Deportation, ‘E-Verify,’ and la migra

U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, August 2016

US immigration officials divide what most of us call “deportations” into two categories: “removals” (immigrants deported by judicial order and subject to felony charges if they re-enter); and “returns” (individuals turned back at the border or deported with no order).

Deportations overall reached an all-time high of more than 1.8 million in 2000, the last year the Clintons were in the White House, and fell to under 600,000 in 2014. The biggest reason for the decline is that fewer people have been immigrating to the United States, due to the capitalist economic crisis. In fact, as a result of high US jobless levels, more Mexicans living in the United States have returned to Mexico since 2009 than have immigrated north of the border.

“Removal” orders rose to new highs during the first five years of the Obama administration. More foreign-born workers lost jobs and were forced out of the US as a result of “E-Verify” audits of Social Security numbers than in the hated la migra factory raids of the Clinton and Bush years. Those raids became counterproductive to the US rulers in the wake of millions-strong demonstrations in 2006-07 by immigrants and their supporters and widespread protests by working people against workplace assaults by SWAT-style immigration cops.

The average daily population of immigrant men, women, and children held in some 200 miserable detention prisons across the US mounted from under 8,000 a day in 1996 to 34,000 in 2014.