Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine provides a thorough treatment of the enforcement and policy mechanisms that the US government has used to expel noncitizens from the late 19th century to the present day. Goodman begins by introducing the reader to three mechanisms that he uses to structure the argument for the entire book; formal deportations, voluntary departures, and a more amorphous and informal set of practices that have been used by the federal and local authorities to encourage noncitizens to “self-deport.” Goodman goes on to show that, throughout US history, the federal government has leaned more heavily on the latter two mechanisms than it has on formal deportation proceedings. In the process, he opens up some important questions about how to best define expulsions as a legal-administrative reality, considering that many noncitizens who are expelled from the US, by the mechanisms described by Goodman, do not show up in any of the federal government’s immigration enforcement statistics.
Goodman’s subject matter makes for a ready comparison with Daniel Kanstroom’s Deportation Nation and Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects. Unlike these books, however, Goodman pays more attention to primary source documents generated by federal agents and enforcement agencies. His detailed treatment of enforcement tactics also recalls Kitty Calavita’s Inside the State (focusing on the Bracero Program) and Joseph Nevin’s Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond, but with a more ambitious historical scope. It bears emphasizing, however, that the most important distinguishing feature of The Deportation Machine is Goodman’s argument, which focuses the reader’s attention on the federal government’s longstanding reliance on expulsion practices that operate outside the court system and in the gray zones of the law. His account of these practices provides an important corrective to much of the recent research on criminal deportations and the intersections of criminal and immigration law (aka, “crimmigration”).
The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) is widely regarded as the tipping point that triggered a massive increase in formal deportations that was made possible, in turn, by policy measures that expanded the immigration consequences of criminal offenses. Goodman traces these legal and policy changes, but he also shows that, even in the era of crimmigration, removals for noncriminal reasons have continued to outpace criminal removals. He also calls attention to the role that IIRIRA played in introducing new mechanisms, including “expedited removal” and “reinstatement of removal” that allow immigration officers to remove noncitizens without having to go through the immigration court system. Although concerns about the likelihood of future criminal behavior may play a role in the decision to use “expedited removal,” the removal procedure does not require the noncitizen to be formally charged for a crime. Consequently, the removal does not show up in the government’s caseload of criminal deportations. Through his careful analysis of these kinds of policy changes, Goodman decenters the criminal/noncriminal distinction with a focus on formal versus informalized and streamlined expulsion mechanisms.
Overall, Goodman provides a very convincing and parsimonious account of how the federal government is using its deportation powers. One big question that he does not get around to answering, however, is why the federal government has organized its deportation powers in this particular way. His research surfaces a number of likely explanations, such as the cost-effectiveness of streamlined operations and the constant pressure to increase expulsions which tests the administrative capacity of immigration enforcement. But he also shows that these factors can work cross-purposes to each other. Voluntary departures, for example, may be a quicker way of removing noncitizens, but Goodman shows that they also increase the likelihood of unauthorized reentry, especially when there is rising demand for migrant labor. Goodman also shows that, as early as the 1920s, privately owned transportation companies had already begun fixing their sites on expulsions, as a lucrative, growth industry, and began seeking federal contracts to arrange “travel services” for deportees. These arrangements paved the way for private-public partnerships (especially involving local governments) that became invested in increasing expulsions for the sake of profit—presaging many of the same factors that were at play in the growth of the immigrant detention system in the 1990s.
According to Goodman’s account, these schemes are just one factor among many that contributed toward the streamlining of expulsions. The growing number of expulsions also increased pressure to ensure that people who are expelled did not reenter, which in turn, led the federal government to invest in methods to transport deportees by plane or boat, many miles across the US-Mexico border. These practices, which Goodman traces to the late Bracero-era, are similar to the deterrence strategies that, according to some scholars, did not take off in earnest until about three decades later, in the late 1970s.
There are labor market theories of immigration enforcement that underscore the role that border control plays in regulating a flow of economically useful migrants. Deterrence strategies, on the other hand, are more concerned with preventing the entry of people who are not even desired as exploitable migrant workers. The transportation methods described by Goodman blur the lines between these two kinds of strategies because they use removals to regulate the size of the migrant workforce, but they are also concerned with deterring the future migration of these people.
This is yet another example of how Goodman’s research speaks to issues in the field of migrant and refugee studies that resonate beyond the stated aims of his book. It is too much to ask any author to explore all of the possible theoretical implications of their work and so I will not ask this of Professor Goodman. It is a testament to the quality of his research that it raises more questions than it answers. It is safe to say, however, that The Deportation Machine is an important account of the history of immigration enforcement in the US. The book is burgeoning with insights that will change the way that migration scholars think about the deportation powers of the federal government.
