The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants

by Adam Goodman

The unknown history of deportation and of the fear that shapes immigrants' lives



Constant headlines about deportations, detention camps, and border walls drive urgent debates about immigration and what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century. The Deportation Machine traces the long and troubling history of the US government's systematic efforts to terrorize and expel immigrants over the past 140 years. This provocative, eye-opening book provides needed historical perspective on one of the most pressing social and political issues of our time.

In a sweeping and engaging narrative, Adam Goodman examines how federal, state, and local officials have targeted various groups for expulsion, from Chinese and Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century to Central Americans and Muslims today. He reveals how authorities have singled out Mexicans, nine out of ten of all deportees, and removed most of them not by orders of immigration judges but through coercive administrative procedures and calculated fear campaigns. Goodman uncovers the machine's three primary mechanisms--formal deportations, voluntary departures, and self-deportations--and examines how public officials have used them to purge immigrants from the country and exert control over those who remain. Exposing the pervasive roots of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, The Deportation Machine introduces the politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens who have pushed for and profited from expulsion.

This revelatory book chronicles the devastating human costs of deportation and the innovative strategies people have adopted to fight against the machine and redefine belonging in ways that transcend citizenship.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Law, Race, Audiobook, American History

336 pages, Hardcover

First published May 26, 2020

Reviews

[Paige McLoughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in 2020 after hearing about the book in an author interview on a political podcast. It covers America's long-standing deportation machine that has been in operation since California's Chinese exclusion act. A legal arrangement in cooperation with informal measures with independent actors. This arrangement takes away legal rights of protections of people with various immigration statuses which is good for businesses to keep labor in-line, wages down, and feeds racist populism and the politicians who use it to get to or remain in office. Another example where power uses legal measures, informal arrangements to immiserate vulnerable people for power and profit and feed off xenophobia to help their bank account and careers. Been going on long before Trump as the book documents in detail.
1 like · Like ∙ flag
following reviews


READING PROGRESS
June 6, 2020 – Started Reading
June 7, 2020 – Finished Reading
February 26, 2021 – Shelved
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: american-history
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: cold-war
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: early-twentieth-century
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: early-twenty-first-century
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: east-asia
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: european-history
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: india-pakistan
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: late-capitalism
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: late-twentieth-century
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: latin-american-history
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: mid-twentieth-century
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: law
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: middle-east
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: nineteenth-century
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: pacific-islands
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: politics
February 26, 2021 – Shelved as: sociology

[Steven Volk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent overview of the history of "unwelcoming" immigrants to the U.S. In well-researched chapters, the author explains mythology of the United States as a land open to immigrants, noting that "the US has deported nearly 57 million people since 1882, more than any other country in the world. During the last century, federal officials have deported more people from US than they have allowed to remain on a permanent basis." The study stops with the election of Trump, only covering it in an epilogue, even though published in 2020 - but that probably would have been a study in itself. But quite instructive that some of the worst anti-immigration policies have been passed under Democratic presidents, Clinton and Obama. Time to pay attention!

[Paige McLoughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in 2020 after hearing about the book in an author interview on a political podcast. It covers America's long-standing deportation machine that has been in operation since California's Chinese exclusion act. A legal arrangement in cooperation with informal measures with independent actors. This arrangement takes away legal rights of protections of people with various immigration statuses which is good for businesses to keep labor in-line, wages down, and feeds racist populism and the politicians who use it to get to or remain in office. Another example where power uses legal measures, informal arrangements to immiserate vulnerable people for power and profit and feed off xenophobia to help their bank account and careers. Been going on long before Trump as the book documents in detail.

[J. Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great look at how America has done mass deportations. These are the stories that show that the past 4 years of the Trump Administration are a continuation of the past 120 years of American policy. Absolutely a great book that covers new ground in a market over-saturated with this topic.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was aware of some historical incidents of deportation but had no idea the magnitude of government involvement and how fear was used as a political tool to create institutionalized discrimination and hate that we still have issues with today.

