In Deportation nation, author Daniel Kanstroom challenges the enduring and popular myth of the United States as a welcoming nation by presenting an innovative perspective on the history of immigration law and deportation. A professor and director of the Human Rights Program at Boston College Law School, Kanstroom explores how the deportation system evolved to become a powerful legal tool for the US government to exert significant social control over noncitizens. Deportation nation is valuable not only as a collection of the seminal cases that shaped US immigration law but also because of the historical context the author provides for each case. Dismissing any idea of law as neutral, Kanstroom explains how ideological, racial, and cultural struggles affected the development of such law. In sum, Kanstroom's overarching contention is that the US immigration system does not function fairly, because of the massive historical inequities that influenced its formation.

Deportation nation is organized chronologically. After an introduction that presents a strong critique of current laws, the second chapter adeptly examines the antecedents of US deportation laws. Divided into three sections, the first part of this chapter reviews how England deported convicts to the new world. Then it discusses how the colonies used deportation to control the movements of the poor, and eventually deported convicts back to the old world. The second part of the second chapter addresses the post-Revolutionary Alien and Sedition Acts as the first experiment with an immigration system that distinguished a person's constitutional rights based on his or her citizenship status. The third part covers the removal of Native Americans from their lands under the US Supreme Court's justification that a conqueror gains irrefutable title to the lands of the conquered. It also discusses Fugitive Slave laws as well as the government's plans to deport freed slaves so they could establish their own colonies in Africa and Latin America.

While Chapter 2 provides a background of the ideologies upon which the modern deportation system was constructed, Chapter 3 introduces the laws that permitted the mass deportation and exclusion of Chinese workers as well as creating the first post-entry (versus border) controls. This chapter is packed with case law and Kanstroom discusses both how constitutional doctrine developed and how later laws originated from these earlier cases. Chapter 4 begins in the twentieth century, dealing with the expansion and refinement of modern deportation laws. From 1900 to 1920 – a period the author refers to as the second wave of immigration and deportation laws – the US enacted stricter controls and immigrants began to be deported for crimes they committed after entering the country. The United States deported people for government disloyalty, labour-organizing activities, and political activism. Chapter 5 explores the third wave, 1930 to 1964, in which deportation was used as a tool against organized crime and labour union leaders. This chapter also covers the deportation of communist sympathizers during the Cold War, Japanese internment during World War II, and Mexican deportations from the Bracero Program to ‘Operation Wetback’. The final chapters address changes in immigration law that took place from 1965 to 2006. It looks at the evolution of judicial discretion, jurisdiction stripping, and retroactivity.

This book has an enormously ambitious goal of analysing the entire legal and social history of immigration and deportation law in the United States. As a result, it is dense and at times the narrative, along with Kanstroom's argument, becomes difficult to follow. Nonetheless, this does not diminish the fact that the work is undeniably successful in explaining the many different influences that shaped the United States' modern immigration and deportation system.