The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants is an impressive piece of documentation, though it is less compelling as a work of scholarship. Preoccupied with debunking any benign understanding of America as a nation of immigrants, Adam Goodman presents one and only one perspective: that any accurate appraisal of US immigration policy from the end of the nineteenth century to the present must take into account not merely the millions who arrived and then settled here but also the millions who were deported.
As Goodman elaborates, that appraisal should include not merely the 8,350,000 individuals formally deported since 1892, but also the 48,360,000 whom the federal government reports were informally deported through “voluntary departure” (1). As he explains, “Similar to prosecutors in the criminal justice system relying on plea bargains, immigration authorities have depended on voluntary departure, making it seem like the best of all the bad options...
