The concept of deportation has become increasingly important in recent years, as states more and more turn to removal as a technique of control over population and territory. But within the field of political theory the concept of deportation has not yet received the attention it deserves. This dissertation helps fill this gap by examining the concept of deportation as it appears in texts by three canonical political theorists, to achieve a better understanding of the deportation laws and practices of contemporary states, such as the U.S. The first chapter examines the relationship between deportation and criminal justice, through a close reading of Immanuel Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals. The second chapter analyzes the threat of a “boomerang effect” of arbitrary power, such as the sovereign’s prerogative of removal, on the constitutional order of the removing country, through an encounter with Jeremy Bentham’s critique of Britain’s penal transportation policies. The third chapter takes Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem as a jumping-off point for a rethinking of bureaucratic responsibility and irresponsibility in the context of deportation law and practice. The fourth chapter offers a reading of U.S. deportation law, focusing on the seminal nineteenth-century case of Fong Yue Ting and the crucial Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, and drawing on the insights gained through close readings of Kant, Bentham, and Arendt. The project concludes that the deportation practices of the U.S. raise serious problems from the perspective of constitutional law and individual rights and cannot be ethically justified.

Last modified

• 03/28/2018

Creator

• Charles Clarke

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2BD61

Subject

• Political Science

Keyword

• immigration
• constitutional law
• removal
• sovereignty
• plenary
• deportation

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright