Deportation

In Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy, Torrie Hester traces the rise of the nation’s deportation regime from 1882 to 1924. While scholars such as Daniel Kanstroom and Deirdre Moloney, among others, have supplied accounts of this history, Hester’s work departs from these studies by offering an in-depth examination of the early, yet seminal, years in deportation history. Through a legal, institutional, and social exploration of the nation’s first deportation laws, Hester “examines the power of deportation, the national and international policies created to administer this power, and the changing meaning of deportability—the status of being deportable” (p. 1). The first three chapters outline the architecture of the federal deportation power: the first chapter reviews the federal statutes and Supreme Court cases that established the federal power to deport; the second chapter offers a fascinating account of how comity, or the lack thereof, informed the deportation of U.S. nationals from countries abroad; and the third chapter, returning to the domestic scene, describes how the federal courts began to assign different sets of rights to citizens, immigrants, and unauthorized immigrants. In the final three chapters, Hester traces the expansion of the federal deportation power from a form of border control that bore resemblances to the federal exclusion power to a method of post-entry policing that enabled the removal of unwanted immigrants and even citizens from within the nation’s borders. The deportation of alleged prostitutes as described in Chapter 4, the application of the deportation power to suspected anarchists during the Red Scare as discussed in Chapter 5, and the race- and class-based deployments of the “likely to become a public charge” clause of the federal immigration statute, the subject of Chapter 6, all rendered deportation a possibility long after an immigrant’s entry into the United States.

Deportation · Immigration · Immigration law · Political science · Power (physics) · Sociology · Statute · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies