Racialized and Gendered Mass Deportation and the Crisis of Capitalism

Abstract

By the time President Obama leaves the Oval Office there will have been 3 million deportations from the United States during his eight years in office. This sum is 50 percent more than the total number of all deportations prior to 1997, and far more than any previous U.S. president. I argue in this essay that the confluence of four factors in recent years has created the conditions for mass deportation from the United States: (1) nearly all deportees are Latin American and Caribbean men; (2) the rise of a politics of fear in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; (3) the global financial crisis; and (4) the potential that mass deportation creates for corporate profit-making. I place this argument in the larger context of race and ethnicity in the capitalist world-system.