[Cam's Corner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine traces the long and troubling history of the American government's efforts to terrorize immigrants and to purge people from the country. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Goodman examines how local, state, and federal officials have targeted various groups for expulsion, from Chinese, Europeans and Mexicans at the turn of the twentieth century to Central Americans and Muslims today. He reveals how authorities have singled out Mexicans through coercive administrative procedures and strategically calculated fear campaigns. Goodman discusses the machine’s three main mechanisms-- formal deportations, “voluntary” departures, and self-deportations-- and examines how public officials have used them to expel immigrants from the country and exert control over those who remain.

[William D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great history of deportation practices in the US. Id recommend this for the portion on "voluntary deportation," which I have never seen covered in as much depth.

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not going to lie, this was a long and heavy book. Lots of information. I listened to audiobook version , and sometimes it was hard to follow along hence the 3 star review. However, I learned some great information about “the deportation machine” and just how long this hatred for immigrants has gone on. Spoiler alert, it’s forever.

[Serge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book! It will be the centerpiece of the Immigrants in American History elective that I will teach next year
The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants by Adam Goodman

P.1 Although celebrated in popular mythology as a nation of immigrants that has welcomed foreigners throughout its history, the United States has also deported nearly 57 million people since 1882, more than any other country in the world. During the last century, federal officials have deported more people from the land of freedom and opportunity than they have allowed to remain on a permanent basis.

P.1 Barack Obama’s administration formally deported some 3 million in eight years, and during the 2016 presidential election Donald Trump promised to remove all of the undocumented immigrants who remained after taking office. But formal deportations represent only a small sliver of the total. More than 90 percent of all expulsions throughout US history have been via an administrative process euphemistically referred to as “voluntary departure”

P.2 Since its founding, the US federal government has expelled people across international boundaries and violently relocated others within the nation. In 1798, the Alien and Sedition Acts gave the president the power to deport “alien enemies” in times of war, especially supporters of the French Revolution and anyone else believed to be a political radical.

P.3 Only in the last decades of the nineteenth century did a series of consequential congressional and Supreme Court decisions create the framework for a deportation machine under the exclusive control of a newly created federal immigration bureaucracy… While federal authorities have formally deported more than 8 million people since 1892, the year they started recording statistics, they ave expelled six times as many people via voluntary departure.

P.4 Voluntary departures have typically occurred after an agent apprehended someone, coerced the person into agreeing to leave, and then physically removed the individual from the country soon thereafter or confirmed their departure within a set period of time.

P.5 Officials have long used everyday policing, immigration raids, and mass expulsion drives to remove unauthorized immigrants from the country , but they have also relied on the rumors and publicity blitzes surrounding these initiatives to spur self-deportation.

P.6 Even though Mexicans removed through formal deportation far outnumber any other nationality, the expulsion of the overwhelming majority of Mexicans– most of whom had done nothing more tan enter the country without inspection or overstay a visa– has come via voluntary departure and self-deportation.

P.11 Chinese migrants first arrived in large numbers after the discovery of gold in California in 1848. In the years ahead, growing demand for cheap labor in the West brought tens of thousands of people across the Pacific Ocean. Between 1850 and 1870, the Chinese population in the United States increased from around 750 to more than 63,000; a decade later it topped 105,000. Nearly all the Chinese in the country , 95 percent of them men, lived on the Pacific coast, mostly in California. They toiled as miners, cooks, cigar makers, lumberjacks, and laundrymen. They also laid tracks for the transcontinental railroad

P.12 When the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865 in the aftermath of the Civil War, questions arose about the prevalence of Chinese contract labor and its meaning for American democracy. In 1868, the United States and China signed the Burlingame Treaty, facilitating trade and migration between the two countries. The agreement further stoked “anti-coole” sentiments throughout the nation, especially as companies began hiring Chinese contract laborers to do jobs once reserved for white men and women. When wages dropped and unemployment rose in 1873 and amid the prolonged economic depression that followed, white workers blamed the Chinese . Sustained pressure from Californians , animated by both antislavery and anti-Chinese politics, led the US Congress to pass the Page Act in 1875.

