Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy by Torrie Hester (review)

Torrie Hester's book is an important addition to the substantial literature on American deportation policy. The scale and significance of deportation are unquestionable. As Hester points out at the beginning of the book, between 1892 and 2015, the United States deported over 50 million people, close to 95 percent of them after 1970 (p. 1). That enormous number understates the terrible impact of deportation in both the United States and elsewhere: families torn apart, communities sundered, businesses disrupted, and American social problems such as crime willfully shifted to other countries less able to cope with them.

Hester traces how the basic structure of deportation policy took shape. She begins in the late nineteenth century, showing how the U.S. Supreme Court exempted substantive deportation law from the purview of the U.S. Constitution. Because deportation was not seen for constitutional purposes as punishment for a crime, immigrants were unable to avail of the various protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution to criminal defendants. Hester then moves to explore how U.S. deportation policy developed two distinct tracks, one for Chinese immigrants that allowed for judicial challenges to deportation decisions and another for all other immigrants that vested administrative decisions with finality. Eventually, she shows how both tracks merged, so that it became increasingly difficult to challenge deportation decisions in court. This did not, of course, stop immigrants from seeking judicial review of deportation decisions, although they would increasingly do so on procedural, rather than substantive, grounds.

Hester also shows in detail how deportation law shifted from the aim of removing excludable immigrants (those who should never have been admitted in the first place but who were let in erroneously) to punishing immigrants for post-admission activities that the state frowned upon. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, deportation law increasingly became an instrument of domestic social policy. Invoking the fact of immigrants' non-citizenship, the state could remove immigrants from its territory when they engaged in behaviors ranging from crime to seeking public assistance to expressing politically undesirable views. This has been the focus of deportation law ever since. While deportation continues to function as an adjunct to exclusion, its main purpose is to punish immigrants for acts committed after (in many cases, long after) they have entered the United States. While citizens may be incarcerated, immigrants' incarceration is often followed by deportation to countries they might not even know.

Much of Hester's story is familiar in its broad outlines to scholars of immigration and citizenship law, although the details she provides are compelling. Her major contribution is in highlighting the international dimension of deportation law. The United States might be eager to get rid of immigrants, but how did it decide where to send them? What if immigrants preferred to be sent elsewhere? Hester highlights state-to-state negotiations over the repatriation of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also shows how the old system of transporting immigrants to the border gradually ceded to the practice of sending immigrants back to their countries of origin. Her account of the "Red Scare" deportations around 1920 is a particularly detailed account of deporting immigrants from the Russian empire back to the Soviet Union at a time when the United States and the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations.

Overall, Hester's book is a fine addition to the literature on American deportation policy. It historicizes one of the urgent problems of our time.