| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
An argument can be made that US lawmakers' replacement of "deportations" and "exclusions" with "removals", in the mid-1990s, marked a decisive about-face in US deportation and exclusion practice by virtue of the due process restrictions that this brought about for a new class of noncitizens deemed neither deportable nor excludable. However, I argue here that the geography of due process rights under assault in the mid-1990s immigration lawmaking were never that certain in the first place. By reviewing a range of key court cases and immigration control practices from the Chinese Exclusion era through the present, I argue that US geopolitical borders have never mapped directly onto its legal-territorial borders as concerns deportation and exclusion. Nonetheless, I also point to a recent, "neo-classical" hardening of US immigration enforcement by virtue of the disconnect between geopolitical and legal-territorial borders in US immigration law.
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