P.13 In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring te immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and establishing grounds to deport “ any Chinese person found unlawfully within the United States.” Three years later, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Foran Act , which prohibited the importation of “alien contract labor,” irrespective of country of origin. Despite these restrictive measures, some Americans continued to insist that the nation needed even more stringent laws that excluded and expelled all Chinese immigrants, not just laborers and individuals who had entered the country illegally.

P.31 Until the mid-nineteenth century, most of the US Southwest was part of Mexico. The Mexican-American War of 1846-48 changed that. The United States’ conquest of nearly half of Mexico’s territory coincided with the discovery of gold in California. In the years that followed, a small number of Mexicans joined the throngs of people who traveled to California from around the world in search of the precious metal. But Mexicans did not start heading north in large numbers until after the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement between the United States and Japan put an end to significant labor migration from Asia. As US employers came to depend on Mexican labor as never before, Mexican immigration shot up, going from an average of just a few hundred per year between 1899 and 1907 to around 15,600 in 1909. Ongoing labor demand and US companies’ active recruitment of Mexican workers, combined with the two countries’ economic disparities and geographic proximity, caused migration to the United States to grow even more after 1910. At the same time, some Mexicans fled north to escape the violence and political and social unrest of the Mexican Revolution. And tens of thousands of Mexican agricultural guest workers toiled in the United States during World War . The extensive railroad network crisscrossing North America facilitated this migration. From 1910 to 1921, an average of nearly 20,000 Mexicans immigrated each year, including more than 51,000 in 1920 alone

The years 1917 and 1918 marked a turning point in the history of Mexican migration and immigration enforcement policy. In late January 1917, fears of typhus and other contagious diseases led US immigration and public health officials to quarantine and disinfect all people crossing the border from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso. A couple of weeks later, Congress implemented the literacy test and head tax as part of the Immigration Act of 1917, although legislators also created a loophole for wartime guest workers. The following year, another act aimed at excluding subversives required anyone arriving to the United States to present a passport at an official port of entry. . Around the same time, the Bureau of Immigration sent additional officers to the southwest border “as a war measure to protect the country against the ingress and egress of enemy agents and intermediaries.” But many of these agents ended up policing unauthorized Mexican migration instead.

While formal deportations along the southwest border increased by nearly 50 percent between fiscal years 1917 and 1918, voluntary departures to Mexico (3,811) outpaced formal expulsions across the nation for all nationalities combined (1,569) by more than two to one. In 1921, an economic recession, an unemployment crisis, and the expiration of wartime waivers on Mexican labor migration caused informal expulsions to jump to 7,482. That year, officials in the Southwest deported more than 80 percent of all apprehended immigrants via voluntary departure.

P.33 Immigration historians argue that federal officials did not make the regulation of unauthorized Mexican migrants a central focus of their efforts until after 1924, the year Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act. The law indefinitely extended Asian exclusion and implemented a system of national origins quotas that severely restricted southern and eastern European immigration, but did not apply to the Western Hemisphere. That same year, legislators appropriated money to create the Border Patrol.

P.34 Immigration officers throughout the country still dedicated much of their energies to excluding and formally expelling Asians and undesirable Europeans, but the typical deportee was no longer a Chinese or Japanese laborer, Italian or Russian political radical, or foreigner deemed likely to become a public charge. According to the aggregate data, by the late 1910s the typical deportee was a Mexican who had entered the country without inspection.

P.42 In early 1931, William N. Doak ,the newly appointed secretary of labor who oversaw
The bureau of Immigration, told Congress that some 400,000 people resided in the United States without authorization. Estimating that a quarter of them could be deported immediately, Doak set out to remove “every evader of our alien laws, regardless of nationality, creed or color.

Fear campaigns and immigration raids that ran roughshod over citizens’ and noncitizens’ rights proved to be Doak’s favorite “weapons” to expel people. Local officials collaborated in organizing and carrying out these large-scale self-deportation drives and rounups, wich frequently worked in unison.

