Self-deportation


Self-deportation is an approach to dealing with unauthorized immigration, used in the United States and the United Kingdom, that allows an otherwise inadmissible person to voluntarily depart a country for which they have no legal ties to rather than face removal proceedings in front of the native court system. It became associated with unauthorized immigration to the United States in the 1990s.

History

This term was used as early as 1984 in a People article about the film director Roman Polanski, which referred to his self-deporting. The term gained its current association with unauthorized immigration in the 1990s, especially in California. In 1994, William Safire described its usage by California governor Pete Wilson's immigration strategy, exemplified by Proposition 187, which prevented unauthorized aliens from using a variety of state social services. Safire summarized the philosophy of the approach as holding that "the most cost-effective way to change behavior is to make life unbearable under present behavior." The same year, Lalo Alcaraz and Esteban Zul launched a satirical campaign involving a character named "Daniel D. Portado", who facetiously promoted self-deportation.