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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Good afternoon and welcome to the Center for comparative immigration studies. My name is David Fitzgerald.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: And together with our colleagues at the UCLA Center for the Study of international migration. We're delighted that you've joined us for our friday migration book seminar series.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Today's book is going to be talking about the deportation machine America's long history of expelling immigrants by Professor Adam Goodman. He is a professor

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Of history and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. We also have with us today. Professor Tobias Digby

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: professor of history at UCLA, who will be providing a comment, the events that is being recorded. If

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: You're not able to catch the entirety of today's event. You can watch it later on YouTube, you can find information about our upcoming speaker series from the websites of either of our centers one programming note is that we will be having

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Next Friday. Discussion of citizenship two point O dual nationality as a global asset. The author is Yossi hard pies with a comment by Rogers brew Baker.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: But today will be hearing from Adam Goodman for about 20 minutes or so giving a brief overview of the book, followed by a comment from Tobias Rigby

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Adam will have a few moments to respond and then we'll open it up to Q AMP. A at any time during the presentation today.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: You're welcome to ask your questions using the Q AMP a function at the bottom of the screen. And at the end of the hour will have a moderated discussion. So without further ado, please welcome Adam

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Adam Goodman: Well, thank you so much. It's really a pleasure to be here with you all, and I would like to thank the organizers at both UCSD and UCLA for the invitation.

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Adam Goodman: And thanks in advance. Toby for your comments. I'm really, really looking forward to the discussion and thanks to everyone for signing on I know these days even an extra minute or two.

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Adam Goodman: On Zoom was a big ask. So thanks for being here on a Friday.

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Adam Goodman: And for your interest in my book. I'm going to share my screen and brief slideshow for you all to see, as I

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Adam Goodman: Transition here.

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Adam Goodman: And I'm going to be speaking about some of the main contribution is the book. Now, the time is limited.

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Adam Goodman: But in the next 20 minutes or so I want to give you an overview. If you haven't had a chance to read the book yet of what I've discovered through the last decade of research and what I'm trying to do here in the deportation machine which is book that's really

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Adam Goodman: You know, been a labor of love. It's been a frustrating process at times trying to piece together this history, and I'd like to speak a little bit more about that and the ways in which this research may have been

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Adam Goodman: obfuscated by design by government officials and the different things that I did to try to piece together this longer story of forced coerced migration out of the United States and the hands of US officials at the federal, state, and local level.

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Adam Goodman: So just to give you a little bit of a sense of where this project came from, you know, I started on this again about a decade ago. And, you know,

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Adam Goodman: The Origins The products date back further than that it really a time that I spent living in the Rio Grande Valley and South Texas where I really came to see the ways that migration policies affected people's lives.

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Adam Goodman: How they shape the region, how they shaped both countries and I wanted to study that in more depth than when I got to graduate school.

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Adam Goodman: During the early years, the Obama administration, not the current administration, people were really talking about immigration policy.

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Adam Goodman: And I was inspired to learn more and part because of young undocumented people coming out across the country as undocumented and unafraid.

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Adam Goodman: And standing up to what you know they rightfully saw as inhumane immigration policies. So I became interested, on the one hand and looking at how state policies to change kind of the political bureaucratic history.

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Adam Goodman: Of immigration during the last century and a half, and then the flip side how people are organized and fought against what I came to think of as the deportation machine.

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Adam Goodman: So those two experiences and interest, combined with a third research discovery and that was that more than 57 million people.

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Adam Goodman: Have been deported from the United States, since the 1880s, it's more than any other country in the world.

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Adam Goodman: And erased serious questions about the United States as a nation of immigrants about the United States as a nation that has welcomed immigrants throughout its history.

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Adam Goodman: I know that a little bit more digging in number crunching and discovered that, in fact, during the last century.

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Adam Goodman: The United States has deported more people than it's allowed to stay in the country on a permanent basis, right, which again.

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Adam Goodman: made me wonder about this mythical reputation of the United States as a nation of immigrants and you know wanted

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Adam Goodman: To learn more about that and discover a little bit more about this. I think little known history and that the photo you see here of a Mexican family in the 1950s, who had recently.

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Adam Goodman: Recently been deported from South Texas as in some ways representative. I mean deportation is affected, men, women and children it's above all affected Mexicans and it's nine out of 10 times happened with little to no judicial involvement or oversight.

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Adam Goodman: The history of deportation is largely history of unilateral explosions through administrative means that we really don't know much about. So that's what set me down this path. And again, I want to share five main takeaways and contributions that I think the book makes

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Adam Goodman: First is that this is a long bipartisan history. I mean, immigration policy has become so politicized today. And perhaps you know more polarized than ever.

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Adam Goodman: Or at least in recent memory. During our lifetimes, most likely on partisan lines but you know I trace the history over the last

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Adam Goodman: century and a half Democrats and Republicans alike implementing punitive enforcement policies and the bureaucratic mechanisms turning along

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Adam Goodman: regardless of who's in power, you know the story I tell is in large part one of the bureaucratic comparatives that have propelled the machine over time.

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Adam Goodman: In addition to the capitalist and racist imperatives that have also shaped it.

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Adam Goodman: So you can see the Table of Contents here, which gives you a sense of the scope of the project starting late 19th century, I'm looking at the creation of the machine and the mechanisms of explosion.

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Adam Goodman: The targeting of Chinese labor migrants mostly as well as Southern and Eastern Europeans and then your Mexicans. For most of the 20th century, and more recently, your Central American refugees, asylum seekers.

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Adam Goodman: As well as South Asians Muslims and Arabs, but I'm interested in doing a number of things here. And certainly, one is engaging in discussions with historians, but also social scientists

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Adam Goodman: legal scholars journalists and others. And I think one of my key contributions comes in the way that I conceptualize deportation how I'm defining it and understanding it.

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Adam Goodman: And you can see here that there are three types of explosion that I trace and identify three mechanisms of expulsion formal deportations.

