Deportation
| Author | Jeffrey Wilson |
| Pages | 951-954 |
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Deportation, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, is "the formal removal of an alien from the United States when the alien has been found removable for violating immigration laws." Throughout the history of the United States individuals have been deported for such reasons as committing subversive acts against the government, fraudulently obtaining legal residency, and having a criminal record. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, for example, a number of immigrants to the United States were deported when it was determined that they had been prison guards in Nazi concentration camps during the 1930s and 1940s. Sometimes these individuals had been living quietly in the United States for nearly half a century.
Until nearly the end of the twentieth century, deportation was considered separate from exclusion, the act of denying an alien entry into the United States With the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996, deportation and exclusion procedures were consolidated, effective April 1, 1997.
The first deportation law in the United States was the Alien Act of 1798. Under this law, the president could deport any alien who was deemed dangerous. (A Naturalization Act was also passed that raised from five to 14 years the length of time an immigrant had to reside in the United States before being eligible for naturalization.) These measures were the result of growing hostility between the United States and France; with the accession to power of Napoleon Bonaparte, tensions eased dramatically, and no one was ever deported under the Alien Act.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed to limit the number of Chinese immigrants into the United States, but it was not a deportation law. During the first decades of the twentieth century, however, a number of potentially subversive aliens were deported, particularly in light of the proliferation of anarchists and the spread of socialism. Events such as World War I and the 1918 Bolshevik revolution in Russia helped shape opinions in the United States, and immigration was viewed less and less favorably.
In the 1920s the issue was not so much deporting aliens as keeping them out; quota systems limited the number of immigrants to the United States. After World War II, the Cold War and a growing fear of
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Communist infiltration into the U.S. government resulted in more deportations for several years.
In the 1980s and 1990s an increasing number of illegal immigrants from South and Central America, Haiti, and Cuba tried to enter the United States. Most deportation cases today, in fact, are illegal immigration cases.
In general, a person who is a lawful permanent resident (LPR) need not fear deportation, unless it can be proven that he or she entered the United States fraudulently or committed a serious crime (ex-Nazi prison guards, for example). One of the more familiar ways for ordinary people to remain in the United States by fraud is to marry a U.S. citizen. When someone who is about to be sent back to his or her country (because a visa has expired, for example) suddenly gets married, INS requires that both spouses be questioned. The typical movie depiction of this is of a desperate alien who loves the U.S. and is able to stay after finding a kindhearted and selfless person who agrees to a fake marriage. In real life these marriages are not always based on such altruistic motives.
The first step in deporting an alien is to...
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