obama: the deportation president

The Right will remember Obama as a Godless Muslim Socialist.* The Left will remember him as He Who Brought Us Healthcare. Overseas, he may come to be known as the Great Snoop, or perhaps, Death from Above. But there are many in this country who will remember Obama as El Deportador.

According to sociologist Tanya Golash-Boza, Obama has headed one of the most intense waves of deportation in the history of the United States and the onus heavily falls on non-whites. Golash-Boza describes this in a recent Houston Chronicle op-ed (ungated version here):

The deportation of legal permanent residents has hit black immigrants particularly hard. Using data from the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that one of every 12 Jamaican and Dominican male legal permanent residents has been deported since 1996.

The United States currently detains upwards of 30,000 immigrants per day, much as it imprisoned more than 120,000 people of Japanese origin during World War II without trials or other court processes. The Department of Homeland Security has broad discretion to arrest and detain any person they suspect does not have the legal right to be in the United States. People held under such detention do not have the same rights and safeguards as criminal suspects. They do not have the right to a speedy hearing before a judge nor do they have the right to appointed counsel.

And:

in 2012, more than 400,000 people were deported. Nearly 100,000 of them were parents of U.S. citizens. Tens of thousands of these children will grow up in the United States knowing that the U.S. government has taken away their right to grow up with one or both of their parents.

Numerous commentators note that Obama’s administration has deported more people in five years than where deported in all eight years of Bush II and more than all previous administrations going back to 1892 (!!) :

According to current figures from Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the federal agency responsible for deportations — Obama has removed 1.4 million people during his 42 months in office so far. Technically, that’s fewer than under George W. Bush, whose cumulative total was 2 million. But Bush’s number covers eight full years, which doesn’t allow an apples-to-apples comparison.

If you instead compare the two presidents’ monthly averages, it works out to 32,886 for Obama and 20,964 for Bush, putting Obama clearly in the lead. Bill Clinton is far behind with 869,676 total and 9,059 per month. All previous occupants of the White House going back to 1892 fell well short of the level of the three most recent presidents.

Astounding.

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* Yes, I know. The right isn’t known for its logical consistency.