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Adam Goodman: Voluntary departures and self deportation campaigns. So this is an important piece of the project, but it's also one that some people are not familiar with.

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Adam Goodman: So let me just take a minute here to define these different types of mechanisms and explain a little bit about how the deportation machine works.

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Adam Goodman: And what I came to realize, you know, is that deportation without due process has largely been the American way.

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Adam Goodman: I mean, it's been in the news in the last few weeks is the Trump administration has tried to ratchet up expedited removals

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Adam Goodman: with little to no legal process, but I think that this is actually the story all along so formal deportations have historically been by order of an immigration judge

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Adam Goodman: Although that's become less the case in recent years and I imagine if you ask someone

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Adam Goodman: Who might not be as knowledgeable about the inner workings of the deportation machine. What does deportation look like in practice, you know, they might imagine there is

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Adam Goodman: A judge sitting in a courtroom and black robes and there's some kind of hearing kicking place where the merits of someone's case, you know, are weighed

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Adam Goodman: And then at the end, the official decides whether or not the person has to leave or is allowed to stay

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Adam Goodman: And the reality is that that you know just is not the case and 85 to 90% of deportations. They're happening through Voluntary departures and I'll tell you a little bit about those in just a second but formal deportations, they have carried with them harsher consequences.

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Adam Goodman: Sometimes people have to spend an indefinite period in detention months or even years they might not know when their cases will play out or how long it'll take

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Adam Goodman: And they also can carry with them 510 or 20 year bars on reentry, sometimes even lifetime.

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Adam Goodman: bars on re entering the United States. So they have been numerically relatively small by comparison to Voluntary departures. As you can see on this graph on the dotted lines represent formal deportations, and they really start spike after the 1996 immigration law.

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Adam Goodman: Opens up you know the funding to the immigration bureaucracy and certainly compounded with 911 and the ways that national security interests became intertwined here.

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Adam Goodman: But for most of us, history, there are actually other mechanisms that play, which we don't know much about which historians have overlooked and I've i don't i don't think people are really wrestled with or come to

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Adam Goodman: Come to terms with a punitive nature of what are euphemistically called Voluntary departures. Okay.

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Adam Goodman: They're nothing voluntary about these deportations, we can think of them as administrative removals and Voluntary departures happen.

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Adam Goodman: after someone has been apprehended. That's the first thing that I try to emphasize, you know, there's nothing voluntary about them again.

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Adam Goodman: They happen after someone has been apprehended by an immigration official and immigration official Ben pressures or coerces or convinces sometimes even tricks.

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Adam Goodman: Or forges the signature on a form, stating that you know the person agrees to leave the country. They're not going to fight their case. And this is how the deportation machine, you know, has worked for, you know, the vast majority of the last century and a half.

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Adam Goodman: Voluntary departures. I think, you know, have sped up deportations, they've kept things moving. They've minimize the cost of immigration bureaucracy.

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Adam Goodman: But there are only possible because formal deportations existed.

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Adam Goodman: Right. The mechanisms work together and I want to emphasize that. So immigration officials would threaten someone with an indefinite period in detention.

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Adam Goodman: Or they would threaten someone with a multi year lifetime ban on re entering the country in order to convince them to take voluntary departure right

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Adam Goodman: So this is more or less. And one of the crucial interventions. I'm making is that if we want to understand how the deportation machine works and what the history of deportation looks like.

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Adam Goodman: We need to understand how 48 of the 57 million deportations since the 1880s have happened. And that's through voluntary departure.

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Adam Goodman: The third mechanism is self deportation and some of you are probably familiar with us at, you know, really.

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Adam Goodman: I guess the term may have been coined in the 1990s, although the practice as I show him the book dates back to before the country's founding

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Adam Goodman: It also became a cornerstone of then presidential candidate Mitt Romney's campaign in 2012 which seems like, I don't know, two or three lifetimes ago at this point. But the idea here with self deportations, is that

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Adam Goodman: Ordinary citizens or local, state, and federal officials make people's lives so miserable.

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Adam Goodman: That they decide to pick up and leave without ever having come into contact with immigration official right so there is no apprehension that takes place with self deportation.

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Adam Goodman: Their fear campaigns that rely on the media and the propagation

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Adam Goodman: You know of fear and scare tactics by public officials something we're certainly familiar with during the last few years.

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Adam Goodman: But also there's local laws state laws that might make people's lives very difficult limit services and the availability of basic needs, you know, for people and

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Adam Goodman: Again, all in the hopes of pushing them out of the country, but also exerting control over the lives of the people who remain

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Adam Goodman: Okay, now most historians and most social scientists, for that matter, and journalists and government officials have focused on the first mechanism. The form of deportations.

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Adam Goodman: But I insist that things look a lot different. When we do have this broader, more expensive. And I think ultimately more accurate definition of exposure.

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Adam Goodman: While at the same time not conflating between the different types of expulsion, I want to say at the all part of the deportation machine.

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Adam Goodman: But there are differences between them and we should be mindful of that. So the second point is deportation without due process has long been the American way.

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Adam Goodman: The third thing that I, you know, really uncovering the book is that

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Adam Goodman: There's been disproportionate targeting of Mexican migrants and, you know, Mexicans in the United States, both

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Adam Goodman: Non citizens permanent residents and citizens in many cases this photo here that you see from the 1980s.

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Adam Goodman: Was a demonstration of protest after officials had deported. A 14 year old Mexican permanent resident from the United States and people in mobilized and this was not uncommon.

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Adam Goodman: When it's not uncommon for people to be targeted for removal, simply because how they looked, you know, racial profiling was rampant throughout the immigration bureaucracy, but you're one of the things that I showed in the book is that

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Adam Goodman: Oftentimes immigration historians have thought of prototypical illegal alien using the legal terminology here being a Chinese migrant in the late 19th century Southern and Eastern European migrants around the turn of the 20th century.

