Enduring Uncertainty

Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life

Ines Hasselberg

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785330230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Focusing on the lived experience of immigration policy and processes, this volume provides fascinating insights into the deportation process as it is felt and understood by those subjected to it. The author presents a rich and innovative ethnography of deportation and deportability experienced by migrants convicted of criminal offenses in England and Wales. The unique perspectives developed here – on due process in immigration appeals, migrant surveillance and control, social relations and sense of self, and compliance and resistance – are important for broader understandings of border control policy and human rights.

– Chapter 1 –

The Politics of Deportation

Deportation, as a form of expulsion regulating human mobility (Walters 2002), is a practice of state power that reinforces its own sovereignty, renovating concepts such as ‘citizens’ and ‘aliens’ that establish the boundary between those who are included and those excluded, attributing certain benefits to the former that are denied to the latter (Allegro 2006; Bosniak 1998; De Genova 2002; Peutz 2006). While an examination of practices of deportation is thus located at the intersection of several oppositions – such as citizen/foreigner, home/away, mobility/emplacement, inclusion/exclusion and deserving/undeserving – these are uneasy binaries, constantly challenged and reshaped by different actors. In this chapter I discuss these issues while providing an overview of existing scholarship relevant to the study of the deportation of foreign-national offenders. I then consider the major political and legal developments that brought the deportation of foreign-national offenders onto the public and political agenda, and culminated in the introduction of automatic deportations from the UK. Finally, I will discuss the policy imperatives to deportation in this context.

Membership, Contestation and the Criminalisation of Foreign Nationals

Though forced migration has long been studied by social scientists, the forced removal of long-term migrants constitutes an emerging field of studies. Literature on this topic has emerged mainly in the past decade, in the wake of changes to US immigration policies in 1996, which led to the deportation of thousands of legal permanent citizens to their countries of origin after being convicted of criminal charges.¹ Indeed, the majority of these early ethnographies of deportation dealt with deportations of long-term residents in the United States (Moniz 2004; Peutz 2006; Yngvesson and Coutin 2006; Zilberg 2004).

The Soviet forced population movements generated an earlier literature on deportation, dating back to the 1960s. As Walters (2002) notes, deportation is but one form of expulsion. Others include religious expulsion, the transportation of criminals, political exile and population transfers. However, these are not necessarily neatly bounded concepts, and at times they may be overlapping categories. Soviet forced population transfers removed people from their place of birth and relocated them to a designated area. Their removability was grounded on who they were (such as Chechens, Polish, Ingush). Deportation, on the other hand, is intended to forcibly remove a person from their place of residence to their purported country of origin. Here, deportability tends to be grounded on lack of legal immigration status or the undesirable actions of the individual – such as moral behaviour, political ideology, criminal conviction. However, these are not neat categories. For one thing, long-term migrants may perceive their country of residence as their home. This is more so for second-generation migrants, as ‘the more time spent in the host country, the greater the imbalance of social, linguistic, or familiar ties between the host and the home country tends to be’ (Bhabha 1998: 615). In this sense, contemporary deportees, like displaced populations under the Soviet regime, may feel they are being forced to leave their home. On the other hand, deportability is not as rooted in one’s actions as it first may seem, but may serve other political intentions, as discussed by Bullard (1997), Cohen (2006), Gabriel (1987), Maira (2007) and Moloney (2006), among others.

Anderson, Gibney and Paoletti (2011) make the case that deportation is constitutive of deservedness of membership (see also Anderson 2013; Gibney 2013). Deportation constructs citizenship (Walters 2002) because ‘every act of deportation might be seen as reaffirming the significance of the unconditional right of residence that citizenship provides’ (Anderson, Gibney and Paoletti 2011: 548). Deportation policies comply with public expectations and electoral politics; they assure the voting public that the problem has been identified, and is being addressed through state power (Bosworth 2008; Gibney and Hansen 2003; Leerkes and Broeders 2010). In seeking to expel the unwanted, deportation reveals ‘citizenry as community of value as much as community of law’, and this is where the symbolic and definitive power of deportation lies (Anderson, Gibney and Paoletti 2011: 548). Deportation thus has the potential to be divisive (Anderson, Gibney and Paoletti 2011; Freedman 2011; McGregor 2011), as the grounds of who belongs, and who should decide on who belongs, are contested not just between the state and the public but also between different actors.

