Torrie Hester - Deportation: the origins of US policy

DEPORTATION

DEPORTATION

THE ORIGINS OF U.S. POLICY

TORRIE HESTER

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN 978-0-8122-4916-3

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, U.S. officials created a national deportation policy. They were not alone in this endeavor. In the same period, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Britain, and Germany, among others, also either revised existing immigrant removal policies or developed new ones.

This book examines the power of deportation, the national and international policies created to administer this power, and the changing meaning of deportabilitythe status of being deportableduring the first, formative decades of the deportation regime.

Before 1882, the U.S. government had never formally deported anyone. That year, in the first of a series of laws, Congress created the power to deport Chinese workers. By 1888, policy makers had enhanced their power to deport all immigrants, and, over the next thirty years, the government expanded restrictions so that, by 1917, deportation provisions variously targeted Chinese workers, anarchists, suspected prostitutes, public charges, and contract laborers, to mention only a few of the categories. Immigration agents carrying out new federal policy deported several hundred or, at the most, a few thousand people each year. They deported fewer people in the first forty years of carrying out deportations than immigration authorities would in any single year after 1970.

In some ways, then, this book covers a time when immigration authorities administered deportation policy quite differently than they would a century later. Nevertheless, the grounds for deportation, the enforcement strategies, the negotiations behind deportations, and the defenses immigrants employed in deportation proceedings all reveal a great deal about the history of the period. Moreover, these years are critical to understanding the explosion of deportations since the 1970s because, between 1882 and 1924, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Bureau of Immigration pieced together the policy and legal regime in which all deportations from the United States have occurred ever since.

In the years before the rise of the U.S. deportation regime, governments had long removed people from their communities. In North America, various authorities expelled individuals and entire groups of people. After Mexican independence in 1823, for instance, the new Mexican government expelled Spanish-born residents. Seventy years earlier, British colonial authorities expelled a group of French settlersthe Acadiansfrom Nova Scotia and sent them to Louisiana. The earliest colonists in Virginia and Massachusetts Bay expelled religious outsiders and criminals. Indeed, expulsion from the colonies that would become the United States is as old as European settlement.

During the colonial period, removals often occurred on a case-by-case basis, driven mostly by locally defined economic and religious motivations. European and Euro-American communities warned out or expelled individuals they thought were unable to support themselves with little to no regard for the nationalities of the poor. Colonists could also be forced out of settlements for practicing the wrong religion. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, membership in the local community was what mattered for receiving assistance from the community or for simply being allowed to stay once poor or deemed disruptive to mores. Some colonies tried sending expelled criminals or poor immigrants back to England, but that was generally too expensive and inefficient. Consequently, expulsion was not a widespread practice in the colonial period, but when it occurred, people were ousted from the community with little concern for where they went. Though it was very different from the federal deportation power developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there is a long history of sporadically expelling men and women deemed undesirable or foreign.

Through much of the nineteenth century, the federal government possessed but did not use a limited formal power to remove immigrants; instead some states operated immigrant removal policies. In the Alien Friends and Alien Enemies Acts of 1798, Congress had given the president a restricted power, based on executive order with judicial enforcement, to expel foreigners from the United States. Some Republicans, including Thomas Jefferson, maintained that this expulsion policy was patently unconstitutional; they thought it represented an attempt by the opposing political party, the Federalists, to remove its political enemies from the country.