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Adam Goodman: And then after the 1924 Immigration Act, you know, the officials and authorities of the ins or of them. Immigration Service really turn their attention.

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Adam Goodman: Toward Mexicans, but I found these early case files from the immigration records that show that officials in the southwest were using voluntary departure as early as 1907 maybe even earlier than that.

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Adam Goodman: But the federal bureaucracy comes into being and the federal government gets control over immigration in the 1890s 1891

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Adam Goodman: And my guess is that they were using course of mechanisms, since the beginning, but the earliest documentation, I found was from 1907 1908

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Adam Goodman: And what I also found were some reports from immigration officials, you know, possible

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Adam Goodman: And what they said is that, you know, there are 10s of thousands of people you know who were deporting through this informal means

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Adam Goodman: Which led me to kind of the broader conclusion that we might need to rethink the chronology here as to when officials really came to

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Adam Goodman: Single out Mexicans and to disproportionately target them. We know that that increases over time. So the book documents, the history of the repatriation campaigns and the infamous Operation Wetback campaign.

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Adam Goodman: Of the 1930s and 1950s, right, and shows that more than controlling migration, perhaps, these were ways of expanding state power.

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Adam Goodman: Right officials with limited means an inability to deport people through formal deportation. They found other ways to go about doing that and to expand their power.

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Adam Goodman: And these were usually low level agents of the state low level agents of the state and kind of mid level mid level people in the bureaucracy, who exercise extraordinary power.

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Adam Goodman: over people's lives and over the making of immigration policy, there's been, you know, work by people like that became that's also shown this from the early 20th century.

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Adam Goodman: And you know, I think that we all know if we've been paying attention to in the last few months. Why am I be problematic to instill extraordinary power and a low level agent of the state and the same was certainly true with immigration.

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Adam Goodman: Now, what we see moving into the post 1965 period is that as many as nine out of every 10 apprehensions are of Mexicans.

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Adam Goodman: And I mean this is way out of proportion to the representation of the immigrant population or even undocumented immigrant population.

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Adam Goodman: And I think this has really a detrimental harmful effects, both on individuals as well as on you know the communities and the country as a whole. And let me explain why.

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Adam Goodman: So, you know, one of the things I learned through doing oral histories and archival research and Mexico and the United States.

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Adam Goodman: Where the ways that these immigration policies affected people's lives. And that's something I'm really interested in and uncovering here and focusing on

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Adam Goodman: In this book and you know through the number crunching I discovered that there's a crucial moment of change. I mean so much of the story I trace is one of continuity.

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Adam Goodman: But there are some important moments of change and one is in the late 1970s, and this is what I refer to as the dawn of the Age of mass expulsion.

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Adam Goodman: So by the late 1970s, the possibility of apprehension and deportation has become

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Adam Goodman: A reality for many people and many ethnic Mexicans.

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Adam Goodman: 900,000 explosions take place each year on average from the late 1970s, up until the great recession of 2008. I think this is when we really see

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Adam Goodman: The shift toward you know what we recognize today as the environment surrounding immigration policy immigration enforcement as well as immigration activism.

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Adam Goodman: So is it this time that you know you see the impact on people's lifestyle shift.

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Adam Goodman: And you know did oral histories, with a man who would later become a dual citizen us and Mexican citizen, but at the time wasn't documented your fit a ranch in Central Valley in California.

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Adam Goodman: And he told me of how he would just get up, go to work every morning and he'd get dressed.

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Adam Goodman: But as you know, shoes, or put his pants on put socks on, put shoes on. And before I walked out the door and he would make sure to hide $20 on his person.

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Adam Goodman: To make sure that he had some money and the event that he was deported that day and sent that to you wanna do you want it to be able to reach across the border.

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Adam Goodman: You know, I think that the fear campaigns really had a harmful impact on individuals and families as well. So I did oral histories with women.

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Adam Goodman: And men who lived in Southern California during this period of late 1970s, early 1980s, who describe things will be very familiar to us today.

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Adam Goodman: They would stop going to the stores there stop going to the supermarket. They were stopped going to the movies or even the Sunday Mass because immigration raids became reality.

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Adam Goodman: In everyday. Kind of day to day, week to week reality and people lived in fear in many ways. And that was for again people without status people in status.

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Adam Goodman: And in addition to the individual level, the disproportionate targeting of Mexicans almost all of whom were deported through voluntary departure.

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Adam Goodman: And many people had multiple apprehensions and deportations, which I think also we should recognize the toll that that might have taken on those individuals and wasn't simply a system.

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Adam Goodman: As some have argued have kind of a not in a wink, the employers get exploitable labor force.

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Adam Goodman: immigration officials can inflate the numbers to get more congressional appropriations and that was happening. But I think that this practice right this cycle.

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Adam Goodman: Or revolving door the board that develops is some people have put it exerted a real toll on migrants and also both created and solidified the idea that Mexicans were prototypical illegal aliens. Right. So it's the bureaucratic mechanisms of explosion that help us see that.

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Adam Goodman: The next thing I want to share a little bit of information about is the human cost you know and I know that, uh,

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Adam Goodman: We are limited on time today, but to go very briefly into this

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Adam Goodman: Many of us are thinking today about private detention companies GEO Group course civic the role a plane immigration enforcement.

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Adam Goodman: I trust the transportation networks and the private transportation companies like Flying Tiger airlines.

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Adam Goodman: Which went on to become the largest cargo carrier in the United States before FedEx bought them out in 1988 they deported 10s of thousands of Mexicans in the middle of the 20th century.

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Adam Goodman: You know, both within the United States on internal deportation flights to the border and then from southern Texas or South Texas and Southern California down into the interior of Mexico.

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Adam Goodman: And you know I traced the story of buses and trains, as well as you know boats and planes and that infamous boatlift that took place in the mid 1950s.

