Although the scholarly literature on comparative immigration politics is vast, few researchers have systematically studied the most direct nexus between immigration policy and the individuals most immediately affected: deportees. Peter Andreas's Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (2000) looked at immigration enforcement on the US and German borders but employed a more symbolic politics approach, emphasizing the contrast between the appearance and reality of immigration “control.” Kitty Calavita‘s Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (1992) documented how the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) acted to maximize its own bureaucratic interest while negotiating the conflict between business's demand for low-priced labor and the agency's mission to enforce immigration law. Though perhaps the most important theoretical predecessor to the book under review, Inside the State mainly covered enforcement politics from the now-distant 1950s and 1960s. A parallel piece to the Calavita work is Juan Ramon García’s Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (1980), but it represents straightforward political history and attempted little institutional analysis. Lastly, Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (1963) by William Preston, Jr., examined an even earlier era and was more polemical and normatively philosophical.

Antje Ellermann's States Against Migrants thus fills a gaping hole in the migration politics literature and arrives at a critical time in the theoretical and policy debates over immigration in industrialized societies. The author's principal dependent variable is essentially the degree to which a state may deport noncitizens with impunity (i.e., without interference from public or immigrant-rights activists such as churches and leftists). To try to account for changes in this variable, Ellermann conducted more than 180 personal interviews with “deportation officers” in four regions of Germany and the United States, with national-level immigration managers, with legislators and their aides at national, state, and local levels, and with both pro- and anti-immigration activists.

One of the book's key insights is that the ability to act in a pro-deportation way varies at different stages of the policy process: “Whereas the ability to make socially coercive law is contingent on strong institutional linkages between the public and legislators, implementation depends on the political insulation of bureaucrats” (p. i).

Thus, at the agenda-setting, or initial legislative stage, xenophobic elements have the upper hand by focusing on the benefits of more restrictive immigration laws and by “demonizing” migrants. Yet later at the committee stage, sometimes behind closed doors, pro-immigration actors often try to soften legislation. Once the bill has become law and has reached the executive implementation level, antienforcement forces have more influence because senior bureaucrats (especially in the United States) lack robust political insulation. Finally, during street-level enforcement, immigrant-rights activists sometimes prevail by appealing to the mass public's common humanity and claiming that strict enforcement would be tragic for particular individuals.

Ellermann also finds that the capacity to carry out pro-deportation policy varies across countries, regions, and parties. A major puzzle she tries to answer is why, after massive increases in funding to immigration agencies and dramatically restrictive “reforms” of immigration laws in both Germany and the United States in the 1990s, the German state was able to enact more laws that matched immigration-related public opinion more closely and to deport people with greater impunity. In both legislation and implementation, she finds, German immigration authorities maintained great freedom to remove foreign nationals because bureaucrats and legislators are more politically insulated than in the United States and also because the Federal Republic is a parliamentary system with strong, relatively homogenous, political parties. The highly mobilized Cuban-Americans in Miami present much higher hurdles to agents than does the relatively quiescent immigrant community in San Diego. On the other hand, removing immigrants is facilitated if the party in power at the national or regional level is socially conservative; deportation then presents fewer conflicts with the party's ideology and attendant intraparty constituents (p. 51).

Whether intentionally or not, Ellermann has vividly conveyed the horror or—if we can purge the word of its post-9/11 connotations—terror of being deported. Though not quite reaching the explicitness of Robert Kahn's exposé Other People's Blood: U.S. Immigration Prisons in the Reagan Decade (1996), the study nonetheless documents chilling abuses. The book's cover photo of smug-looking immigration agents preparing for a deportation flight by laying out shackles on the tarmac conjures up images from Steven Spielberg's Amistad, a movie about the Middle Passage. Ellermann's text itself reports the suffocation death of Sudanese migrant Aamir Ageeb during a German deportation flight in 1999 (p. 93), two other fatal deportations out of Austria and Belgium, and the 1994 sedative-induced demise of Nigerian Kola Bankole during yet another deportation (p. 94). The reader of this study has little trouble imagining how such deaths occur; explaining the advantages of chartering private, noncommercial planes, one German agent noted: “In these cases we can exert more force—I can openly admit to this—the deportees get shackled at their hands and feet and can also get pushed down” (p. 95).

Like every other book, States Against Migrants suffers from at least a couple of flaws. Although typos are rare, a sharper or less-rushed copy editor might have caught the duplicate quotations on pages 112 and 155 and on pages 118 and 144, and the author should have noticed that the same interview is listed as having been conducted in July on page 118 but in June on page 144. More substantively, Ellermann should have at least acknowledged the existence of the Sanctuary Movements in the United States, not just Kirchenasyl/Church Asylum in Germany; the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s on behalf of Central American refugees may have inspired Kirchenasyl and definitely motivated today's “New Sanctuary Movement,” which aims largely at preventing the deportation of undocumented economic migrants from Latin America. But the most problematic aspect of this work is that the American half focuses primarily on the INS, a now-defunct agency. Sometimes the author even speaks of the INS in the present tense (p. 103). Although she speculates about the difference between post-9/11 Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation politics and the politics of the INS in the 1990s (pp. 163–66), one wonders how many of the lessons derived from a study of the INS are still applicable today.

States Against Migrants is especially recommended for immigrant-rights advocates trying to oppose deportations in general or an individual case of proposed removal. Chapter 4 is practically a how-to manual for local activists wishing to block an expulsion order, demonstrating that it is crucial for opponents of deportation to enlist the support of elected officials, who in turn pressure bureaucrats not to enforce the law in a particular case. Simply organizing a public protest against immigration agencies has little or no effect; immigration supporters must instead use the media and public opinion to persuade legislators that it is in their personal electoral interest to intervene in a given case of potential deportation. In addition to this first target audience, migration scholars and students of the bureaucracy should take particular note of Ellermann's work. It is probably the best book on deportation politics ever written in any language.