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  • National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy Since 1882 by Deirdre M. Moloney
  • Daniel Kanstroom
National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy Since 1882. By Deirdre M. Moloney (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. x plus 315 pp.).

Dierdre Moloney has written a wide-ranging, informative, well-documented corrective for anyone who might still think of recent US immigration history as any sort of simple or happy tale. While the book aims generally to examine the historical origins of many contemporary immigration polices, its main focus is on how exclusion and deportation laws and policies have, as Moloney puts it, “served as a [End Page 213] social filter.” What she means by this is that deportation in particular—much more than many historians and contemporary observers have realized—has long regulated US demography.

Considerable scholarly attention, across a wide range of disciplines, has recently begun to focus on this phenomenon, which has metastasized over the past two decades into an exceptionally radical and harsh social experiment. The government’s enforcement targets have not only been the undocumented, though millions of them have been removed through a wide variety of mechanisms. Many hundreds of thousands of non-citizens with legal immigration status have also been deported for an array of often quite minor criminal offenses, such as possession of drugs and petty larceny. Put bluntly, there has never before been an immigration enforcement system of the size, ferocity, and scope that has been built, ironically, in one of history’s most open and immigrant-friendly societies. The relative lack of critical and scholarly attention paid to this subject is itself a phenomenon worth pondering, given that deportation has developed into a huge, expensive, harsh, and rigid system the targets of which are almost exclusively people of color. Formal deportations alone have long approximated 400,000 per year; and many different, less formal mechanisms in the modern deportation regime have resulted in the forced removal of tens of millions of people.

Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars, one might well ask what we have accomplished, either as a backstop to ineffective border control or as a mechanism of crime control. In fact, researchers have concluded that the deportations of the undocumented have apparently not stemmed the tide of migration north in any meaningful way, compared to economic and broader demographic factors.1 Indeed, before the economic crash of 2008, the undocumented population had increased steadily each year from 2000–08, despite massive deportation enforcement. Of course, the increases might have been greater without such enforcement, but even this is debatable, as the same powerful forces that induce the undocumented to risk violence and death to come north, also impel them to do so after having been deported.2 Moreover, research by sociologists, particularly Rubén G. Rumbaut and Walter A. Ewing, has shown that deportation of “criminal aliens” has had little positive impact on crime rates and that immigrants are actually less likely than citizens to commit serious crimes.3

And what has the experiment wrought? Deportation has forcibly separated hundreds of thousands of families—an especially harsh fate for the U.S. citizen children or elderly parents left behind. Tens of thousands of these children have already seen their families split or experienced their own de facto deportation to countries that are as foreign to them as they would be to any other American children. The harm to a U.S. citizen child in these circumstances was well described as “palpable and long-lasting.” What explains or can justify the deportation of hundreds of thousands of green-card holders who have grown up, been fully acculturated, attended school, and raised families in the United States? Why do we separate them from their families and send them to places where they have few, if any, acquaintances, do not speak the language, and lack cultural references? Why do we permanently bar them from ever returning to the United States, even temporarily, to visit their parents, spouses, or children?4

These are subjects that are worthy of serious, sustained inquiry. Moloney offers a timely and helpful overview of much current scholarship and she suggests [End Page...

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