TY - JOUR
AU - Kang, S, Deborah
AB - 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 is best read not as a single narrative but as a set of studies, which examine the federal deportation power from at least three different perspectives—one domestic, the second international, and the third social. Hester’s study of the international dimensions of deportation is the most engaging and original component of the book and ought to inspire further explorations into the international system of deportation that emerged over the course of the last century. Although Hester’s accounts of the rise of the domestic deportation regime will be familiar to immigration scholars, her close reading of the case law and their records and briefs serve as an important reminder that the creation and expansion of the federal deportation power were never preordained but instead regularly challenged by immigrants, citizens, and members of the bench and bar. As a social history, Hester’s work underscores how deportation law was used to render putative insiders—including naturalized citizens, legal resident aliens, and undocumented immigrants—outsiders on the basis of their race, class, gender, and political beliefs. Readers should be advised that Deportation is not an easy read. Because the book is not organized around a single argument, the flow of the book suffers. At times, moreover, the prose can be stilted and unclear, rendering Hester’s complex legal points less accessible to the lay reader. For all that that, what Hester has accomplished here will be of much interest to graduate students and scholars of immigration law, policy, and international history. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Western History Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy. By Torrie Hester
JO - Western Historical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/whq/whx100
DA - 2017-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/deportation-the-origins-of-u-s-policy-by-torrie-hester-z2aGHG5txP
SP - 102
VL - 49
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -