Fwd: Mass Deportation and the Machinery of Ruin
Molly Molloy
From: Christine
Date: Tue, Jul 1, 2025 at 8:31 AM
Subject: Fwd: Mass Deportation and the Machinery of Ruin
Begin forwarded message:
From: James B. Greenberg from James’s Substack <jamesbg...@substack.com>
Subject: Mass Deportation and the Machinery of Ruin
Date: July 1, 2025 at 7:46:22 AM MDT
Mass Deportation and the Machinery of Ruin
How U.S. Immigration Policy Completes the Cycle of Dispossession that Economic Policy Began
There is a story about Mexican migration that Americans rarely hear. It’s not about border crossings or asylum claims. It’s about how we engineered the exodus.
For decades, U.S. trade policy, development loans, and economic pressure helped dismantle the rural economies that once sustained Mexico’s Indigenous communities. People didn’t leave because they wanted to. They left because the systems that once held their lives together—farming, communal land, public support—were deliberately stripped away in the name of modernization and market efficiency.
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I saw the before and after. In 1973, when I began fieldwork in the Chatino-speaking highlands of Oaxaca, most villages were self-reliant. Corn and coffee provided enough. Migration was rare, and communities were held together by kinship, reciprocity, and land. That world didn’t fade. It was broken—by design.
In the early 1990s, under pressure from international lenders and free-market economists, the Mexican government imposed a series of structural reforms. They cut off agricultural credit, slashed social programs, and undermined communal land tenure. These weren’t isolated measures—they were a blueprint for displacement, severing people from the means of subsistence they had relied on for generations.
Then came NAFTA. Subsidized U.S. corn flooded rural markets, collapsing the price of the staple crop. Deregulated coffee markets sent incomes plummeting. Southern Mexico’s promised industrial development—once held out as a solution—was abandoned in favor of cheaper factories in China. What remained was an economy of abandonment: under-resourced, over-extracted, and forced to adapt without support.
Migration wasn’t a dream—it was the last option. Over the next thirty years, Chatino families began to move. They found work in U.S. fields, construction sites, hotels, restaurants, and homes. They paid taxes, enrolled their children in school, contributed to local economies, and rebuilt community life across borders.
Now, those communities are being deliberately unraveled.
Trump’s mass deportation regime isn’t just targeting individuals. It’s destabilizing networks of care and belonging built over decades. This isn’t about securing borders. It’s about making survival itself illegitimate—about criminalizing the very adaptations people made in response to the destruction we helped unleash.
We’re watching that destruction become personal.
Our friend María quit her job because she was afraid to be seen. No papers meant no safety. Now she’s planning to return to her village in Oaxaca, leaving behind her three U.S.-born children. Flor, our comadre, made a different decision. She sent her toddler—our goddaughter—back to Mexico to live with relatives. If ICE arrests her, she told us, she might disappear without a chance to say goodbye.
These are not isolated decisions. They are responses to a system designed to extract and expel. In Mexico, families were separated from land and livelihood. In the U.S., they are being separated from their children, their neighborhoods, their hard-won foothold in American life.
Some U.S.-born children sent back with relatives now find themselves undocumented in the only country where they’re allowed to live. No school enrollment. No access to healthcare. No official identity. Others remain here, effectively orphaned. Either way, the rupture is permanent.
This is not just an immigration story. It’s a story about how displacement becomes state policy. It’s about governments that create unlivable conditions, then punish those who leave. It’s about how fear, surveillance, and silence are used to govern—not just to control behavior, but to erase people’s presence from public life.
The arc of Chatino migration reveals the pattern. Dispossession isn’t a single rupture. It recurs. First, rural communities were stripped of resources. Then, migrants were labeled illegal for surviving. Now, they’re being erased from civic life entirely. The methods shift—structural adjustment, trade deals, deportation raids—but the logic is consistent: render people useful, then disposable.
What’s being removed is more than bodies. It’s memory, continuity, and belonging. These deportations aren’t just removals. They are acts of political amnesia. The country benefits from migrant labor, then forgets the cost it imposed that made migration necessary in the first place.
We should name this clearly: it is a politics of abandonment. Engineered through law, enforced through bureaucracy, and tolerated through silence.
And we should resist—not just with outrage, but with clarity. These families are not undocumented—they are overexposed. Not invisible, but targeted. They are living through the aftershocks of policies we helped set in motion and then failed to confront.
We’d be wise to pay attention. What is being done to them under the banner of enforcement may, under another pretext, be done to others. The border is not a line. It is a system. And it expands.
If there’s a way forward, it begins with memory—with telling the truth about what was taken. And with refusing to look away from those still being taken.
Suggested Readings
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Geronimus, Arline T. Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023.
Greenberg, James B. Santiago’s Sword: Chatino Peasant Religion and Economics. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Heyman, Josiah McC. “Constructing ‘Illegality’: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses.” In Illegal Immigration in America: A Reference Handbook, edited by David W. Haines and Karen E. Rosenblum. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2007.
Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the Southwest North American Region. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.
Weaver, Thomas, and James B. Greenberg, eds. Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico: Structures, Struggles, and Futures. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012.
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