Book Review: Patrisia Macias-Rojas, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America

Abstract

Book Review: Patrisia Macias-Rojas, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America. New York: NYU Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-479-83118-0 (Paperback). 240 Pages. $28.00.[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2017 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]Patrisia Macias-Rojas' book, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America, provides rich insight into domestic border security in the Southern Arizona/Sonora region. With the escalation of immigration debates throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, the subsequent election of Donald Trump, and ongoing talk of building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, this is an especially timely and relevant book. It will therefore appeal both to lay audiences and to scholars working within a range of academic disciplines, including but not limited to American Studies, Criminology, Latina/o Studies, Political Science, Public Policy, and Sociology.Macias-Rojas is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology in 2007 from the University of California, Berkeley. She then spent seven years on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College before assuming her current position in 2015. MaciasRojas' background features previous work with the San Quentin Prison University Project and the American Bar Association in Chicago as well. She thanks several mentors and colleagues in her book's acknowledgments section, including high profile scholars such as Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo from the Racial Democracy, Crime & Justice network, Michael Burawoy, Loic Wacquant, John Hagan, Beth Richie, and Marjorie Zatz, among others. Her intellectual lineage is impressive, and it has prepared her well for undertaking publicly engaged scholarship.From Deportation to Prison is a heartfelt book. In her acknowledgments, Macias-Rojas shares a story about her long-time friend who was labeled as a gang member when he was a teenager. He was subsequently incarcerated for many of his teen and adult years, and he was then eventually deported around the time that she was completing her dissertation. Macias-Rojas had been corresponding with her friend for several years leading up to when this happened. She was clearly struck by this experience, which ultimately drove her to seek out a greater understanding of the crimmigration crisis that currently plagues the U.S.Within the book itself, Macias-Rojas strategically brings in her own experiences at times. She describes her work as an ethnography of migration enforcement in an Arizona/Sonora border town, and toward this end she recounts her own encounters with law enforcement while in the field. Her book is based on a decade of research that includes over 150 interviews, field work during the 2001-2005 period, archival work between 2007 and 2009, and additional field work in 2010. Among her interviewees were smugglers, NGO workers, and border patrol agents. She also visited migrant shelters 1-2 times each week (as well as several other sites) when she was in the field. Macias-Rojas' methodological approach and personal accounts ultimately humanize topics and groups of people that are more typically politicized, sensationalized, and misunderstood.From Deportation to Prison focuses on changes in domestic border security since the 1990s and new forms of criminalization that have resulted from these changes. Macias-Rojas notes that unauthorized migration into the U.S. was regarded as a civil offense for most of the twentieth century. It is only in more recent years that it has come to be considered a criminal act. She offers the intriguing observation that ports of entry were originally set up to facilitate cross cultural sharing and international commerce and were hence less centered on security when compared to today's border check points. …