以应对该机构的反对意见。正如我们所揭示的，这种演变的一个关键组成部分是国会对寻求庇护者的看法发生了转变。虽然立法者最初谴责对他们的拘留，但他们后来将他们称为危险。立法者开始将寻求庇护者描述为罪犯或传染病代理人，以便为他们的拘留辩护，这为更广泛地大规模拘留抵达的移民扫清了道路。我们的分析表明，他们可能强调了寻求庇护者的危险性，以解决他们对庇护的理论承诺与他们对欢迎新移民的犹豫之间的不协调。除了这种独特形式的认知失调之外，我们还讨论了我们研究的许多其他含义，包括新的刑罚学框架如何融入关于拘留寻求庇护者的不断变化的话语中。