P.45 Apprehension and deportation statistics did not include the vast majority of people who left the United States in the decade after 1929. As the Depression dragged on, cities and counties across the nation came to the conclusion that they could save hundreds of thousands of dollars by repatriating people instead of keeping them on the relief rolls. Acting as de facto immigration agents, local welfare officials and social workers tried to coerce people into departing by threatening to cut off their unemployment benefits and offering to pay for their travel out of the country. Authorities also relied on the power of rumor and exaggeration to do some of the work for them… Though some localities also targeted Filipinos and Europeans for repatriation, they directed most of their energies and funds toward expelling ethnic Mexicans (regardless of legal status or citizenship), who they considered unassimilable in addition to being a drain on the economy… The collective efforts of local, state, and federal officials caused or contributed to the repatriation os as many as half a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans between 1929 and 1939…Fear campaigns served as the primary expulsion mechanism in the 1930s. Government officials repatriated more than twice as many Mexicans in 1931 alone (138,500) as they formally deported during the entire decade (64,000)

P.47 The Alien Registration Act of 1940 also gave the immigration bureaucracy the statutory authority, for the first time, to do what individual officers had long handled on an ad hoc basis: offer voluntary departure to noncitizens of “good moral character” facing deportation and willing to pay their own way. Although Congress formalized this power as a privilege for migrants who posed no threat (and as a cost-saving measure), voluntary departure proved punitive in practice.

The war also ushered in a new era of Mexican migration. In 1942, the United States and Mexico agreed to a wartime measure that ended up being te first in a series of binational labor agreements between the countries. From 1942 to 1964, the two governments issued more than 4.6 million short-term contracts to more than 400,000 Mexican men who went to the United States as agricultural guest workers as part of what came to be known as the Bracero Program.

P.50 The Bracero Program’s exclusion of women and children made them more likely to enter without inspection, whether in search or work or in order to reunite with relatives. Women’s deportation cases often differed from those of men. If authorities expelled men to control exploitable labor, they oftentimes removed women to regulate morality and social boundaries. Officials distinguished between “good” and “bad” women and specifically singled out those they deemed prostitutes.

But officials also targeted women, like men, for doing nothing more than entering the country without inspection. Their deportation frequently divided families and separated people from their material possessions.

P.51 In some cases, people used deportation in unexpected ways. Mexican women called for the apprehension and expulsion of their husbands, usually after discovering that they had found new partners in the United States.

P.52 Beyond personal motivations and those related to the regulation of Mexicans’ labor and morality, Cold War-era national security concerns also animated calls for restrictive immigration measures. Fears of a communist infiltration led lawmakers to pass the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, reaffirming the national origins quota system and excluding people who espoused radical political beliefs.

P.52 Launched in the summer of 1954, Operation Wetback sought to regulate the flow of Mexican agricultural laborers by reducing te number of unauthorized migrants and increasing the number of braceros. It built on previous deportation efforts mounted throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, including an aborted secret plan that called for 3,500 to 4,000 army troops to execute deportation drives and patrol the California portion of the US-Mexico border twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for three to six months.

P.53 The history of Operation Wetback is inextricably intertwined with the histories of the Bracero Program and the mass expulsion of migrants via voluntary departure. It is no coincidence that voluntary departures first outnumbered formal deportations in fiscal year 1942, the year the guest program began and both documented and undocumented migration increased. Whereas INS apprehensions numbered just 11,000 that year, they ballooned to more than one million a little over a decade later. In total, the INS carried out nearly six million expulsions between 1942 and 1964– almost all to Mexico, and roughly six times as many as in the previous half-century.

P.71 More than just a deportation drive, Operation Wetback also amounted to a yearlong INS self-promotion campaign that served as a way for te agency to boost its reputation, build morale among its officers, and solidify its place within the federal bureaucracy… The deportation drive seemed to push Mexican migrants into the Bracero Program, in turn reducing unauthorized migration. The number of guest worker contracts rose from some 309,000 in 1954 to a record high of more than 445,000 in 1956, in part because of the expulsions, but also because the INS and Department of Labor promised to provide southwestern growers with a sufficient number of braceros to replace the unauthorized labor force.

