Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

Latino immigrant men and the deportation crisis: A gendered racial removal program

“…In this article, we review how US deportations ballooned between 1997 and 2012, and we underscore how these deportations disproportionately targeted Latino working class men. Building on Mae Ngai's (2004) concept of racial removal, we refer to this recent mass deportation as a gendered racial removal program. We explain the legal and administrative mechanisms supporting this process, and we indicate how structural factors in the economy and the politics of race, criminalization and immigration have prompted these changes.…”

“…The Border Patrol's focus on Mexicans has a long historical legacy (Ngai, 2004;Hernandez, 2010). During the Great Depression, the United States repatriated as many as half a million people of Mexican origin -some of them US-born, US citizens -to Mexico.…”

“…This massive project of coercion required the participation of not only US federal agents, but also local sheriffs, schools, social workers and the Mexican consulates (Hoffman, 1974;Balderrama, 1982). By 1940, the Mexican population in the United States had declined to about half of its size in 1930 (Gonzalez, 1983), resulting from what historian Mae Ngai (2004) has called a "racial removal program." Racism against Latinos persists today; Figure 4 illustrates the enduring emphasis, as well as the emphasis on Caribbean nationals.…”

“…Building on Mae Ngai's (2004) concept of racial removal, we describe this recent mass deportation as a gendered racial removal program. Drawing from secondary sources, surveys conducted in Mexico, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security published statistics, and interviews with deportees conducted by the first author in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Jamaica, we argue that: (1) deportations have taken on a new course in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the wake of the global economic crisis -involving a shift towards interior enforcement; (2) deportation has become a gendered and racial removal project of the state; and (3) deportations will have lasting consequences with gendered and raced effects here in the United States.…”

“…We conclude by offering some questions, analyses and implications for both research and action. Many scholars working from diverse disciplines have analyzed the soaring number of deportations (Coutin, 2000;Hing, 2003;Ngai, 2004;Hernandez, 2008;Brotherton and Barrios, 2011; Golash-Boza, 2012;Kanstroom, 2012;King et al, 2012;Kretsedemas, 2012), and the increase in police/Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cooperation (Zilberg, 2004;Stumpf, 2006;Donato and Armenta, 2011;Armenta, 2012;Coleman, 2012), yet these studies have not explicitly considered the intersectionality of gender, class and race in these removals. In this article, we review how US deportations ballooned between 1997 and 2012, and we underscore how these deportations disproportionately targeted Latino working class men.…”