The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants by Adam Goodman

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants by Adam Goodman Elliott Young The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants. By Adam Goodman. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. 352. Illustrations, notes, index.) Adam Goodman's The Deportation Machine provides a much-needed historical perspective on deportations from the United States. It has become [End Page 230] commonplace for journalists and social scientists to argue that deportations in the last decade have reached unprecedented levels. Goodman reveals the much longer history of immigrant deportations that have peaked and subsided over the past 140 years by exploring the range of ways in which immigrants have been expelled. Formal removals involving a hearing before an immigration judge have been a relatively small subset of the fifty-seven million deportations that have occurred since 1882. More than 90 percent of all deportations have been conducted through an administrative procedure called "voluntary departure," an expulsion that was anything but voluntary. In addition, the government has orchestrated fear campaigns in the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s, and more recently that used well-publicized raids and anti-immigrant rhetoric as a tactic to provoke immigrants to "self-deport." By looking at deportations holistically, Goodman forces us to change the periodization of immigrant removals and to see recent deportations in a much larger trajectory. The book begins with the origins of federal deportations as a result of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. In the landmark case Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893) the Supreme Court established the absolute right of the federal government to "expel or deport foreigners," insisting that detention pursuant to deportation was not a punishment (23). Although the immigration bureaucracy was still in its infancy, and the government did not have the resources to expel the estimated eighty-five thousand Chinese laborers who were in the country without authorization, the legal framework for detention and deportations was created at this moment. By the 1920s, Southern and Eastern Europeans became a major target of deportations as a result of the 1924 Johnson Reed National Origins Quota Act. However, in the succeeding decades Mexicans began to supplant Chinese and Europeans as deportees; by the 1960s, Mexicans accounted for 63 percent of formal removals and 90 percent of all deportations (38). Mexicans have continued to account for the overwhelming proportion of deportations until the present. Beyond tracking the millions of expulsions over time, Goodman examines the human cost of deportations. In addition to the fear instilled throughout immigrant communities, the inhumane crowding on trains, boats, buses, and airplanes used for deportations was designed to deter return-migration. In 1956 deportees mutinied aboard the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)-chartered ship Mercurio after the captain refused their request to disembark in Tampico, Mexico. Some jumped overboard to escape, and a few drowned, highlighting the desperation that migrants felt on the ship. Private shipping and airline companies, like private immigrant detention corporations today, prioritized profits over the well-being of migrants. As Goodman concludes, "Not only was deportation punishment; frequently, punishment became the point" (74). [End Page 231] Although this is a sad and depressing history of families being torn apart and people being locked up and expelled, Goodman also highlights the ways in which immigrant communities resisted. He focuses on the Sbicca workers in suburban Los Angeles who refused to accept "voluntary departure" in 1978 after the INS raided their shoe factory. By refusing to cooperate, the workers drew the INS into a much longer and expensive legal process. The case dragged on until 1992, when the court finally forced the INS to inform future arrestees of their right to counsel. Goodman ends the book by arguing that President Donald Trump represents a continuation rather than a break from a 140-year history of a bipartisan deportation policy. But he also points out that even though the deportation machine has grown into an engorged monster that incarcerates half a million migrants each year and deports hundreds of thousands, the vast majority of the estimated eleven million undocumented people remain in this country. Their ability to remain in spite of U.S. government efforts to remove them is a great American...