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

“How does one write the history of something designed to leave no paper trail?” Adam Goodman asks this provocative question in the introduction of The Deportation Machine, a deeply researched study of US migration history and policy that draws on extensive archival holdings across the United States and Mexico. While most people are familiar with the concept of deportation, this legal process of removal is not responsible for the tens of millions of removals that make the United States the nation that has deported more migrants than any other in the world. Instead, Goodman argues, “voluntary departures” have been the main mechanism of expulsion. As he writes, the “machine” has three mechanisms: formal deportation, voluntary departure, and self-deportation. When the state lacked the capacity to formally deport masses of migrants, it relied on fear, terror, and violence to stigmatize and racialize unwanted groups, leading to voluntary departures and self-deportations. The Deportation Machine thrusts the racial origins of deportation into the center of American history. Beyond its important narrative and arguments, Goodman excels at quantifying the longer history of forced removals. Rich with charts that document numerical changes, it serves as an essential reference for students and scholars of migration.The book begins in the late nineteenth century, earlier than many would assume, as voluntary departures were deployed against Chinese migrants in California in the late 1800s. For example, “the Truckee Method” represented a system of destroying Chinese communities, economic boycotts, and violent threats against Chinese workers in the town of Truckee. Throughout six chapters, Goodman pays careful attention to legislative changes and the shifts in policy and practice that resulted as a consequence of the growing immigration bureaucracy. After the formation of the Border Patrol in 1924, informal methods of removal allowed the agency to claim success and “served to fashion state power as much as control migration” (pp. 38–39).Newspaper articles in the second chapter help to reconstruct the atmosphere of fear that led many to leave the United States during the period of Mexican repatriation in the 1930s. The Border Patrol harnessed this strategy, relying on media outlets such as newspapers and Spanish-language radio stations to prioritize publicity in the implementation of the mass deportation campaign known as Operation Wetback in 1954. Goodman addresses ongoing debates regarding the size and efficacy of the operation; as he points out, the numbers of formal deportations in the mid-twentieth century might lead to inaccurate conclusions about the INS's power. Instead, the massive shift in formal deportations versus voluntary departures reveals the power of the state in expelling migrants through multiple mechanisms.After the end of the Mexican guest worker program known as the Bracero Program (1942–1964), the federal government increasingly criminalized Mexicans. Goodman discusses government actions like Nixon's Operation Intercept as part of larger processes that criminalized Mexicans. Building on studies of deportability, Goodman emphasizes how such practices emphasized “internal borders.”One of the strengths of the book is its incorporation of first-person narratives, which is especially noticeable in chapter 5’s coverage of the Sbicca factory raid in Los Angeles. This section details the growing immigrant rights movement in the 1970s, when workplace raids became an increasingly common tactic. While the overall narrative of expulsion paints a grim picture of US history, this chapter illustrates how multiple factions mobilized to achieve civil rights for undocumented groups and offers important lessons for today. Throughout the book, Goodman offers examples of how laws affected individuals, sharing poignant details of how their lives were upended. These “human costs” of expulsion mounted alongside the expansion of a profitable deportation and detention systemThe last chapter traces the explosive growth of the carceral state and the multitude of federal and state laws from the 1980s to 2010s, including IRCA, California's Proposition 187, NAFTA, and IIRIRA in 1996. Goodman then explores how 9/11 fundamentally changed perceptions of national security and threats of outsiders, connecting homeland security to incarceration. For students, this chapter would be a helpful synthesis of immigration and deportation policy since the 1980s. Goodman also discusses the increase in migration from Central America, accompanied by the United States’ funding of Mexico's enforcement of its southern border.The Deportation Machine ends with the context of the first Trump administration. As we grapple with the reality of a second Trump administration, understanding the racist, violent history of US deportation policy has become even more important. As Goodman stresses, however, this goes beyond individual presidential administrations—it has been central to US history.