P.75 Before deportation became a big business, shipping firms were already making money by transporting millions of emigrants from Europe and Asia to the United States…
Return migration, whether by choice or force, was an important source of revenue for shipping companies as well, and became even more so after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and immigration acts of 1917, 1921, and 1924 restricted immigration and expanded the population of deportable people in the United States. At first, however, immigration restriction cut into shipping companies’ profits. This was not only because it limited the number of people who could migrate, but also because it interrupted shipping schedules and, under the 1891 Immigration Act, made companies financially responsible for inadmissible migrants’ detention and return.

P.79 In the 1940s and 1950s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service began using airplanes to transport deportees both within the United States and to their home countries. The first airlift took place in fall of 1946, when an Air Force B-25 aircraft transported a group of apprehended migrants from Tucson, AZ to Texas for deportation. After just a few flights, immigration officials turned to private contractors to carry out the lift. The most infamous airlift in US history, the January 1948 flight that crashed near Coalinga, CA, killing all thirty-two people aboard, including twenty-eight Mexicans– memorialized by Woody Guthrie’s song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”-- was run by Airline Transport Carriers, Inc.

P.83 For private shipping companies already hauling bananas, cement, and other cargo from Mexico to the United States, deportees represented a potential moneymaking opportunity for the return trip south.

P.95 The boatlift also offers insights into the intersection of social control, public health, and the state’s coercive efforts to regulate immigrants deemed dangerous. Soon after leaving Port Isabel, the ship’s doctor egan administering smallpox vaccinations to deportees. Officials sometimes stamped meal tickets as proof of vaccination, which migrants then had to present in order to receive a meal.

P.107 From the mid-1970s on, deportations averaged nearly 925,000 per year, or more than 2,500 each day [Thirteen million deportations between 1965 and 1985] Unlike the episodic deportation campaigns during the Great Depression and early years of the Cold War, the unprecedented magnitude and regularity of enforcement actions marked a break from the past and the dawn of a new era: the age of mass expulsion.

P.109 From 1965 to 1985,changes in policy and the political economies of the United States and Mexico resulted in significant transformations to the deportation machine. The expiration of the Bracero Program at the end of 1964 had an immediate impact on immigration enforcement practices and migrants’ lives. The following year, President Lyndon B. Jonson signed the Hart-Celler Act ending the discriminatory national origins quota system that had been in place for more than four decades. But the act also implemented a 170,000-person quota on immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere (including a country cap of 20,000)and, for the first time ever, a 120,000-person quota on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. Over the course of the next fiscal year, the number of Mexicans apprehended rose by more than 26 percent and total apprehensions topped 100,000 for the first time in a decade…. Expulsions increased even more after Congress extended the 20,000-person country cap to the Western Hemisphere in 1976.

P.110 A recession in 1970-71, followed by the oil crisis and the subsequent drop in the value of the stock market a few years later, heightened feelings of economic and cultural instability across the country.

[Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Sweeping Bureaucratic, Legal, and Human Assessment of America's Deportation History

I've been a student of immigration history and politics for years now, and I found this book to be a quite well-written and readable explanation of America's deportation policies combined with a potent assessment of their human impacts.

*Brief Synopsis: Goodman walks readers through the history, bureaucracy, politics, and human impact of American deportation policies from the 1870s through the 2020s. Notable elements of the book include:
-A detailed explanation of the United States' three deportation mechanisms: formal deportations (following detention and a series of immigration hearings), "voluntary" departures (which Goodman defines as government officials coercing detained immigrants into signing away their right to a hearing so they are not permanently barred from returning to the country through authorized pathways, then physically removing them; Goodman writes, "voluntary departures account for 85 percent of the nearly 57 million total expulsions during the last 125 years."), and self-deportations (Goldman also puts the onus for these deportations on the U.S. government, claiming immigrants make the decision to leave because they live in a state of fear during immigration crackdowns, reduced social services, or community intimidation). Goldman writes that government officials (in INS and DHS) heavily relied on voluntary departures for the bulk of the 20th century as a cost- and time-saving measure, though formal deportations surged during the 21st century;
-Anti-Chinese sentiment in California during the late 19th century;
-Anti-Mexican sentiment, beginning in the 1930s under "Operation Wetback" and growing until Mexicans became the stereotyped target of anti-immigration movements and policies;
-Deportation resistance and civil disobedience movements, most notably including a push in the 1970s-1980s to convince detained immigrants to exercise their right to remain silent and refuse to agree to voluntary departure;
-The simultaneous rise of the militarized southwest border and mass incarceration (including by private enterprise), particularly following 9/11;
-Government policies designed to make the deportation process uncomfortable and punitive for deportees, including when they were evaluated as cargo rather than travelers on overcrowded buses and ships. (One INS official said, "Our contention is that the Mexican aliens are, in a sense, personal property in that they make no decisions as to the means of transportation or destination." ... "As one man declared, 'The boat trip was very bad for me and if I ever got on land again I would never get on another boat or take the chance of being sent to Veracruz again.' None of this was unintentional.")

