Deportation

Legally understood as a civil procedure rather than criminal punishment, deportation—and the spatial-political banishment it entails—nonetheless has interacted with forms of law and social/territorial control since European colonization of the Americas. Proponents of deportation have seen it as a “second line” of defense against illegal immigration and the self-evident right of a sovereign polity to control its territory and population. Critics have seen it as an effort to create an amorphous mechanism of state control over labor markets and global populations: a means ...