In my recent book, The Deportation Express: A History of America through Forced Removal, I trace the historical roots and spatial routes of systemic denial, arrest, and removal from the United States. A century ago, the US laid the foundations of the largest deportation system that the world has ever known. Between 1890 and the present, it has forcibly removed more than 56 million people.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the United States developed new means for sifting through migrant populations who—similar to today—left homelands wracked by the conditions of capitalism or torn by the geopolitics of imperial war. The US was a driving force in expanding imperial markets and war, and was one of the largest beneficiaries of both. Indeed, as a settler-nation at the nexus of the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds, the United States was culminating its shift from the relative periphery of the global economy to its core. And yet when people from across the planet sought to live and work in the United States—the profits extracted from their low wage labor filled American coffers—American nativists fretted about the migrants’ eugenic and political qualities, developing new laws, institutions, and networks to contain and expel people they considered undesirable.
Between 1914 and the Second World War, the US Immigration Bureau and the Department of Labor sent reconfigured prison railroad cars on constant circuits around the nation. These Deportation Specials gathered so-called “undesirable aliens”—disdained and arrested for their poverty, political radicalism, criminal conviction, physical disability, or insanity, perceptions compounded by maligned national and ethnoracial difference. They then conveyed them to ports and borders for exile overseas. Previous deportation procedures had been locally-driven, violent, expensive, and relatively ad hoc. But the use of the railroad—perhaps the exemplary technology of industrial modernity—sublimated racial violence into spatial control and facilitated the mass expulsion of the undesirable.
American deportation trains were the culmination of a century’s worth of immigration law, materialized in the steel of their rail networks and force of their engines, expanded in complex links of public administrative bureaucracies and private corporate power. They created a complex network that conjoined a host of security-oriented laws, agencies, and techniques, and enabled the will and desire for an expansive understanding of national protection. Aided by the telegraph, the emerging, nationally coordinated rail-based deportation network connected the nation’s prisons, hospitals, workhouses, mental institutions, and welfare offices. In so doing, it wove these previously-disconnected sites in the US carceral-welfare archipelago into an integrated infrastructure to cast out the unwanted.
