These two excellent first books cast well-trodden areas of immigration history in new light. Although they take different pathways to issues of structure and power, both generate important insights into related questions about the history of deportation and removal of foreign-born residents from and by the United States.
In The Deportation Machine, Goodman deploys a social and cultural approach to placing the development of crucial but often uninterrogated mechanics of deportation in historical context. Goodman argues for the reciprocal influences of immigration patterns, immigrant-rights advocacy, and mass-mediated surges of nativism on the removal practices perpetrated by the immigration service (first, the Immigration and Naturalization Service [ins]; after 2001, the Department of Homeland Security [dhs]). He follows the trajectory of the “deportation machine” from the late nineteenth-century advent of Asian Exclusion into the present day. Although many historical accounts discuss deportation with regard to foreign-born communities,...