*Highly Informative, and Also Highly Charged: I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about the long-term context of U.S. deportation and immigration policy. The book is digestible (about half of it is taken up with footnotes) and well-written, a real accomplishment given immigration history's cyclical and repetitive nature. Goodman does a good job weaving together the threads of history, bureaucratic and legal details, human impacts, and political analysis that tell the whole story. One thing he went a little too far on, I thought, was his tone that occasionally lapsed into preaching. I certainly understand where he's coming from as he writes in such passionate and outraged tones about the human costs of immigration, but I felt he hit such messages a little too often and a little too blatantly to come across in an academic or universally-approachable way.

*Notable Excerpts:
-"Although Democratic and Republican administrations have targeted different immigrant groups, the history of deportation from the United States has been, for the most part, the history of removing Mexicans. Mexicans make up around half of the undocumented immigrant population in US history, but they account for nine out of every ten deportees."
-"In a landmark 1889 decision, the US Supreme Court found that the federal government's exclusive authority to regulate immigration derived from the United States' status as a sovereign nation, rather than from an explicit provision of the Constitution."
-"The Immigration Act of 1910 made prostitution a deportable offense regardless of how long someone had lived in the United States, marking an important shift toward deporting immigrants based on their actions after entering the country, rather than as people who should have been excluded upon arrival."
-"The deportation machine that legislators and immigration bureaucrats established during these decades prioritized speed and economy over people's constitutional right to due process. ... Despite heir euphemistic names, voluntary departures and self-deportations had more to do with overt government planning, force, and coercion than with migrants' autonomous decisions. The machine only functioned because of these alternate and expedited means of expulsion that stripped migrants of any rights they had." (Goodman points out several times that, though they do not know it, even undocumented immigrants hold many of the same Constitutional rights as U.S. citizens.)
-On the early search to push out deportees to "safe third countries" when they could not be sent home: "During the height of the Red Scare in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, removing radicals to Russia proved problematic since the United States had no diplomatic relations with the new postrevolutionary government. To sidestep this obstacle, officials searched for third-party countries willing to accept Russian expelees and facilitate their return."
-As early as 1929, one immigration official wrote, "Some day an immigration officer will erroneously extend the voluntary departure privilege to an American citizen of alien appearance, and one incident of the wort, with a claim of coercion, given sufficient publicity may do this Service irreparable injury."
-When Operation Wetback took place in Texas in 1954, many Texan farmers and farming communities strongly opposed the INS' efforts to deport their field hands. "A week before Operation Wetback commenced, one newspaper offered a tongue-in-cheek solution to potential labor shortages: 'putting 700-800 invading Border patrolmen into the cotton fields, picking.' ... A candy store in Harlingen put up a sign stating, 'Prices Double to Border Patrolmen until Cotton is Picked.'"
-On commercial incentives for transportation companies: "Under the 1891 Immigration Act, companies (were) financially responsible for inadmissible migrants' detention and return trip."
-In a section titled, "The Politics of Immigration Statistics": "Immigration officials (in the 1970s-1980s) used the ever-rising number of apprehensions and deportations inherent to the voluntary departure-revolving door system to simultaneously celebrate their 'accomplishments' and call attention to the dire need for additional funding, all while helping to fulfill the nation's ongoing labor demands. ... Voluntary departures suited the needs of both (the United States and Mexico) in the sense that they allowed the United States to continue deporting people, while leaving open the possibility of future reentry to supply necessary labor north of the border and to ease economic and population pressures in Mexico."
-One Mexican migrant's take on life in the United States: "Being here is like a prison, a beautiful golden prison. You have everything, but at the same time you have nothing."
-The playbook for 1970s anti-deportation activists: "Don't say anything. Don't sign anything. Demand to see a lawyer. Demand a deportation hearing." Goodman wrote, "Although many undocumented immigrants might not have realized it, they possessed many of the same constitutional rights as other people in the country. Regardless of legal status, they still had the right to remain silent; the right to speak with a lawyer; the right not to sign anything; the right to a deportation hearing; and the right to be released on bond or on one's own recognizance and in the meantime remain free." ... "As one lawyer put it, the Sbicca team's straightforward strategy was to tell the service, 'You have to meet you burden (of proof) by yourself. We're not going to help you.' The tactic proved to be incredibly effective." ... Another lawyer said, 'When required to follow congressionally mandated procedures, INS cannot establish the deportability of approximately 50% of the persons whom they take into detention.'" ... And another said, "You didn't have to be a smart lawyer to come up with the strategies, you had to be a courageous worker to execute them."
-At least as early as 1978, the process began in which judges would sign temporary restraining orders halting immigrants' deportations, even when they had already been loaded into government transportation vehicles headed toward the border."
-I think the following is Goodman's thesis: "For many people, enduring state-sanctioned violence and trauma was--and continues to be--a central element of the immigrant experience."

