Deportation by Design: How Political Entrepreneurs Engineered Crime-Based Deportation in the United States

Starting in the 1980s, the U.S. federal government considerably expanded criminal grounds for deportation, laying the foundation for today’s enforcement regime. Yet, the policymaking dynamics behind this shift remain unclear, given the country’s long history of using criminality to exclude, detain, and remove immigrants. I argue that modern crime-based deportation originated with an underexplored provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, followed by key expansions in 1988 and 1990. Using a reactive sequences framework, I trace how macroscopic forces converged to produce a contingent event—the insertion of Section 701 into the 1986 Act—triggering a backlash-driven sequence of reforms that reshaped U.S. immigration enforcement. Analyzing congressional debates from 1986–1990, I reveal how a bipartisan coalition of political entrepreneurs, many from Florida, embedded crime-based deportation within the broader institutional crackdown on drugs and crime. Substantively, my findings clarify how deportation laws evolve through national policymaking, often in response to local pressures. Theoretically, I extend the reactive sequences approach to a novel case, demonstrating how political actors exploit contingent moments to drive institutional change.