Conflicts are brought about for instance during Antid-eportation Campaigns (ADCs). It has been shown how the dynamics of migration control vary during the policy cycle (Ellermann 2009; Freedman 2011): a person may vote for restrictionist policies while also campaign against the deportation of their neighbours. Where people may in general and abstract terms want stricter immigration control, when faced directly (through a neighbour or colleague) with the harsh reality of deportation, they may seek to prevent particular migrants from being deported. It is in this sense that Gibney (2008) argues that deportation invites contestation.

But who is worthy of contestation? ADCs may make use of human rights language, but mostly they deploy ideas of integration, belonging and ‘the good citizen’ to underline the contribution of removable foreign nationals to their community and the society at large. As ADCs emphasise normative identification and relegate human rights considerations to second place, foreign-national offenders may be left out of their reach. In fact, as explored in Chapter 5, foreign-national offenders with no asylum claim seldom campaign against their deportation. Society’s normative behaviour deems them less worthy than others (Anderson, Gibney and Paoletti 2011), and ‘the good citizen’ argument is hardly convincing.

Current reliance on criminal justice and punitive rhetoric about the dangers embodied in foreign citizens is used in policy to secure the border, both in the UK and elsewhere (Aas 2013; Bosworth 2011, 2012; Inda 2006; Khosravi 2011). The increasing tendency towards governance through criminal law is prevalent in the management of migration (Stumpf 2006), through the practices of detention, bail, reporting and deportation, which not only allows for the close monitoring of foreign nationals but also reinforces the notion that the public needs protection from them. The policing and criminalisation of foreign nationals thus sends the message that foreigners pose a risk to society. Harsh immigration policies may be a symbol of strength, but one indicative of an actual weakness in authority and inadequate controls – it is indicative of government’s inability to control the border (Bosworth 2008; Leerkes and Broeders 2010).

But while policy is developed and applied, it may not be carried through to the end. There is an ‘increasing inability of states to conduct the kind of mass deportation campaigns they claim to aim for’ (Paoletti 2010: 13). For one thing, there is often a lack of cooperation from receiving states, which refuse to provide travel documents to deportable migrants. There are legal and human rights constraints and, through immigration appeals, deportation and removal can be delayed for long periods of time. Most foreign nationals participating in this study, for instance, had been appealing their deportation for over two years. The Home Office also faces financial and administrative constraints (Paoletti 2010). The non-deportability of some foreign nationals (Paoletti 2010) leaves them in a legal limbo where they are not included in the host society even if they are physically present as they are prevented from actively participating in it. This was particularly felt among research participants as evidenced in Chapter 4. Not being able to work or actively plan their future and carry on with their lives, their existence in the UK is effectively interrupted even if they are still in the country.

The criminalisation of immigrants in liberal democracies and elsewhere has been examined and discussed in a comprehensive body of literature that discusses the legality and social legitimacy of such practices (Aas and Bosworth 2013; Bhabha 1998, 1999; Cohen 1997; Cohen 2006; De Genova 2002; Hayter 2003; Kanstroom 2000, 2007, 2012; Maira 2007; Morawetz 2000; Nyers 2003). These debates are again intrinsically connected with notions of citizenship, entitlement and justice. Stumpf (2011) argues that the convergence of criminal and immigration law also reduces migrants’ lives and existence to a particular point in time – that of a criminal or immigration offence:

