How Laws Affect Lives: Deportation and Denaturalization with a Human Face

Nearly one hundred years later, the famed anarchist Emma Goldman remains perhaps America’s most famous deportee. Yet two things needed to happen before Goldman’s expulsion from the United States. First, she had to be stripped of her U.S. citizenship, which she had obtained upon her marriage to a naturalized American citizen. Only after she had been denaturalized could deportation proceedings begin. After a ten-year process, Goldman was deported as an “alien radical” in 1919.

Goldman makes an appearance in both Patrick Weil’s The Sovereign Citizen, which deals with denaturalization (that is, loss of citizenship), and Deirdre M. Moloney’s National Insecurities, which addresses exclusion and deportation, mainly in the period between 1882 and 1924. Yet rather than taking center stage, Goldman shares the spotlight with dozens of ordinary immigrants in similarly precarious situations, confronted with the possibility of losing their citizenship or facing removal from the United States. These are people who are usually represented as mere statistics in the story of immigration and naturalization.

Denaturalization and deportation served a similar purpose: shaping the composition of the U.S. population. (Indeed, denaturalization was usually the precursor to deportation.) Both were used to control the morality of the citizenry and to rid the body politic of foreign-born “undesirables”—including, but not limited to, convicts, paupers, prostitutes, diseased persons, polygamists, people who held radical or supposedly dangerous beliefs, and those who were racially unwelcome, like Asians. In addition, both practices chilled the actions and speech of immigrants, who could be deported or denaturalized for things they did even after entering the country or becoming a citizen. In essence, the United States was divided into two classes of residents: the native-born, safe in their status, and the foreign-born, who could never feel absolutely secure.

Other books give a more thorough account of U.S. deportation policy, such as Daniel Kanstroom’s Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (2007), a legal history that traces deportation legislation from the colonial era to the present. Moloney, in contrast, leaves out entire swaths of immigration history; she barely addresses Chinese exclusion, for instance. But what Moloney sacrifices in terms of breadth, she more than makes up for in depth. She does a masterful job of integrating social history with public policy history to highlight the human and emotional side of deportation. Using largely untapped administrative INS files, Moloney finally gives immigrants a voice. Looking beyond the text of statutes, she interrogates how immigration laws were implemented on the ground and who they really targeted.

Specifically, Moloney argues that various immigration provisions, which appeared neutral on their face, served as proxies to exclude or deport people based on race, gender, religion, or other factors. Her best-developed contribution involves her analysis of gender, an analytical category largely overlooked by Kanstroom and by Mae M. Ngai’s Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004). “Even when written as gender neutral,” Moloney contends, “immigration laws and policies concerning sexual morality, economic independence, and public health had significantly divergent effects on men and women” (p. 33). In this sense, her book builds on works like Eithne Luibhéid’s Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality on the Border (2002).

In particular, the provision that banned immigrants “likely to become a public charge” (LPC), which originated in English poor laws and supposedly targeted paupers, actually served to regulate nonmarital sexuality. The people most likely to fall under the LPC provision were women who arrived unaccompanied by a husband or father. Even when they had marketable skills, these women were viewed as suspect and more likely to turn to prostitution. In other words, when immigrant women did not conform to middle-class social norms—meaning relation to a...