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Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism (New York: New York University Press 2015)
With a record 400,000 deportations in 2012, United States President Barack Obama earned the title, Deporter-inChief. Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, however, argues that mass deportation cannot be credited to one administration. Instead, she demonstrates that the process of border policing has been "intimately tied to the worldwide movement of people and goods" and has evolved as a natural product of "global capitalism, neoliberalism, and racialized social control." (ix) Golash-Boza grounds her analysis with the voices and stories of the migrants themselves, helping demonstrate how Dominicans, Jamaicans, Guatemalans, and Brazilians came to the United States and became caught in a web of exploitation, policing, and incarceration that stripped them of rights and access to the law. Deported demonstrates how certain migrants became crucial cogs in a neoliberal machine established to perpetuate individualist labour practices. Ultimately, the book offers an excellent glimpse into the lives of a group who are important to America's economy, yet face uncertain job prospects and the daily threat of incarceration and deportation.
Golash-Boza's conclusions are based on 147 interviews of deportees conducted from 2009 to 2010, giving the book a timely and intimate examination of global migration. Migrants were interviewed in their home nations of Jamaica, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil, ensuring a transnational approach, and the book focuses on several core themes. Golash-Boza examines how migrants entered the United States and became Americanized, how many got entangled in drug wars...