Adam Goodman details the efforts by US governments—local, state, and national—to rid themselves of those the leaders deem undesirable. Although the practice of removal has historic roots, it was in 1891 that the United States Government began to oversee the formal process of immigration, with its new power to “admit, exclude, and expel” (10) foreigners who the government or its agents determined to be unwanted in the country.
In the succeeding decades, the process of immigration and its deportation machine became institutionalized around three disparate paths to expulsion: formal deportation, voluntary departure, and self-deportation. It was in this formative stage of immigration control, argues Goodman, that the United States began to articulate—both formally and informally—the concept of “what it meant to be American along the lines of race and class, politics and culture” (11). Furthermore, when the federal government was unable to control the flow of undesirable immigrants, local communities took matters into their own hands, as occurred in the numerous local efforts at Chinese exclusion in the American West in the mid 1880s.
The book examines data up to 2018, the most recent year for which statistics were available at the time it was written. In his six chapters, Goodman documents and analyzes not only the raw statistical data that clearly prove his thesis, but also the toll that the deportation machine has taken on immigrants (physically and psychologically), local communities, and American businesses. Goodman also explores the reaction to the machinery by immigrants and their advocates, and it is here that he puts a human face on an institutional process and its consequences.
Although resistance to the deportation machine existed long before 1968, it was in that pivotal year that organizations began their all-out assault on the procedures, especially the voluntary departures which were, more often than not, nothing more than coerced removals. Through financial backing by the Ford Foundation, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and the Southwest Council of La Raza were founded. In the succeeding years, additional key organizations were founded, including the Center of Autonomous Social Action—General Brotherhood of Workers (CASA) and the Comité Obrero en Defensa de los Indocumentados en Lucha (Committee in Defense of Undocumented Workers in Struggle (CODIL). It was these organizations, and others like them, that eventually pushed the US government to guarantee the rights of people arrested as “illegal aliens,” an effort that became formalized in 1992 when the US Immigration and Naturalization Services agreed to henceforth inform these individuals of certain rights, such as the right to contact a lawyer and to request a list of free and low-cost legal services. The agreement also requires those arrested be informed of legal avenues to become residents.
Adam Goodman has written an excellent account of the processes used by the US government to remove those immigrants the government does not want in the country. Focusing on what are referred to as “voluntary departures,” Goodman's work provides its readers with the first in-depth study of this often overlooked practice. Embracing an expansive definition of “deportation” to include non-formal means of removal, Goodman consulted both primary and secondary sources to bring together various voices within the immigration arena to present “the deportation machine as a whole, looking at all of the forms of expulsion together with the bureaucratic, capitalist, and racist imperatives that have driven them over nearly a century and a half” (6).
An excellent read and highly recommended for anyone interested in immigration history and policy.