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Adam Goodman: I really zoom in on and try to recreate and understand what that experience might have been like when the US and Mexico governments contracted to Mexican shipping companies I should emphasize

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Adam Goodman: Private Mexican shipping companies that are looking to make a buck off of transporting what they referred to as HUMAN CARGO

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Adam Goodman: They treated deportees as cargo. They took bananas from the Mexican state of Tabasco, which you see at the bottom of the map here up to Alabama and then on the return trip home.

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Adam Goodman: They would pick up deportees at Port is about Texas and take them through better cruise Mexico. And that was kind of the back and forth cycle.

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Adam Goodman: But they maximize their profits by treating human beings as cargo and the Immigration Service actually benefited from this as well.

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Adam Goodman: Because they were seeking to punish migrants, you know, this is a precursor of prevention through returns policies that became so

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Adam Goodman: Ubiquitous in the 1990s, with the militarization of border, and more recently with the targeting of Central American asylum, so you can children and parents for family separation.

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Adam Goodman: Right, so this history of prevention through deterrence is something that I pull back into the mid 20th century.

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Adam Goodman: And show really clearly how the Immigration Service sought to punish people in hopes that they would not return to the United States. You know, they fail.

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Adam Goodman: But just as it does today. We know that these policies exerted an extraordinary physical, psychological and material costs on migrants.

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Adam Goodman: Into the state policies that created this market and exploitable right labor, but also a lucrative market out of the expulsion process. And that's something that I that I show and trace for, you know, the middle decades of the 20th century, especially

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Adam Goodman: And finally, you know, I want to emphasize, I'm sorry, this is just one other image actually looking down into the the hold of one of those deportation ships.

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Adam Goodman: That Mercutio. And it's actually this is a photo really haunted me you're seeing the gaze of, you know, that young boy perhaps teenage boy on the right hand side, they're looking up directly at the camera.

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Adam Goodman: And really trying to better understand what the experience would have been like. So in that particular chapter I do I try to recreate what it would have been like a board those ships for the parties.

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Adam Goodman: And I think, in doing so, we understand as well. Why this operation came to an end. And that was because conditions are so bad that people organized and then muted the mutiny.

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Adam Goodman: Then mutinied, they end up ending the operation successfully although very tragically. Some people lost their lives in the process. Right, but my parents have always been fighting back and organizing against the deportation machine. And this brings me to my last point fighting the machine.

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Adam Goodman: This is something that I really was keen on understanding, you know, as I mentioned at the beginning, not only how the deportation machine works.

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Adam Goodman: But seeing that as a first step to perhaps organizing against it because that's what migrants have always done and migrant activists and advocates have always done

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Adam Goodman: And you know, I look at this, at different points throughout the book, you know, the Chinese migrants use of the court system very effectively in the late 19th, early 20th century.

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Adam Goodman: Mexican migrants and also the court system in different activists and organizing groups.

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Adam Goodman: Throughout the 20th century, certainly. More recently, you can think of young undocumented people that I mentioned the beginning and who have pushed for the DREAM Act and it pushed for protection for all

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Adam Goodman: Beyond any kind of limited protections for just some people in the country without authorization

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Adam Goodman: But what I really zoom in on is this period at the dawn of the Age of mass explosion and I show the ways that a group of courageous.

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Adam Goodman: undocumented workers at a shoe factory and suburban la stood up to the machine organized and figure out a way to potentially bring it to a screeching halt and you know the deportation machine has always been vulnerable.

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Adam Goodman: It remains vulnerable today how it's vulnerable changes over time but activists have consistently tried to identify those weak spots and apply as much pressure as possible to them.

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Adam Goodman: And I think that, you know what I learned is that if there's any kind of generalizations as to how and when people have been effective. It's through broad based organizing

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Adam Goodman: Through actual solidarity and sustained struggle a lot of these fights did not take, you know, days or weeks or months, they took years or even decades. And I think that, in fact, is still the case today.

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Adam Goodman: So I would just like to thank you all for again tuning in and thank you again. Toby for your comments. And I'm very much looking forward to

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Adam Goodman: Our discussion.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Okay, yeah. Thank you very much. Tobias

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Okay, thanks, David. Thank you, Adam, for that great introduction to your book and survey of it.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): It's, it's my pleasure and privilege to be part of this conversation about Adam Goldman's compelling book the deportation machine.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): I'm just going to give some general comments and about this sweeping and highly detailed book which I recommend that everybody go out and purchase and read immediately and followed up with some suggestions for further discussion and things that I'm particularly interested in

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): So you know as as as Adam was describing, you know, the American system of immigration control has relied much more on

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Informal means of expulsion. Then we have thought in the past and those have been he argues overwhelmingly applied to migrants from Mexico, creating a racialized cast essentially

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): That straddle the border between the US and and Mexico. The two related processes at the heart of the method are voluntary departure and administrative process that facilitated swift repatriation of migrants and the second

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Potentially larger although hard to know. Perhaps impossible to know was migrants self deportation induced by fear campaigns and targeted raids that sent a message to migrants.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): And that message was leave on your own or your family and your belonging with your family and belongings or risk being snatched up from your home or your workplace and swiftly Deported Without a chance to say goodbye, or to gather your belongings, or even to get your paycheck.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): For the Immigration and Naturalization Service like ice today Immigrations and Customs Enforcement bureaucracy. It was a bureaucracy that felt itself persistently underfunded.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Whatever we might think about its funding the the intertwined processes of voluntary departure and self deportation achieved the double ends of removing undocumented migrants and saving money.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): By avoiding complicated legal processes and lengthy detention, but the US economy. These systems enforced migrant circulation and labor market churn.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Placing a sizable portion of the workforce in a condition of permanent prosperity and in the great American tradition, creating opportunities for money making on other people's misfortune for contractors in the deportation system and for employers and even landlords who could

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Rent the apartments that deported migrants were removed from

