Patterns and Trends of Deportations to Mexico: The Unequal Distribution of Deportability

Abstract

A growing body of research has examined how the local contexts, policy settings, and institutional dimensions of immigration enforcement in the United States influence the outcomes and rates of immigrants’ apprehension, detention and removal. While scholars have argued that the risk of deportation is unevenly distributed among the immigrant population, much remains unknown about how that risk varies across demographic profiles and contextual features. In this dissertation, I study deportation risk through a demographic approach that centers the analysis on deportees’ characteristics and their population-level composition. Specifically, I utilize data sources collected at different sides of an international border to answer the following questions: (1) Who is being deported from the United States? (2) How do the characteristics of those deported influence their susceptibility to deportation?, and (3) To what extent do changes in the characteristics of the immigrant population explain differences in deportation risk across immigration enforcement regimes? The findings of this study highlight the heterogeneity of the Mexican deported population across time, geographies, and enforcement contexts; shed light on the discretionary application of immigration enforcement along racial and cultural lines; and disentangle the temporal and spatial variations in the population at risk of deportation from changes that result from the evolution of America’s deportation machine.