Reviewed by: The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants by Adam Goodman Nico Soto (bio) Adam Goodman, The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pres, 2020). 336 pp., ills. Index. ISBN: 978-0-691-18215-5. Adam Goodman's book challenges readers to turn to history to inform their understanding of the contemporary immigration debate. Reflecting on the Trump era, Goodman argues that the intense demonization and deportations of immigrants were not exceptional and should be contextualized in the longue durée history of the U.S. deportation machine that encompasses all forms of expulsion and the bureaucratic, capitalist imperatives of pro-deportation public and private enterprises at local and national levels (P. 6). Goodman explains, "The deportation machine … did not just come into being during the presidency of Donald J. Trump … the machine's roots are much deeper, dating back to the late nineteenth century" (P. 197). He centers his study around three mechanisms of expulsion: formal deportation, voluntary departure, and self-deportation, while directing the main thrust of deconstruction at the concept of "voluntary departure." The Deportation Machine takes the case of Mexican expulsion as paradigmatic, and with good reason. Mexicans bear the brunt of the deportation regime, as nine out of ten deportees expelled are of Mexican descent (P. 6). As interest in immigration discourse reaches a peak, Goodman's monograph offers crucial insights reminding us that expulsion has a long history in the United States. The Deportation Machine greatly expands the existing historiographic canon on U.S. immigration matters. In the 2010s, immigration historians increasingly turned to the early twentieth-century immigration processes to critically inform our twenty-first-century understanding. Historians and social scientists now approach immigration history using an analytical lens that combines top-down institutional shifts and geopolitical processes with social history methods. The latter bring in immigrant voices that challenge the existing concepts about mobility and exclusion. The studies by Deborah Kang and Rosina Lozano are examples of historical work that positions U.S. immigration as a long history with roots in early America and uses both legal and social history methods.1 Goodman goes back [End Page 288] even further, expanding the long history timeline of the U.S. deportation machine to the nineteenth century's earliest exclusion and removal processes. His book critically analyzes misconceptions in the legal definition of "deportation" and supports this discussion with social histories that further problematize the common immigration narrative. His approach is a very important correction to the scholarship on U.S. immigration that has overemphasized the past thirty years in U.S. politics and thus colored our understanding of the history of borderland enforcement with a sense of novelty and exceptionalism. The Deportation Machine is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 broadens understanding of the deportation agenda and searches for the ideological roots behind exclusion in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 2 introduces the mechanisms of the machine and terms of expulsion, and highlights Operation Wetback as a case study of how the machine operates. In chapter 3 Goodman pushes his argument beyond the border, focusing on how the combination of federal exclusion policies and pro-capitalist private enterprises punished Mexican migrants in the interest of big business capitalism. In chapter 4 Goodman gives voice to the migrants and discusses their deportability, analyzing how federal and state powers manufactured crisis and fear to unsettle the day-to-day lives of migrants and coerce "voluntary departure." Chapter 5 highlights community resistance to the machine, primarily focusing on the case of the Sbicca of California shoe factory, where Mexican laborers used the legal process to resist expulsion. Goodman uses his final chapter and epilogue to turn to recent decades, as he reflects on how the explosive anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy of the twenty-first-century Trump era is merely a continuation of the longer history of expulsion since the Civil War period. Goodman's book is a discussion of how state power controls human mobility, and a narrative about the complex relationship between the United States and immigrants. Full of useful analysis and insight, the author's crucial argument reexamines the definition of "deportation...