The hotel has mostly escaped the focus of those who have critically investigated spaces and practices of immigration detention and border governance. However, hotels have a long history in their use as temporary – as well as longer-term – incarceration and bordering, globally (Davidson, 2018). While hotels have been discussed within a geopolitical framing, their role in bordering practices, and specifically how they operate as carceral sites, has not yet received the necessary attention required to understand their continued use for this purpose. As Mountz et al. (2013, 523) argue, “detention systems do not operate in isolation, but rather are intensified by the growth of related global industries and policies that become enmeshed in distinct geopolitical landscapes.”

Following in the footsteps of the ‘hotel geopolitics’ agenda developed by Fregonese and Ramadan (2015), Andrew illustrates how hotels become integrated into border regimes. In doing so, he contributes to debates on the material and infrastructural dimensions of bordering practices and specifically to the literature on carceral geographies, polymorphic bordering and the politics of mobility.

Andrew Burridge is a political geographer, based in the Discipline of Geography and Planning, School of Communications, Society and Culture, at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia. Andrew’s work has focused primarily upon undocumented migration, the effects of border securitization and immigration detention, as well as asylum and refugee reception and settlement. He has worked with several immigrant and refugee rights organizations including No More Deaths/No Más Muertes (US), Bristol Refugee Rights and Right to Remain (UK), and the International Detention Coalition. He is co-editor of the collection Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders and Global Crisis (UGA Press, 2012).