Deportation

History of Deportation

The history of deportations interrelates with conditions that cause xenophobia: periods of financial insecurity, war, and mass immigration. The first legal grounds for deportation came through passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In preparation for a possible war with France, the United States passed An Act Concerning Aliens, granting authority to the president to order the deportation of any alien deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The president was also granted the power to remove aliens who had been imprisoned. Another related law passed in the same year was An Act Respecting Alien Enemies. This act gave the president the power to detain or deport aliens if their country of citizenship was at war with the United States. Whereas three of the acts passed in this series were repealed or allowed to expire, the Alien Enemies Act is still enforced in a modified form today.

Early Immigration Laws

Faced with the growing diversity of immigrants from non-European countries, the United States instituted a series of laws, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Acts of 1891, 1903, 1907, and 1917. These laws restricted immigration and barred Chinese and many Asian migrants. These laws expanded the reasons for the apprehension and deportation of undocumented immigrants, enemies of the state, and criminal aliens. There were relatively few formal removals in the early period of the laws (between 2,000 and 5,000 annually), and voluntary departures were not tracked. Following the Immigration Act of 1903, in which the Bureau of Immigration was moved to the Department of Commerce and Labor, the number of formal removals doubled to nearly 10,000 deportations. By 1910 there were 27,000 removals, climbing to a peak of 37,000 in 1914. Deportations dropped dramatically during World War I to fewer than 10,000 annually by the end of the war. Yet, during this period, demands in the [Page 224]United States required the importation of undocumented laborers from Mexico as many U.S. workers had gone to Europe to fight in the war. By 1924, labor demands had decreased and deportations nearly reached pre-war levels.

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