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Taken together, it's a history that challenges the self image of the United States as a pluralistic nation of immigrants, but as Goodman also shows and just outline. There's been a persistent resistance to this deportation machine.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): He has this fascinating chapter about Los Angeles in the 1970s that shows how this network of activists and union organizers.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): And undocumented immigrants.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): As well as a group of the Mexican radicals who had left Mexico fleeing repression there became involved in an effort to trip up the machine at its weakest point

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): The system of voluntary departure required people to acquiesce in their own deportation.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): And many did so either willingly in order to thinking that they could come back quickly or they were coerced or as Adam mentioned their signatures were forged

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): And this group of activists who were actually part of a larger national network that with the ACLU and other groups and National Lawyers go

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): We're sharing information, you know, at a moment when there wasn't an internet. So it's kind of this amazing National Information Network. How do you take on the immigration authorities.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): In order to stop this rapid system of deportation and he focuses on this one case in Los Angeles, the speaker or Elma el Monte that is Vika shoe factory. But there's a whole host of other cases in Los Angeles and Illinois and New York and other places where

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): activists, lawyers were taking on the system. And one of the things they discovered was that

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): The immigration system was not filled with hot shot lawyers and if these these more

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Well, often cases quite well trained lawyers could take on the immigration courts, they could outsmart them and and when the stay of deportation for their clients, but it was a really as a big fight. It was like you had they had to mobilize this network practically out of nothing.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): And in a way, what's fascinating about this is it suggested the potential of what we might call today a sanctuary coalition made up of progressive unions of migrant community organizations of immigration lawyers and a few

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): At that point, democratic politicians, because most democrats like Republicans were kind of running for the

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): For the doors. Whenever these topics were mentioned, but it's a coalition that didn't fully take shape really until the late 1990s after proposition.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): In California, but also, especially after the passage of a new set of more restrictive immigration laws and one of the fascinating stories that this book shows is that the victory of this network of lawyers, which actually does result in a decline of

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): deportations.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Is, in a sense, is there's an end run around it because the forces of, you know, the pro deportation forces are able to pass new laws that are much harsher and and move

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Ironically, from this system of voluntary deportation towards a system of formal expulsion that we know today.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): There's a lot more. I could say about this book. It's, as I mentioned, it's super rich, I really look forward to assigning it to my students, but I want to offer two little

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Things to point to that maybe we can discuss and I know people. There's the questions already in the Q AMP. A so I won't take too much time one is about the relationship between internal borders and international borders and the other is about the value of archives, and historical research.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): So,

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): My some of my previous work is about the compulsion and violence involved in mobilizing and D mobilizing migrant workers internal to the United States. And I was really fascinated that Adam in the early chapters of the book talks about this.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Deep well displacement or expulsion of Chinese community and Truckee have California and the famous or infamous deportation of striking mineworkers

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): multi ethnic group of mine workers in biz be Arizona and how much these resembled the broader pattern of

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Of worker deportation that existed across the United States. So, you know, like there. There are literally hundreds of these deportations.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): In the wheat belt and across the west, were just as as this book describes local authorities engage in, you know, rounding up all the workers at gunpoint and putting on on a train and sending them on to the next town and

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): And I thinking to myself, you know, this is also in some ways functionally related to things like the infamous massacre in Tulsa of African Americans in 1921 a kind of

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Politics of violence and geography that is designed to maintain security and functions around the relationship between the federal and local or federal and regional, state apparatuses so

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): I'm very intrigued about that. And of course it's part of the longer history of how government totality works in the United States and how how state power grows. And I think one of the great contributions of this

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Book is it shows that you know this is is is what people would call today soft power, ironically,

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Like the self deportation campaigns without theoretically without using the coercive force of the state. We're actually in, you know, increasing the power of the state that's really fascinating.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): But I'm sort of an also intrigued about the relationship between then the social movements that build up around this and how social movements.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Activists radicals tend to be the target of actually formal deportation more often. So hopefully, Adam, can talk a little bit about that and how that plays out in in that world.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Okay. Moving along, in the interest of time, my second thought is really about archives. So in the introductory chapter

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Goodman rights. How do you write a history of something designed to leave no paper trail and I really feel the relation. I can feel that, you know, because there are many topics like this in the world, but the deportation machine shows the value of archival research.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Of memory for memory and democratic accountability. This is a super

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): well researched book the footnotes are incredibly detailed and and future graduate students are going to like go directly to the end of this book and be mining it for years and years to figure out what their next dissertation projects about

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): So I just want to celebrate Adam as a historian and historians in general as a discipline that you know is has great value for us because

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): The prot the patience and fortitude, that it takes to wade through massive archival collections is something that not every social scientist or humanist is really up for. And in fact, not all human historians are as we saw with the Trump administration's family separation policy, the

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Government's the state prefers to operate in the shadows.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): And so record. It's not just historians, the public records and archivists themselves.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): Who are the memory keepers and I think about how

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): We as scholars of international migration, how can we support the preservation and collection of archives, which today are growing larger but are very much more easily destroyed or or lost.

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Tobias Higbie (UCLA): In our digital world. So with that, I close, and as I said, encourage everybody to go get the book and read it and I look forward to our conversation.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Thank you twice and Adam, could you take just a couple of minutes to respond to one of those points and then we'll open it up to everyone.

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Adam Goodman: Oh, yes. Thank you so much. You know, those are incredibly generous and close read of the book, very appreciative and look forward to discussing, you know, in more depth as well after our brief session here today.

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Adam Goodman: You know, but just, you know, very briefly, in response. And one thing that I noticed. And this was a real kind of discovery, an aha moment for me.

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Adam Goodman: Was that you know there's been so much wonderful work done both in the past and more recently on the history of deportation and increasing amount of work. I think that's coming out.

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Adam Goodman: But in fact, the vast majority of people, you know, probably more than 90% of people, statistically, at least, who have been deported have been Mexican migrants who have

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Adam Goodman: Enter the country without authorization or overstated visa. I mean, it's not to belittle or to diminish the targeting of political radicals and

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Adam Goodman: That has a long, you know, troubled history as well that we're seeing, you know, come back into the news these days, and for many other reasons that historians have documented, you know,

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Adam Goodman: And you know that's something we could definitely talk more about but I realized that, you know, it was largely the targeting of ordinary people who are here to work or here to reunite with their families.

