Deportation. Torrie Hester
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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Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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ISBN 978-0-8122-4916-3
Contents
Chapter 1. Creating U.S. Deportation Policy
Chapter 2. The International Regime
Chapter 3. Deportation and Citizenship Status
Chapter 4. From Protection to Punishment
Chapter 5. The Limits of Deportation Power
Chapter 6. From Racial to Economic Grounds
Abbreviations
| AR-CGI | U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894–1924). |
| CAN | Immigration Branch, RG 76, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. |
| CCF-AZ | Criminal Case Files, 1869–1911, Arizona Territorial Court, Third Judicial District, Records of the District Courts of the United States, RG 21, National Archives, Pacific Region, Laguna Niguel, Calif. |
| CCF-CA | Criminal Case Files, 1907–1929, Southern District of California, Southern Division (Los Angeles), Records of the District Courts of the United States, RG 21, National Archives, Pacific Region, Laguna Niguel, Calif. |
| ChEx-AZ | Chinese Exclusion Case Files, 1897–1911, Arizona Territorial Court, Fourteenth Judicial District, Records of the District Courts of the United States, RG 21, National Archives, Pacific Region, Laguna Niguel, Calif. |
| DF | Central Decimal File Subjects 1910–1949, Central Files 1910–January 1963, U.S. Department of State Records, RG 59, National Archives, College Park, Md. |
| DS | Diplomatic Correspondence, Central Files of the Department of State, 1778–1963, RG 59, National Archives, College Park, Md. |
| FRUS | U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1886–1924). |
| FSP | Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, State Department and Foreign Affairs Records, RG 84, National Archives, College Park, Md. |
| ILR | U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Immigration Laws and Rules (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1907–1924). |
| INS | Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85, National Archives, Washington, D.C. |
| USC-AZ | U.S. Commissioners Dockets and Minutes, 1891–1912, Arizona Territorial Court, Third Judicial District, Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21, National Archives, Pacific Region, Laguna Niguel, Calif. |
| USSCRB | U.S. Supreme Court Records & Briefs on Microfiche (Bethesda, Md.: Congressional Information Service, 1984–present). |
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.1 Their efforts made deportation into an internationally recognized form of removal, which was unique in law, scope, motivation, and significance. The act of deporting individuals thereafter became one of the most far-reaching powers exercised by the United States government. Between 1892, when the U.S. government first started to establish its federal deportation policy, and 2015, the United States deported more than fifty million immigrants, almost 95 percent of them since 1970.2
This book examines the power of deportation, the national and international policies created to administer this power, and the changing meaning of deportability—the status of being deportable—during the first, formative decades of the deportation regime.3
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