Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism
| Author | Raymond Michalowski |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474517709288 |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Punishment & Society
2019, Vol. 21(1) 125–137
! The Author(s) 2017
Book reviews
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474517709288
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Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism,
New York University Press: New York, 2015; 320 pp. (including index): 978-1479843978, $23
(pbk), $75 (cloth)
In August 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the
United States with a full-throated condemnation of Latinos and Latinas through-
out the Western hemisphere:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . They’re sending
people that have lots of problems . . . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing
crime. They’re rapists . . . It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all
over South and Latin America (Trump, 2015).
A year-and-a-half later, speaking in Nogales, Arizona, Jeff Sessions, Attorney
General
under
now-President
Donald
Trump
doubled-down
on
the
Administration’s fear mongering, claiming that southern border crosses are respon-
sible for:
Criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into warzones, that rape and kill
innocent citizens and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across
our borders . . . Depravity and violence are their calling cards, including brutal
machete attacks and beheadings. It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first
take our stand against this filth (Sessions, 2017; Townes, 2017).
Sessions not only fabricated a dystopian fantasy of ‘‘depravity’’ in the US–Mexico
borderlands, but also willful ignorance in failing to admit that the rise of criminal
Mexican smuggling cartels is the result, not the cause, of the militarization of the
US–Mexico border.
Into this morass of hysterical anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy absurdities
comes a book that offers a sane, evidence-based understanding of just who are
the immigrants targeted by the US deportation regime.
Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism offers a
thickly descriptive study based on interviews with a total of 147 deportees from
Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Jamaica. It is a portrait that
undermines currently popular nativist claims that mass deportations will protect
real (i.e. white)...
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