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Adam Goodman: And that's something that I wanted to pick up on the book and really emphasize and put front and center.

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Adam Goodman: And the second thing was just about the archival research and thank you so much.

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Adam Goodman: For your feedback on that. I think when I started on this project. And actually, I'm in the early days I was talking about with Roger waldinger at a NEH seminar at UCLA.

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Adam Goodman: And had some really formative discussions and, you know, did some important research during that time.

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Adam Goodman: And around that time, a professor of mine told me that I probably use 10% of all the archival sources I found

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Adam Goodman: And I think I may have used 1% of everything. I found so you're definitely right but there's so much more there.

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Adam Goodman: Thank you to Princeton University Press for letting me include 90 pages of notes. I felt like I was getting away with something on that.

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Adam Goodman: But you know I'm grateful and, you know, I think that you're casting a wide net and really going as deep as I could, into the

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Adam Goodman: historical archives in the United States and Mexico and combining that with

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Adam Goodman: The government reports I was getting the FOIA requests that I filed as well as the oral histories and interviews allowed me to tell the rich history.

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Adam Goodman: And for each chapter I relied on different source space and I kind of had to piece that together over time. I don't think it, you made it any easier any faster, but it ultimately led to, you know, the product.

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Adam Goodman: That I was, you know, happy with and proud of. So thank you again for the comments and I look forward to discussing in more depth in the future.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Thanks. So we have

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Many questions, Lenny combined

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: A concern from Donna kabocha and Andrew Lee around this notion of self deportation.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Can you talk more about how you distinguish self deportation from return migration, more generally, which perhaps could be affected by economic push and pull factors is self deportation included in your total number of 57 million deportations.

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Adam Goodman: I thank you both for for those questions on this is a really important one. You know, I've spent so much time thinking about the politics of immigration statistics which I address in the book briefly.

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Adam Goodman: But also what we cannot know I mean as much research I did, I, I came up against the wall, a number of occasions, realizing that we can't know everything there were some things that I wouldn't be able to quantify one of those certainly is self deportation.

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Adam Goodman: You know, there is no way to figure out how many people left the country in response to some of those fear campaigns, we know that it happened.

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Adam Goodman: I mean, we have documented case that it happened. But we also know that the majority of people did not leave

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Adam Goodman: And some people, as you know, tell me mentioned in his comments might have migrated internally moved from a particularly restrictive environment into one. There was more open and Liberal, I mean,

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Adam Goodman: Angela Garcia has written a book called legal passing that looks that in the more recent past, and

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Adam Goodman: So in California and I think shows really effectively the ways in which these campaigns. Often you know don't necessarily succeed and pushing people out

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Adam Goodman: But, you know, the big difference between voluntary departure or self deportation is that, you know, one involves the apprehension.

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Adam Goodman: And then forcing someone out through these administrative means and coercion, but self deportations, regardless of the fact that I couldn't pinpoint whether someone left in direct response to

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Adam Goodman: Your government fear campaigns or anti Chinese violence in the late 19th century, or whatever it might have been

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Adam Goodman: It's impossible to ignore the fact that that was the pervading atmosphere and environment in which people were living

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Adam Goodman: In some way, you know, that did contribute to their decision subconsciously or consciously, I think.

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Adam Goodman: But the 57 million number does not include the self deportations. That is just the formal deportations, and the Voluntary departures.

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Adam Goodman: I have not come across any kind of statistical analysis or data on self deportation. Although if someone does know of anything or any studies that have been done. I'd love to, to know about that.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: We have a comparative question from Megan guarantee, could you put the US deportation machine and a comparative context with another democracy with a mythical origin story here. The rainbow nation of South Africa.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: South Africa, second only to the US has perhaps the largest history of deporting migrants across this long and porous borders with neighboring countries.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Is there's something about democratic states that incentivizes them to use Creative bureaucratic strategies to remove unwanted populations, rather than one off expulsion orders of an entire massive people such as EDM mean did and 72 or Nigeria and 83

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Adam Goodman: You know, that's a wonderful question. I really appreciate it. And I haven't done as much research into those comparative context. So you know what i do know, and some of the work that other scholars have done is that I think you know

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Adam Goodman: There's always a mixture of force and coercion that play perhaps especially in liberal democracies, I think the United States has a somewhat distinct

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Adam Goodman: Position of being, you know, geographically next to Mexico and had such a long history of 10s of millions of Mexican migrants coming again mostly for, you know, labor reasons.

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Adam Goodman: Or labor recruitment from the United States or to reunite with family and just numerically. I think that the United States case is an outlier there in some ways.

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Adam Goodman: But the mechanisms of state control and the reliance on these kind of soft power mechanisms of coercion. I think we see, you know, certainly in the UK and I'm

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Adam Goodman: I'm you know guessing, even though I haven't done the research and most other places as well. I mean,

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Adam Goodman: The role that coercion plays in enforcing the law or compelling people to do certain things, whether it's in the contracts immigration or otherwise.

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Adam Goodman: I think we can you know see that as you know a constant or a through line, and I hope that other people will do that worker. Perhaps they have. And I'd love to learn about it. So feel free to send along any references. But thank you for the question.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: John Havilland has a question about activist mobilization within the state within the system inside the bureaucracy. In addition to these various other kinds of folks that you were talking about.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Are there other levels of almost invisible actors in the system. I myself referred to interpreters, whose organization inside the Department of Justice as a bit of a mystery and their own often direct personal links to migrant communities and possible activism there in

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Adam Goodman: You know there have been people that within the immigration bureaucracy, you may have acted, you know, on the behalf of migrants, although I think that what my research shows is that

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Adam Goodman: Time and again, when people do try to disrupt from within the overwhelming kind of bureaucratic inertia.

