The United States is deporting more people than ever before – nearly 400,000 each year since 2006. Many deportees have close ties to the United States: in 2011, 100,000 deportees had U.S. citizen children. The vast majority of deportees are men of color. How do we explain this devastating policy shift? I argue that neoliberalism and, by extension, global capitalism, make the mass deportation of men of color possible in the current context. Mass deportation is a U.S. policy response designed to relocate surplus labor to the periphery and to keep labor in the United States compliant. The U.S. public accepts this policy response because it targets men of color – people perceived to be expendable in the current economy.

Tanya Golash-Boza is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of three books: 1) Due Process Denied (2012), which describes how and why non-citizens in the United States have been detained and deported for minor crimes, without regard for constitutional limits on disproportionate punishment; 2) Immigration Nation (2012), which provides a critical analysis of the impact that U.S. immigration policy has on human rights; and 3) Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru (2011), the first book in English to address what it means to be black in Peru. She has also published many articles in peer-reviewed journals on deportations, racial identity, human rights, U.S. Latinos/as and Latin America, in addition to essays and chapters in edited volumes and online venues. Her innovative scholarship was awarded the Distinguished Early Career Award from the Racial and Ethnic Minorities Studies Section of the American Sociological Association in 2010.

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