This extraordinary focus on the moment of the crime conflicts with the fundamental notion of the individual as a collection of many moments composing our experiences, relationships, and circumstances. It frames out circumstances, conduct, experiences, or relationships that tell a different story about the individual, closing off the potential for redemption and disregarding the collateral effects on the people and communities with ties to the noncitizen. (Stumpf 2011: 1705)

In the UK, deportation and related practices of surveillance are indeed a straightforward consequence of a criminal conviction. But while the decision to exclude migrants is reduced to that particular moment of their lives, when deciding on deportation appeals, the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT) does bear in mind the ‘circumstances, conduct, experiences, or relationships that tell a different story about the individual’ of which Stumpf writes (see also Chapter 2). That their lives were now dominated by that one moment in time when they were convicted was in fact all too present in research participants’ lives. They had become labelled as offenders, which, coupled with being foreigners, not only subjected them to deportation and state surveillance (see Chapter 3) but also prevented them from openly resisting and protesting for their rights (see Chapter 5).

Banishment and Exile

Deportation ethnographies do illustrate, as Siulc (2004) puts it, the differences between lived and legal definitions of citizenship, belonging and justice. A good example is Davies’s study of the deportation of Claudia Jones from the US in 1953 on the grounds of allegiance to communist political ideology (Davies 2002). What is of interest here is the political terminology used by Jones. She was a young child when she moved to the United States, and that country was therefore her home; she had even applied for American citizenship. When the deportation order came through and Jones lost the appeal, she voluntarily moved to the United Kingdom, instead of being deported to the Caribbean, and has since referred to her deportation as exile. An exiled person is one who is banished from their home, as opposed to a deportee who is forced home. As Davies puts it, ‘[b]y identifying her experience as an exile, Jones was able to challenge the idea of citizenship and belonging’ (Davies 2002: 963).

In fact, many authors use the words ‘deportation’ and ‘exile’ interchangeably (e.g. Bullard 1997; Cominsrichmond 2002; Pohl 2002). It is argued here, however, that the words connote different meanings, and it is indeed this difference that allows deportees to contest established concepts of justice and citizenship by resisting the notion that they do not belong to the country from which they have been removed. The choice of the word ‘exile’ is often used exactly to resist this idea that someone has been deported to their home as opposed to being forced to leave it. The title of Moniz’s work on the forced return of foreign-national offenders of Azorean origin – Exiled Home (Moniz 2004) – reflects this paradigm. My own findings also suggest that for settled migrants, whether 1.5 or first generation, deportation may indeed be experienced as exile, as deportees are being expelled from their residence of choice, separated from their families and everything they have worked for – their lives in the UK remain suspended and interrupted. As Yngvesson and Coutin put it so well, ‘deportation interrupts what would presumably otherwise have been the migrant’s continued existence’ in the country of residence (Yngvesson and Coutin 2006: 181).

‘Deportation’ is a strong word. It may invoke images of the Second World War, of Jews and many others being deported from Europe, and of harsh Soviet population movements (Burman 2006). Similarly strong are ‘banishment’ and ‘exile’, words that evoke images of people expelled from their home country, resonating with notions of injustice and persecution, mostly associated with repressive political regimes. ‘Removal’, on the other hand, ‘is a seemingly benign term seldom applied to humans in other contexts, that simply describes making disappear a stain or a wart on the body politic’ (Burman 2006: 280), especially as discourses of ‘removal to’, not ‘removal from’, veil ‘the prospective deportees dwelling place completely’ (Burman 2006: 280).

In the UK, the two terms – deportation and removal – are used for two different practices that have different implications for those subject to them and, most important, elicit different public opinions. The choice of words resonates with their political uses. Asylum seekers, more likely than others to obtain public sympathy and support when campaigning against their deportation, are ‘removed to’ – or in other words, are ‘sent home’ (and what harm can come from returning home?); ‘foreign criminals’, meanwhile, are ‘deported from’ the UK. Deportees have no public sympathy, no public support.

