U.S. Deportation Policy, Family Separation, and Circular Migration

Hagan, Jacqueline; Eschbach, Karl; Rodríguez, Néstor

doi:10.1111/j.1747-7379.2007.00114.x

Cited by 197 publications

(186 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(32 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

170

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Hagan et al (2008) found that, in El Salvador, 95 per cent of deportees are men, three quarters were undocumented in the United States, nearly 79 per cent have family members in the United States, and their median stay in the United States had been 8 years. The study by Headley et al (2005) of Jamaican criminal deportees revealed that 28 per cent had arrived in the United States before age 16, 98.5 per cent were men, and the average time in the United States had been 12 years.…”

Section: Twenty-first Century Deportations: Gendered Racial Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article reviews how US deportations ballooned between 1997 and 2012, and underscores how these deportations disproportionately targeted Latino working class men. 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 begin by examining the mechanisms of the new deportation regime, showing how it functions, and then examine the legislation and administrative decisions that make it possible. Next, we show the concentration of deportations by nation and gender. Finally, we discuss the causes of this gendered racial removal program, which include the male joblessness crisis since the Great Recession, the War on Terror, and the continued criminalization of Black and Latino men by police authorities. This figure amounts to more than twice the sum total of every deportation before 1997 (1.9 million people). Nearly all of these recent deportees have been Latino men, creating a crisis in Latino families and communities. We suggest this constitutes a gendered racial removal program, and argue that changes in immigration law, the War on Terror, the law enforcement racial profiling and criminalization of Latino men, and the male joblessness crisis in the United States have produced this deportation crisis. 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. 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 ...

show abstract

Section: Twenty-first Century Deportations: Gendered Racial Removalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Deportation can occur at any time, from hours after arrival to many years later (Peutz 2006;Kanstroom 2007;Hagan, Eschbach and Rodriguez 2008). If the person being deported has close family in the deporting country, especially if he or she is responsible for those left behind such as children, the impulse to return is very strong.…”

Section: Transnational and Local Tiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Scholars such as those just mentioned have interviewed people deported from the USA, who have families there to whom they are determined to return. Hagan, Eschbach, and Rodriguez (2008) note that whether the person deported is supporting family in the country of origin or the deporting country, deportation means their families are left without support. There is much less work done on those families in Europe who have been separated by deportation, but similar concerns and questions are raised.…”

Section: Transnational and Local Tiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Scholars working on those deported to Cameroon (Alpes 2012), Cape Verde (Drotbohm 2011), the Dominican Republic (Brotherton andBarrios 2011), El Salvador (Hagen, Eschbach, andRodriguez 2008;Zilberg 2011), Somaliland (Peutz 2006), and Sri Lanka (Collyer 2012), as well as Afghanistan, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sierra Leone,Togo,and Vietnam,6 have found that the majority of those who are deported want to, will attempt to, and often do leave again. Frequently, their stay or sojourn in the countries to which they are deported represents a temporary return or break before a new phase in the migration cycle (Peutz 2006;Hagen, Eschbach, and Rodriguez 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

What happens post-deportation? The experience of deported Afghans

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Deportation, understood as the physical removal of someone against their will from the territory of one state to that of another, has moved to the forefront of academic and policy agendas. Although there is a growing literature on legislation and policy, there is very little in-depth data on what happens post-deportation. In this article, we examine possible post-deportation outcomes. We argue that, whatever reasons existed for people to migrate in the first place, deportation adds to these and creates at least three additional reasons that make adjustment, integration, or reintegration difficult, if not impossible. These include the impossibility of repaying debts incurred by migration, the existence of transnational and local ties, the shame of failure, and the perceptions of 'contamination'. We draw on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data gathered in Europe and Afghanistan to argue that many deported Afghans attempt and succeed in re-migrating.

show abstract

“…Their liminality is revealed through the spaces that they occupycamps on the outskirts of urban communities, a soccer field that even the border patrol treated as part neither of the United States nor of Mexico. Deciding to Be Legal (Hagan 1994) recounts the impact of the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act (IRCA) on a Mayan community living in Houston. Hagan found that, over the course of this program, participants were able to challenge initially restrictive documentation requirements such that, by the program's end, many were able to "decide" to legalize, regardless of whether they officially met eligibility requirements.…”

Section: Immigrant Communities and Their Homelandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rights of Noncitizens in the United States

Coutin

2011

Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Over the past three decades, sociolegal scholarship on the rights of noncitizens in the United States has sought to explain rights and exclusions while incorporating new theory regarding racialization, biopolitics, neoliberalism, risk, and states of exception. Early work in this period distinguished between legal and illegal immigration, with a focus on assimilation, ethnicity, and new ethnic enclaves in the case of the former, and an examination of the relationship between membership and movement in the case of the latter. Large-scale restructurings of the immigration enforcement regime have made the distinction between citizens and noncitizens more important than before. Thus, scholars have coined such terms as "crimmigration" to describe the unprecedented convergence of criminal and immigration law, "rescaling" to refer to shifts from national to local enforcement efforts, and "securitization" to denote the infusion of antiterrorist measures within immigration policymaking. 289

show abstract

U.S. Deportation Policy, Family Separation, and Circular Migration

Cited by 197 publications

References 22 publications

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

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

What happens post-deportation? The experience of deported Afghans

The Rights of Noncitizens in the United States

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About