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Adam Goodman: wipes them out, you know, there's such a power imbalance there and there's one case I discussed in the late 1970s when Leon El Castillo becomes integration, Commissioner, your Mexican American

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Adam Goodman: Man from Houston was the Comptroller there in the city before that he was a football star Peace Corps volunteer and it comes in, in the late 1970s and Jimmy Carter appoints him and

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Adam Goodman: Tries to reform the agency in some ways to make it more of a service agency instead of enforcement agency and at the same time.

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Adam Goodman: deportations are a record numbers and he faces incredible resistance from within the agency, despite, you know, trying to reform it, as the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

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Adam Goodman: So we see the ways there that, you know, I think. While there may be some examples. Certainly of people

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Adam Goodman: Acting on migrants behalf from within the bureaucracy. This is a much larger question.

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Adam Goodman: And perhaps speaks to the fact that regardless of which administration's in power Democrat, Republican in throughout most of the 20th century and into the 21st

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Adam Goodman: And we see that the immigration bureaucracy has its own interest in ends right and maximizing apprehensions maximizing deportations.

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Adam Goodman: Happened to be in their interest to try to increase their congressional funding and they've always felt kind of ignored, they felt like they had been overlooked.

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Adam Goodman: And there's always been a push to celebrate and promote and even inflate statistics in order to get more money. So I think it's a really tricky thing where individuals may act courageously but changing the bureaucracy would require kind of an overhaul, top to bottom.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Another question about looking within the state.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Unpacking the state do you examine in your book and all how state policies small state policies change deportation over time. For example, complying with ice through 27 G agreements.

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Adam Goodman: You know, one of the things that I discovered it. I don't know how much. I'll be able to speak to this, but you're certainly there's been collaboration from local officials from state officials know since the beginning of my study

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Adam Goodman: You know, I think that these things are always at play. And these questions the immigration federalism that so many people have been working on. I don't know. I know that Hiroshima Tamara there at UCLA has done.

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Adam Goodman: Excellent work in this area and certainly in the in the research I did, you know, I see that you're some of the reasons why the deportation machine is first created

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Adam Goodman: The targeting of the Chinese migrants, you know, as Toby mentioned in his comments was because they're these

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Adam Goodman: Ordinary citizens who organized in Truckee California and develop these

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Adam Goodman: Kind of prototypical self deportation campaigns and helps and not only pushing people out of town but pushing people out of the country all together.

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Adam Goodman: And in turn, trying to encourage Congress to pass new legislation to exclude people and to expel people

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Adam Goodman: So that relationship between the local, state, and federal that there's a through line there throughout that I think people haven't fully recognized with good reason we've paid attention to

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Adam Goodman: Just Secure Communities, but I do think there's kind of some antecedents there that need more exploration

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Another question about who exactly we're talking about in the big picture of the numbers of people in different categories who've been deported.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Howard Edelman is remarketing that most Canadian deportations are Voluntary departures overwhelmingly a visa over stairs rather than permanent landed immigrants.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Is that the case here. Can you can you say more about, you know, what percentage of these folks were in an unauthorized status versus some other kind of legal status.

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Adam Goodman: That's a great question. Voluntary departure has been used to deport people all over the world.

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Adam Goodman: Those specifically you're designed with Canadians and with Mexicans in mind, you know, the countries that, you know, but the United States, the contiguous land borders, just for practical reasons.

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Adam Goodman: I wasn't able to dig into, you know, the multiple layers throughout the entire hundred 40 year period.

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Adam Goodman: But Voluntary departures are overwhelmingly Mexican and the early 20th century. It's more of a mix Canadians represent a higher percentage there.

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Adam Goodman: But you know it quickly becomes almost all Mexican and, you know, within the groups. There's some diversity and variety

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Adam Goodman: It's certainly not just people that have been in the country for a short period of time. It's not people that have just tried to cross the border there apprehended in the process and return

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Adam Goodman: Those boatlift the horrific journey across the Gulf of Mexico. I told you about.

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Adam Goodman: Many of those outlets were 100% like 800 of the 800 people on board, those boats were deported via voluntary departure.

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Adam Goodman: And they had lived in the United States for years or even decades, in many cases, you know, this was simply how expulsion worked for most of

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Adam Goodman: The 20th century and it's only after 1996 you know shifts things and creates more opportunities for formal deportation by expanding the category and the deportable offenses.

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Adam Goodman: By funneling more money to the bureaucracy, but there's one catch here, but I don't think I mentioned that I want to, you know, let you know about now. And that's that.

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Adam Goodman: Formal deportations in recent years have come to resemble Voluntary departures.

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Adam Goodman: Formal deportations today are streamlined in the same way the voluntary departure is always were except for now form of the partitions carry harsher consequences. The voluntary departure is ever did, you know, separation, the deportation represents today. It was much

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Adam Goodman: Much more than ever before in part because it's hard to re enter the United States after being expelled and also because people spend longer time and attention.

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Adam Goodman: So it's both the expediting of the formal deportations, but the ways in which deportation. What it means to be deported of change over time that have led to this punitive turn in the last 25 years

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Of question from money and the moon is about

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: how money is allocated to to pay for all of these deportation operations that one of the limitations inherently on deportation machine is financing.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: You know, over the years, the responsibility for migration management has shifted with securitization from Labor Department's to interior Homeland Security department's doing your research. How have you found that the responsibility of covering the cost is shared or has shifted

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Adam Goodman: That's a great question, and I did try to track this as much as I could. And, you know, long story short, is that

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Adam Goodman: The Immigration Service tried to push as much of the cost of deportation onto the migrants themselves onto the people being expelled. So most people deported through voluntary departure.

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Adam Goodman: Have to pay their own way and the catch is that you pay your own way. That's part of the deal. You know, we will not depart you through formal means you won't be in detention.

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Adam Goodman: For the extended period, you won't have the bar on re entry, but you have to pay your own way.

