Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism by Tanya Maria Golash-Boza (review)

With a record 400,000 deportations in 2012, United States President Barack Obama earned the title, Deporter-in-Chief. Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, however, argues that mass deportation cannot be credited to one administration. Instead, she demonstrates that the process of border policing has been "intimately tied to the worldwide movement of people and goods" and has evolved as a natural product of "global capitalism, neoliberalism, and racialized social control." (ix) Golash-Boza grounds her analysis with the voices and stories of the migrants themselves, helping demonstrate how Dominicans, Jamaicans, Guatemalans, and Brazilians came to the United States and became caught in a web of exploitation, policing, and incarceration that stripped them of rights and access to the law. Deported demonstrates how certain migrants became crucial cogs in a neoliberal machine established to perpetuate individualist labour practices. Ultimately, the book offers an excellent glimpse into the lives of a group who are important to America's economy, yet face uncertain job prospects and the daily threat of incarceration and deportation.

Golash-Boza's conclusions are based on 147 interviews of deportees conducted from 2009 to 2010, giving the book a timely and intimate examination of global migration. Migrants were interviewed in their home nations of Jamaica, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil, ensuring a transnational approach, and the book focuses on several core themes. Golash-Boza examines how migrants entered the United States and became Americanized, how many got entangled in drug wars and consequently were caught by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) and police officers, were jailed, and sent to their home nations. Her final chapters focus on how deportees fare in their Latin American home nations, where many became stigmatized by their deportations. But large numbers of deportees, she argues, have become crucial components in an increasingly globalized economy. Many returned migrants use the language and technical skills along with their cultural acumen to work in call centres and American enterprises abroad. Thus, migration and deportation provides informal and inexpensive training to major global enterprises.

Golash-Boza's source base allows her to uncover the voices of deportees, but it also creates constraints on the work. The sample of 147 interviews forces Golash-Boza to make generalizations about national groups and migration patterns based on several individuals. Her reliance on outside literature, statistical analysis, and census data, however, helps mitigate this source issue. By focusing on particular interviewees, she is able to breathe life into a field that has been dominated by numbers and data, emphasizing the different needs between migrants according to their class and national background. Her analysis deftly demonstrates the difference between middle-class Dominican refugees fleeing the end of Trujillo's regime and poorer migrants, emphasizing that both groups made remittances crucial to the development of the Dominican Republic's struggling economy. Her interviews also uncover how border crossings worked, profiling Guatemalans who had to approach all of Mexico as a border and Brazilians who faced a trek across South and Central America before reaching their destination.

The key strength of Deported, however, is its ability to connect literature on deportation to emerging scholarship on mass incarceration and the United States War on Drugs. Golash-Boza's analysis reveals that the federal spending allocated to anti-terrorism in the wake of 11 September allowed for increased policing in immigrant neighborhoods. This portion of the book focuses on Dominican and Jamaican migrants, groups that have the highest number of criminal deportees, most of whom faced deportation after being charged with drug possession or sale. Michele Alexander's New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), and more recently, Keyanga-Yamahtta Taylor's From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (New York: Haymarket, 2016) emphasize how neoliberal policies combined with racism to incarcerate disproportionate numbers of African Americans. Golash-Boza completes this story, arguing that in urban...