Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism.
Bavery, Ashley Johnson
Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable
Labor, and Global Capitalism (New York: New York University Press 2015)
WITH A RECORD 400,000 deportations in 2012, United States President
Barack Obama earned the title, Deporter-in-Chief. Tanya Maria
Golash-Boza, however, argues that mass deportation cannot be credited to
one administration. Instead, she demonstrates that the process of border
policing has been "intimately tied to the worldwide movement of
people and goods" and has evolved as a natural product of
"global capitalism, neoliberalism, and racialized social
control." (ix) Golash-Boza grounds her analysis with the voices and
stories of the migrants themselves, helping demonstrate how Dominicans,
Jamaicans, Guatemalans, and Brazilians came to the United States and
became caught in a web of exploitation, policing, and incarceration that
stripped them of rights and access to the law. Deported demonstrates how
certain migrants became crucial cogs in a neoliberal machine established
to perpetuate individualist labour practices. Ultimately, the book
offers an excellent glimpse into the lives of a group who are important
to America's economy, yet face uncertain job prospects and the
daily threat of incarceration and deportation.
Golash-Boza's conclusions are based on 147 interviews of
deportees conducted from 2009 to 2010, giving the book a timely and
intimate examination of global migration. Migrants were interviewed in
their home nations of Jamaica, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and
Brazil, ensuring a transnational approach, and the book focuses on
several core themes. Golash-Boza examines how migrants entered the
United States and became Americanized, how many got entangled in drug
wars and consequently were caught by US Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) and police officers, were jailed, and sent to their
home nations. Her final chapters focus on how deportees fare in their
Latin American home nations, where many became stigmatized by their
deportations. But large numbers of deportees, she argues, have become
crucial components in an increasingly globalized economy. Many returned
migrants use the language and technical skills along with their cultural
acumen to work in call centres and American enterprises abroad. Thus,
migration and deportation provides informal and inexpensive training to
major global enterprises.
Golash-Boza's source base allows her to uncover the voices of
deportees, but it also creates constraints on the work. The sample of
147 interviews forces Golash-Boza to make generalizations about national
groups and migration patterns based on several individuals. Her reliance
on outside literature, statistical analysis, and census data, however,
helps mitigate this source issue. By focusing on particular
interviewees, she is able to breathe life into a field that has been
dominated by numbers and data, emphasizing the different needs between
migrants according to their class and national background. Her analysis
deftly demonstrates the difference between middle-class Dominican
refugees fleeing the end of Trujillo's regime and poorer migrants,
emphasizing that both groups made remittances crucial to the development
of the Dominican Republic's struggling economy. Her interviews also
uncover how border crossings worked, profiling Guatemalans who had to
approach all of Mexico as a border and Brazilians who faced a trek
across South and Central America before reaching their destination.
The key strength of Deported, however, is its ability to connect
literature on deportation to emerging scholarship on mass incarceration
and the United States War on Drugs. Golash-Boza's analysis reveals
that the federal spending allocated to anti-terrorism in the wake of 11
September allowed for increased policing in immigrant neighborhoods.
This portion of the book focuses on Dominican and Jamaican migrants,
groups that have the highest number of criminal deportees, most of whom
faced deportation after being charged with drug possession or sale.
Michele Alexander's New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), Angela Davis's Are
Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), and more
recently, Keyanga-Yamahtta Taylor's From #BlackLivesMatter to Black
Liberation (New York: Haymarket, 2016) emphasize how neoliberal policies
combined with racism to incarcerate disproportionate numbers of African
Americans. Golash-Boza completes this story, arguing that in urban
centres, police can rarely distinguish between Dominican and Jamaican
migrants, and African Americans, and tend to police their neighborhoods
with the same ferocity. While many migrants do get caught up in drug
trafficking and use, Deported emphasizes the importance of place in
determining how these migrants get charged with drug crimes.
Golash-Boza's interviews demonstrate that in many instances,
Jamaican and Dominican immigrants face deportation because they live in
close proximity to the places in which drugs are sold or are in a car
with a friend or acquaintance with drugs in their possession. Thus,
Golash-Boza demonstrates that mass deportation represents an
understudied yet crucial aspect of mass policing and incarceration.
While most of the interviewees in Golash-Boza's book are men,
she often mentions how women are left to fend for themselves when
husbands are incarcerated or deported. In Chapter 5, she introduces a
system of "gendered racial removal" in which men are more
likely to get caught and forced to leave their families behind. And
while Golash-Boza explains how this impoverishes many women and
children, she could do more to connect it explicitly with an
increasingly global neoliberal regime. Altha Cravey's Women and
Work in Mexico's Maquiladoras (New York: Rowman and Littlefield,
1998) demonstrates how women faced particular hardships as victims of a
post-NAFTA globalized labor system. Golash-Boza would benefit from an
incorporation of Cravey's work to offer a more consistent gendered
analysis of the United States' deportation regime.
But this issue presents more a suggestion for further research than
a criticism of Golash-Boza's work, which is necessarily guided by
the themes set forth by her 147 interviewees. Ultimately, Deported
provides a thoughtful and nuanced look at the effects of ICE raids,
policing and deportations on some of the United States' most
vulnerable inhabitants. These immigrants sustain a neoliberal system
that requires "docile workers willing to work for less than a
living wage." (19) Instead of joining unions or demanding benefits,
these undocumented workers keep their heads down and govern themselves,
sustaining a system that relies on cheap labour and derives its power
through the possibility of forced deportation.
ASHLEY JOHNSON BAVERY
Eastern Michigan University
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