Shipped, 2021 -
Water and soil sourced from Ellis Island, New York, and the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas, found cardboard Amazon box.
Dimensions vary
The United States of America is often regarded as the land of opportunity, a promised destination of prosperity. In her book“In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,” Chrisitna Sharpe investigates literary, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that encapsulate the varied meanings of the word wake. “Wake: the track of water left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved, in water; it is the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow.” She asks how we can frame this “opportunity” in a space of suffering, mourning, and survival she calls the Wake. To break down the question, she provides us with the origin of the word opportunity from the Latin Ob-, meaning “toward,” and “portu(m), meaning “port.” This breakdown suggests America is inextricably tied to business that begins on the sea.
For about the first one-hundred years of its existence, the United States did not enforce many immigration laws. It wasn’t until the late 1830s when the state of Massachusetts began taxing transoceanic shipmasters for some of the migrants they brought to the state’s ports. In a decision known as the Passenger Cases the Supreme Court ruled the fee unconstitutional, requiring shipmasters to post bond for all migrants on board. Soon after, California adopted the same policy for Asian immigrants arriving in San Francisco. These fees were created out of fear that “undesirable” people (i.e. non-Anglo immigrants and formerly enslaved Black people) would move into their towns.
The government needed to figure out how they would process the large influx of immigrants coming to the United States. Holding migrants on land was not an option because it meant that migrants would have officially entered the United States. The government decided to force steamships to keep migrants on board to easily contain and surveil migrants while they decided who was fit to enter. The Passenger Cases effectively made transoceanic steamships America’s first detainment camps.
These new restrictions solidified the relationship between commerce and immigration as a dual-enterprise. Eventually, steamship companies became frustrated with the holding policies enforced onto them by the government, as they lost days worth of business waiting for migrants to be evaluated. On-shore processing sites were then created to legally detain and process migrants on U.S. Soil.
In the 21st century, building off the structures of the prison industrial complex, maritime detainment practices, and the legacy of slavery, immigration detention policies now incorporate a vigorous use of surveillance technology. Private corporations such as Amazon and Palantir currently work with the government to amass profits from the detainment of Black and Brown people. Amazon, which has the largest federal contract, provides Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with computer systems that integrate a vast ecosystem of data to track undocumented people.
“At the center of the criticism was data mining company Palantir, which designed the Investigative Case Management system. The ICM is a critical component of ICE’s deportation operations—it integrates a vast ecosystem of public and private data to track down immigrants and, in many cases, deport them. Little is known about how the software actually works or how extensively ICE uses it. But within the first nine months of the Trump administration, ICE arrests increased 42% compared with the same period in the previous year. According to civil rights and immigration activists, ICM is fueling the mass surveillance and targeting of immigrants at an unprecedented scale.”
In a 2018 letter, an anonymous Amazon employee shared more information about a facial recognition system Amazon was gearing up to sell to police departments nationwide. In the letter, the employee states that, “We know from history that new and powerful surveillance tools left unchecked in the hands of the state have been used to target people who have done nothing wrong; in the United States, a lack of public accountability already results in outsized impacts and over-policing of communities of color, immigrants, and people exercising their First Amendment rights. Ignoring these urgent concerns while deploying powerful technologies to government and law enforcement agencies is dangerous and irresponsible.”
Shipped uses water sourced from Ellis Island, Angel Island, and the Rio Grande, all sites associated with the beginning of American immigration policies.
Water and soil sourced from Ellis Island, New York, and the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas, found cardboard Amazon box.
Dimensions vary
The United States of America is often regarded as the land of opportunity, a promised destination of prosperity. In her book“In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,” Chrisitna Sharpe investigates literary, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that encapsulate the varied meanings of the word wake. “Wake: the track of water left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved, in water; it is the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow.” She asks how we can frame this “opportunity” in a space of suffering, mourning, and survival she calls the Wake. To break down the question, she provides us with the origin of the word opportunity from the Latin Ob-, meaning “toward,” and “portu(m), meaning “port.” This breakdown suggests America is inextricably tied to business that begins on the sea.
For about the first one-hundred years of its existence, the United States did not enforce many immigration laws. It wasn’t until the late 1830s when the state of Massachusetts began taxing transoceanic shipmasters for some of the migrants they brought to the state’s ports. In a decision known as the Passenger Cases the Supreme Court ruled the fee unconstitutional, requiring shipmasters to post bond for all migrants on board. Soon after, California adopted the same policy for Asian immigrants arriving in San Francisco. These fees were created out of fear that “undesirable” people (i.e. non-Anglo immigrants and formerly enslaved Black people) would move into their towns.
The government needed to figure out how they would process the large influx of immigrants coming to the United States. Holding migrants on land was not an option because it meant that migrants would have officially entered the United States. The government decided to force steamships to keep migrants on board to easily contain and surveil migrants while they decided who was fit to enter. The Passenger Cases effectively made transoceanic steamships America’s first detainment camps.
These new restrictions solidified the relationship between commerce and immigration as a dual-enterprise. Eventually, steamship companies became frustrated with the holding policies enforced onto them by the government, as they lost days worth of business waiting for migrants to be evaluated. On-shore processing sites were then created to legally detain and process migrants on U.S. Soil.
In the 21st century, building off the structures of the prison industrial complex, maritime detainment practices, and the legacy of slavery, immigration detention policies now incorporate a vigorous use of surveillance technology. Private corporations such as Amazon and Palantir currently work with the government to amass profits from the detainment of Black and Brown people. Amazon, which has the largest federal contract, provides Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with computer systems that integrate a vast ecosystem of data to track undocumented people.
“At the center of the criticism was data mining company Palantir, which designed the Investigative Case Management system. The ICM is a critical component of ICE’s deportation operations—it integrates a vast ecosystem of public and private data to track down immigrants and, in many cases, deport them. Little is known about how the software actually works or how extensively ICE uses it. But within the first nine months of the Trump administration, ICE arrests increased 42% compared with the same period in the previous year. According to civil rights and immigration activists, ICM is fueling the mass surveillance and targeting of immigrants at an unprecedented scale.”
In a 2018 letter, an anonymous Amazon employee shared more information about a facial recognition system Amazon was gearing up to sell to police departments nationwide. In the letter, the employee states that, “We know from history that new and powerful surveillance tools left unchecked in the hands of the state have been used to target people who have done nothing wrong; in the United States, a lack of public accountability already results in outsized impacts and over-policing of communities of color, immigrants, and people exercising their First Amendment rights. Ignoring these urgent concerns while deploying powerful technologies to government and law enforcement agencies is dangerous and irresponsible.”
Shipped uses water sourced from Ellis Island, Angel Island, and the Rio Grande, all sites associated with the beginning of American immigration policies.