5/2 Soo Ah Kwon's Reading "Deporting Cambodian Refugees: Youth Activism, State Reform, and Imperial Statecraft"

Angel Truong 5/2 Soo Ah Kwon’s Reading Journal

            Soo Ah Kwon’s article mentions about how incarceration and deportation are racialized and capitalized which relates to today’s issue with the prison industrial complex and deportation. The article reveals how Southeast Asians youth males are targeted for deportation when they have criminal records. These criminal acts however, are not because of the individual themselves, but because of their living situation where they are placed in low income areas as refugees. This relates to today’s issues of mass incarceration and how police forces are mostly targeting African American males in low income areas and deportation is targeted mostly towards undocumented Hispanic individuals. From these two situations, incarceration and deportation are deemed racialized towards people of color. Moreover, incarceration and deportation are products of capitalism because people make profit from the institutions that carry these acts. In the article, Kwon mentions how one of the prisoners in the INS detention center had to pay for medication and phone calls highlighting how the institution makes profit off these individuals. Today, the prison industrial complex involves having private corporations make profit from mass incarceration and deportation by exploiting the prisoners to cheap labor and increasing the production of more prisons because of the “War on Drugs” and negative discourse around deportation. Therefore, the article ties to today’s issues of how incarceration and deportation are deemed as forms of justice when they are really forms of racism and capitalism. 

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