[César Hernández · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic, deep exploration of U.S. deportation practices that evade immigration courts. Historian Adam Goodman unearths a wealth of new material and deploys much of the best scholarly literature on deportation to reveal how U.S. deportation operations have relied on pressure and fear to circumvent immigration courts. This is a bipartisan, century-plus phenomenon that is frequently overlooked by scholars as much as by journalists and policymakers. Goodman's excellent book is an urgent reminder that often the most substantial impacts happen out of sight.

[Emma Siemer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was assigned to read this book for a class I took surrounding immigration and the history of the United States. I'm not going to lie, I was not excited to read it. However, The Deportation Machine opened my eyes to so many different aspects of how immigrants were and continue to be perceived and treated in this country. Goodman, the author, is clearly very knowledgeable about the subject and his writing made me question why the United States calls itself a "nation of immigrants" if they always have and continue to treat those who want to live and work in their nation so poorly.

[sarah wertis · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know when you hear something about public policy (immigration or otherwise), and you think to yourself: surely this is a conspiracy theory? Surely these adverse consequences are coincidences or accidents or the side effects of something else???
Well, Adam Goodman is here to remind us that they did it all on purpose.

Accessible, super well written, so nicely synthesized, SO much evidence; my mind is blown. Everyone should read this book.
(read for class, mostly in the Milstein Green Chairs)

[Andy Marin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-researched book that covers how the US has used formal deportations, voluntary deportations and self-deportations in various ways to force those groups and communities that were disliked and disfavored out of the country. The books covers the 19th century up until the modern day, showing how these policies and political battles are crucial parts of the national debate over what kind of country the US is. One thing that I particularly loved was how the author also included how communities have fought back, pushing for dignity and rights too often denied.

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just as fucked up as you would expect. I do wish the author had focused more on the period before 1945 though.

[Zachary Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In “The Deportation Machine,” Adam Goodman argues that for the last 150 years, “various means of expulsion have been a central feature of American politics and life.” The three means in question, which together constitute the titular machine, are formal deportation, voluntary departure, and self-deportation. Formal deportation, or removal from the country by order of an immigration judge, dominates our understanding of the subject, but Goodman demonstrates that for the first century of its existence, the United States’s immigration enforcement apparatus relied primarily on voluntary departures.

