O’Ryan came to the United States from Jamaica as a small child. He qualified for citizenship when he was eleven years old, but his mother did not seek out naturalization on his behalf. Instead, he applied on his own soon after he turned eighteen. His application for naturalization was delayed due to a technical issue with his fingerprints, and took five years to be processed. By the time the application was ready to be approved, it was too late: O’Ryan had been arrested on drug charges and no longer qualified for naturalization. Moreover, he faced deportation. O’Ryan grew up as a legal permanent resident (LPR) of the United States. He completed all of his education in this country and came of age feeling as if Brooklyn was where he belonged. A transgression of the law when he was in his early twenties, however, changed everything. O’Ryan’s drug conviction transformed him from an LPR into a criminal alien. In addition, O’Ryan lost the right to remain in the United States and was deported to Jamaica. Drawing from interviews with O’Ryan and other former LPRs who have been deported from the United States, this chapter considers the transformation of LPRs into criminal aliens, shedding light on the vulnerability and potential illegality of all noncitizens residing within U.S. borders. These stories render it evident that all noncitizens face marginalization because of their “deportability” (De Genova 2005). Whereas most scholarly writings on “illegality” and “deportability” focus on the marginalization faced by undocumented migrants (Abrego, Chapter 6; De Genova 2005; Gonzales 2011; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ruiz, Chapter 11; Parker 2001), the stories of these deported LPRs render it evident that all noncitizens are potentially deportable.

The implementation of restrictive immigration laws in 1997 in the United States has led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of legal permanent residents— denizens who had made the United States their home. Mass deportations of denizens have given renewed importance to territorial belonging and legal citizenship for theories of citizenship, a relatively neglected area of scholarship in this field. This article draws from interviews with 30 deported Jamaicans who were once legal permanent residents of the United States to argue that denizens often feel “like citizens” based on their family and community ties to the United States, yet that their allegiance and sense of belonging is primarily to their family and community—not to the state. In this sense, there is a disconnect between the law—which privileges legal citizenship—and the daily lives of denizens—in which they can experience a profound sense of belonging in their communities.

Deportations from the United States reached record highs in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2007-2009). At the peak of this wave of deportations, over 400,000 people were deported from the United States—as many in 1 year as in the entire decade of the 1980s. The majority of these deportees have U.S. citizen family members, nearly all of whom continue to live in the United States. Over 90% of these deportees are men, and nearly all are sent to Latin America, creating gendered and raced consequences for specific communities. This article draws from interviews with 27 people from California who experienced the deportation of a family member to provide insight into the effects of deportation on these families. This article builds on scholarship on the collateral consequences of incarceration to enhance our understanding of the collateral consequences of deportation. The findings reveal that family members face short, medium, and long-term consequences in the aftermath of a deportation and that many adolescents are forced to make an abrupt transition to adulthood when one or both of their parents is deported.

This article explores how race and color labels are used to describe people in an Afro-Peruvian community. This article is based on analyses of 88 interviews and 18 months of fieldwork in an African-descended community in Peru. The analyses of these data reveal that, if we consider race and color to be conceptually distinct, there is no "mulatto escape hatch," no social or cultural whitening, and no continuum of racial categories in the black Peruvian community under study. This article considers the implications of drawing a conceptual distinction between race and color for research on racial classifications in Latin America. © 2010 by Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc.

The number of people being removed from the USA on an annual basis is far higher than ever before. The increases in removals since the passage of the 1996 laws have had a disproportionate impact on Mexican and Central American male immigrants. Moreover, the changes made to the laws in 1996 were draconian insofar as they removed judicial discretion in certain removal cases, and the laws were applied retroactively. The raced and gendered disparities in immigration law enforcement are one more instance of institutionalized racism in the USA insofar as these laws primarily harm black and Latino families.

In the spring of 2014, President Obama’s administration reached a landmark of over 2 million deportations—more in under six years than the sum total of all deportations prior to 1997. Mass deportation has not affected all communities equally: the vast majority of deportees are Latin American and Caribbean men. Today, nearly 90 percent of deportees are men, and over 97 percent of deportees are Latin American or Caribbean. This article explores the global context under which mass deportation has occurred and draws parallels with mass incarceration. Whereas other scholars have characterized mass deportation as a tool of social or migration control, this article argues that mass deportation is best understood as a racialized and gendered tool of state repression implemented in a time of crisis. I argue that the confluence of four factors has created the conditions of possibility 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 attacks of September 11th; (3) the global financial crisis; and (4) the utility of deportees