Commentary
Deportation capitalism
Deportation as a governing tool is by no means a peculiarity arising from some kind of “American exceptionalism.” We also know its tragic history in Europe.
Trump’s mass-deportation policy is scandalizing a part of the global public sphere – paradoxically, the progressive part. The “Battle of Los Angeles” is focusing the debate around its supposed exceptionality vis-à-vis the (equally supposed) liberal-democratic political ontology of the “land of the free.” Such perplexity looks to us like an exercise in white innocence that turns truly perverse when it airbrushes away the vast apparatus of expulsion, detention and deportability on which the European migration regime is founded.
Let’s say it right away: there is nothing exceptional about Trump’s deportation policy. Under Barack Obama, deportations hit a record high – more than three million in eight years, earning him the nickname of “deporter-in-chief” among migrant-rights activists. Under Joe Biden, the “deportation as method” approach has hardly slowed: official data lists almost 600,000 removals, with a grim peak in 2024 of 272,000 repatriations, the largest total in the past decade. However, stressing this continuity across Trump, Obama and Biden adds little by itself.
What feels like an era-defining turn is the explicit use of urban raids to hunt deportable migrants, the deployment of troops against “rioting” detainees, and the decision to wage the fight in Los Angeles – a multi-ethnic, mixed-race city-region in a “woke” state. This phenomenon showing up has a “hidden cause”: today’s global war climate, the decline of U.S. hegemony and Western white civilization, the crisis of structural racism – including in demographic terms – and the persistence of white supremacy inside the United States.
Beyond the specifics of the current juncture, it is just as superficial to dwell on the differences. Let us look deeper: across U.S. history, deportation, including mass deportation, has never been an exceptional tool. Recent scholarship, spurred in no small part by the Trump phenomenon, drives home the point. One statistic reads like a genealogy of the present-day situation: in The Deportation Machine (2023) Adam Goodman reminds us that since 1882, the United States has deported 57 million people, more than any other country in the world.
From the late nineteenth century onward, a flexible mesh of laws and practices evolved to expel whoever was deemed “undesirable.” It’s enough to recall the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, or the Immigration Act of 1917 which, as Jack R. Kraut shows in Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States (2020) and Lisa Lowe outlines in the now-classic Immigrant Acts: On Asian Cultural Politics (1996), broadened deportability to include “Asians,” anarchists, political or union militants, undocumented foreigners and anyone – criminals, the mentally ill, etc. – who might threaten national security, such as the thousands arrested and expelled for “subversive activity” during the Great Red Scare.
Yet, Goodman notes, in the United States the very word “deportee” is still synonymous with “Mexican.” In the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover unleashed one of history’s fiercest removal campaigns: nearly two million persons of Mexican origin were expelled, many of them U.S. citizens, as Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez documented in Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (1995).
During World War II the deportation machine ran under national-security logic: thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned by an order signed by Roosevelt, while expulsions also hit Germans and Italians deemed “enemy aliens.”
Then, in the 1950s Dwight Eisenhower launched Operation Wetback, another enormous operation that swept up hundreds of thousands of Mexican and Mexican-American laborers through raids, round-ups, arbitrary detention and other violent abuses. The Mexican flags visible in Los Angeles today are not mere “Latino” nationalism: they carry the memory and resistance of Mexican communities inside the U.S.
Furthermore, deportation as a governing tool is by no means a peculiarity arising from some kind of “American exceptionalism.” We know its tragic history in Europe – a history that is anything but behind us, as shown not only by post-fascist Italy’s new “deport them to Albania” racial delirium but also by the New European Pact on Migration and Asylum.
Here we must add that it was with colonial expansion that deportation became part of a broader biopolitical and necropolitical technology for producing national territories and populations. The various settler-colonial projects – not to mention Zionism in Palestine – used deportation as a central device of social, racial, cultural and territorial engineering.
On the one hand, the development of the slavery mode of production, even before the African slave trade, and the scheme to colonize Indigenous lands both rested on mass deportation from Europe to the colonies, applied to convicts, religious and political dissidents, as well as to the poor, serfs and commoners who resisted the discipline of nascent capitalism. On the other hand, in colonial territories the “sovereign” exercise of deportation was bound up with the expropriation, annihilation, replacement and forced relocation of Indigenous peoples, but also with the revolts of slaves, rebels and natives. One must underline this last point: both in Europe’s transition to capitalism and in its colonies, deportation took shape as a sovereign answer to ever-growing human mobility.
Even though the deportation of “undesirables” has existed for millennia – traceable back to Mesopotamian civilizations, through classical antiquity and the European Middle Ages – its true enshrinement as a practice of government lies in the coloniality of modern global capitalist supremacy: in the tragic fusion of race, capital and sovereignty as a device of domination.
We can paraphrase Malcolm X’s famous dictum, “You Can’t Have Capitalism Without Racism,” on the 100th anniversary of his birth, and say: “You Can’t Have Capitalism Without Deportations.” And that is exactly what some of today’s most significant mobilizations are telling us: from the global uprisings for Palestine to the No Kings movements against Trump, all the way to the struggles resisting the authoritarian-securitarian drift in Italy.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/deportati-dal-capitale on 2025-06-29