Despite their name, voluntary departures are not, in fact, voluntary; they are “voluntary” only in the sense that they are not accompanied by hearings or extended detention stays. Because they expedite and economize the deportation process, voluntary departures have proven extremely useful to immigration enforcement officers. Charles Gordon, who served as INS general counsel during the 1970s, admitted as much in a hearing before Congress, testifying that relying only upon formal deportations “would cause a breakdown of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. . . . [If everyone] were subjected to a hearing, the administrative mechanism would collapse. It would never complete a case.” Goodman shows that reliance upon voluntary deportation was customary long before the Hart-Celler Act triggered an acute uptick in the number of undocumented arrivals. Indeed, even mass deportation events such as Operation Wetback and the repatriation of 500,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression rested upon the practice.

By paying attention to voluntary departures, Goodman is able to identify a critical turning point in U.S. immigration history around 1986: the emergence of a punitive immigration enforcement regime that came to rely far more heavily upon the mechanism of formal deportation than it had in the past. Goodman registers a couple of reasons for this shift. For one thing, immigrants and activists undermined the effectiveness of voluntary departures by refusing to assist in the practice. More consequentially, Congress passed an immigration reform package in 1986 that paired amnesty for undocumented immigrants with $400 million for the Border Patrol, setting in motion a hardening of immigration policy that would continue apace in the 1990s, culminating in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

One of Goodman’s achievements in The Deportation Machine is to detach the history of immigration enforcement from the history of partisan politics. The United States’s mechanisms for expulsion, Goodman wants to argue, almost go of their own accord, regardless of the intentions of who is in office. The most recent example of this dynamic is Barack Obama, the liberal darling who oversaw a historic spike in formal deportations, but others include Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Part of the reason for this is that nativism has a long and bipartisan history in the United States, but another is that once established, institutions like Immigration and Customs Enforcement feed the stories of crisis that make them seem necessary. Thus, even as Goodman acknowledges that President Trump is uniquely evil, he is not hopeful that a future, less diabolical president will be able to fix things. “The diverse stakeholders that benefit from expulsion,” Goodman concludes, “mean that the relentless targeting and scapegoating of immigrants will likely continue—regardless of which politician or party is in power.”

[Yunis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goodman's history of the Deportation Machine is mostly situated in the south border, and most deportation happens in voluntary basis. Every time the deportation machine is disputed, it comes back with more restrictions and more pain. It seems that deportation will get more efficient and better at putting fear in the world of the undocumented. The resistance to the machine will not catch up to the well oiled machine of the system that is always winning legal framework.
Fear of the others will always wins against the compassion that Americans showed to the arrivals of the European descents. Since Europeans stopped arriving in drove, it seems the US is already full and will only accept below the numbers of demand of immigration labor. Good luck winning refuge and legal status in system that accept less.
Very bleak future

[Bryan Mcquirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goodman does an excellent job of going over the history of immigration policies in the United States. It is a long, capricious, and bloody affair, which was rife with blatant racism and bigotry.
While the book is very well researched and written, some of the author's language used, tends to show a clear bias and make the narrative less academic.
3.75 stars.

[Daniel Farabaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well written and technical analysis of the history and current issues of deportation in the US. It does especially good job of addressing the "voluntary" deportation system that exists in the US and its impact on immigrants.

[Justin Drury · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very informative understanding of the US long history of deportation, its methods (under both major political parties), as well as moments of resistance and perseverance. A necessary read in immigration of deportation history.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Such a well researched, eye opening book

[Emma Ito · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5⭐️. This is such a well-done, well-researched history of immigration in the United States. Goodman pays particular attention to the historical deportation of Mexicans & Mexican Americans, flowing and connecting to the history of today (up to 2019), including the creation of ICE. Excellent history and I wish I had learned it sooner.

[Dski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good history lesson.

[Eve]

The book opens with a quote from a TERF named Adrienne Rich. So I don't trust the author's discernment. -- This book does not have a monopoly on the topic.

[RYAN PHAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting take on deportations and America’s over reliance on voluntary departures. Dust jacket

[Joseph Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid. A little dry. Helps to have background on immigration policy and history to appreciate the numbers

[criscelis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read, highly recommend if you are even a little bit interested in immigration or curious about it.