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Adam Goodman: And when push came to shove, and people didn't pay their own way. Immigration Service would usually try to come up with the funds, although sometimes they weren't able to do that.

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Adam Goodman: But they've always tried to the officials that is the authorities have always tried to minimize the cost

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Adam Goodman: And by paying your own way that then in turn allowed the deportation machine to keep turning along and allowed the Immigration Service to apprehend more people

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Adam Goodman: So I think that question of cost and who is paying for this, it actually matters a great deal.

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Adam Goodman: But what we see after again 911 is that all of a sudden there's just such an influx of funding into the immigration bureaucracy that they can now carry out and pay for many of these explosions. Unlike they ever had.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Thanks Milla Jovovich remarks that in Europe in recent years there has been a movement towards a radical resistance to deportation. For example, in Germany over 95% of plan deportations were foiled in 2016

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: However, this has resulted in a greater push from the state to criminalize resistance, including print of arrests.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Of activists criminalizing access to asylum seekers camps and so forth. What, in your opinion, has been the greatest impediment and coalescing a larger coalition of resisting deportations in the US.

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Adam Goodman: Wow, that's a great question. And I think the comparative examples here actually really important, probably, and I looked, learn more about what what people have been doing

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Adam Goodman: It on the one hand, you know, I think things are bleaker than ever. When it comes to immigration enforcement policy during the current administration and at the same time.

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Adam Goodman: There's some opportunities that perhaps haven't been there, because more people are aware of just how bad things are

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Adam Goodman: And they're not necessarily aware of the longer history. They think it might have just emerged during the Trump administration, but in fact

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Adam Goodman: They actually want to do something now. So people turning it out for protest people in the streets. I think present some opportunities. Perhaps you know having the common enemy.

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Adam Goodman: In this case, you know, could be useful, but at the same time. You know what happens in the selection. What happens, moving forward, whether you know broader public.

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Adam Goodman: loses interest, whether politicians in the Democratic Party whenever their next in power, whether that's

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Adam Goodman: This election or in the future if they really try to stick out some ground.

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Adam Goodman: You know, and create some distance between themselves in the Republicans, which just hasn't been there.

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Adam Goodman: I mean, Hillary Clinton brock obama they were both willing to exchange some kind of regularization program for enhanced enforcement. And that's always kind of been the democrats line in recent history.

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Adam Goodman: I don't know what that's going to look like going forward. And that could actually lead to some real change, but it's only through the sustained pressure that organizing

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Adam Goodman: Will put on politicians that people will do anything to begin with, you know, they're not going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, and I think that we see as I mentioned earlier, how

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Adam Goodman: The vulnerable points within the machine shift over time, you know, so during the Obama years. There are people that would publicize cases, use the media very effectively and in many cases have deportations halted.

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Adam Goodman: They put their bodies on the line to act of civil disobedience blocking buses literally blocking buses.

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Adam Goodman: By forming human change from transporting immigrants from detention centers to airports and in some cases that succeeded.

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Adam Goodman: That has not been as true. I think in the last few years, and I'm not sure exactly what that will look like moving forward. But I think the question gets it. This key piece where

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Adam Goodman: We need much more support, you know, for people who are interested in advocating on migrants behalf and would like to great radical change to the system which has done such violence. For now, you know, century and a half. It's going to rely on mass support and sustain struggle.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: So a question from

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Nancy hamster about

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Transportation companies and basically it is I see the question. It's how much does it matter that these were private companies involved in deportation. Is that really what's driving the use of deportation.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Or is this a chicken and egg phenomenon where it's hard to tease out the causality. What does it matter more generally, why does it matter if deportation is carried out by private actors, as opposed to a state agency.

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Adam Goodman: And that's a great question certainly something that abolitionists have been thinking about and pointing out that yeah I mean private prisons, for example, are horrible and do a lot of bad things. But getting rid of private prisons doesn't solve the problem.

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Adam Goodman: You know, the majority of people are held in public facilities. And likewise, the majority of people deported during the 20th century, you know, were deported, you know, through government vehicles and government means. But I do think that there is you know something. Notable here.

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Adam Goodman: Where you have that profit incentive. I mean, the government's interested in minimizing the cost the companies are interested in maximizing profit. I mean, at no point in time, they have migrants well being human beings, you know. Well, being in mind, I think that matters a great deal.

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Adam Goodman: And also, in turn, serves that you know secondary purpose or perhaps primary purpose of punishing migrants.

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Adam Goodman: In this system of prevention through deterrence, you know. So I think it's that toxic combination that I saw was notable

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Adam Goodman: But the question also brings up something important. I'm not trying to conflate the role that private companies played Ben.

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Adam Goodman: And the role they play. Now, I do think that has changed over time it should now you see private prison companies for lobbying and spending millions of dollars.

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Adam Goodman: Lobbying in DC, and they get hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts and return it wasn't quite the same.

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Adam Goodman: In the middle of the 20th century, with these transportation companies, but I do think the profit motive, you know, did matter there in creating those conditions that I uncovered.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: So, there

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: You know, a number of other questions here.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Perhaps that I like can continue online. I would like to close with just one question following up on this remarkable statement that I think I've heard at the beginning of your presentation.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Which is that there have been more deportations than permanent admissions and US history. Did I hear that correctly.

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Adam Goodman: Yes. So there's been US officials have deported more people than they've allowed to remain on a permanent basis. They've been they've granted permanent residents.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: So, that is, for me, one of the most striking takeaways of this really rich study. Thank you so much, Adam. Thank you so much. TOBIAS. For, for joining us and for the audience for their excellent questions.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: Again, the book is available from Princeton University Press the deportation machine.

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David FitzGerald - UCSD: And next week, the conversation continues on Friday with a discussion of citizenship two point O dual nationality as a global asset by Yossi Harper's of Tel Aviv University with a comment by Rogers bread baker of UCLA. Thanks to all of you for joining. See you next week.


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