Deportation and Deportability

Recognising that migrant illegality is more than a juridical status led anthropologists in the early 2000s to call for a shift of focus away from the illegal migrant and the deportee towards illegality and deportability as conditions ensuing from the social and political processes that legally produce them (Coutin 2003; De Genova 2002). Focusing on illegality and deportability emphasises both socio-political (De Genova 2002) and phenomenological dimensions (Willen 2007). As socio-political modes of existence, they profoundly affect migrants’ everyday lives, ‘shaping their subjective experiences of time, space, embodiment, sociality and self’ (Willen 2007: 10).

Consequently, the past decade has witnessed a rise in studies engaging critically with deportation to explore the intricacies of sovereignty, space and the freedom of movement (Aas and Bosworth 2013; De Genova and Peutz 2010). Academic attention has focused both on experiences of deportation and deportability as lived by those remaining in the host country (Burman 2006; Willen 2007), and in post-deportation circumstances (Drotbohm 2011; Moniz 2004; Peutz 2006; Schuster and Majidi 2013; Zilberg 2004). The latter focus tends to emphasise the removal of second-generation migrants – people who ‘are returned “home” to a place where, in their memory, they have never been’ (Zilberg 2004: 761). Issues of identity formation and alienation have been central in these studies. Studies of deportability on the other hand, have underlined questions of exclusion, entitlement, human rights and the foreigner/citizen divide. Here deportation is most evident as a disciplinary tool of social control (Kanstroom 2000). Both approaches examine the way deportability impacts on migrants’ perceptions of justice, of public/private spheres of life, and of their sense of security (Bhabha 1998). What these studies emphasise, as does this book, is that deportation is not merely an event that forcibly relocates foreign nationals from one nation to another, but rather a process that exerts its power far before, and long after, removal takes place, and over a wider group of people than just the deportee.

When narrating the experiences of deportees, these ethnographic studies have pointed to several domains of forced return. Peutz (2006, 2007) explores the embodied and chronotopic experiences created by the deportation of Somali nationals, as well as deportees’ perceptions of the law and their uses of it (Peutz 2007). The author finds an apparent contradiction: her informants, expelled for breaking US law, believe that deportation proceedings against them were not lawful, and yet, while in ‘exile’, they trust the power of the law to defend them – they desire the (US) rule of law. Zilberg (2004) focuses on the criminalisation and transnationalisation of Salvadoran migrant identities and the recreation of the geographies of violence of Los Angeles at the receiving end.

Siulc (2004) has examined strategies deployed by nationals of the Dominican Republic who have been deported from the US, and who, perceiving their removal to be unjust, attempt to return illegally, thus becoming ‘illegal’ migrants in a place they call home and where they were legal residents before. Siulc’s approach is particularly important in that, by looking beyond deportees’ suffering, emphasis is not placed on what is being done to the deportees but rather on what they are doing about it. It acknowledges their agency and their resistance. Like Peutz (2007), she also emphasises deportees’ perceptions of justice and law. Related to this is the notion of double punishment. One of Zilberg’s informants, for instance, states that he feels exiled in El Salvador because he has not been given a passport and hence cannot leave the country (Zilberg 2004). He feels he is being punished twice: he was incarcerated and served his sentence, after which he was deported. Many others, including my own research participants, have echoed this perception (Moniz 2004; Peutz 2006). Double punishment in these circumstances has been equated to ‘double jeopardy’ (Bhabha 1998, 1999) in the sense that it ‘violates human rights norms of non-discrimination and presumptions of equality of treatment before the law’ and ‘negates the historical and psychological reality of third country nationals’ (Bhabha 1998: 615). Here again, lived concepts of citizenship and justice are at play, and stand in opposition to legal and institutionalised ones.

These studies were mostly concerned with long-term migrants forcibly removed from the US due to their criminal convictions, and centre their analysis on the deportees themselves at the receiving end. Another literature has focused on the experience of deportability, of waiting for deportation to come through and the experience of living in a community in which deportations have occurred (Gabriel 1987; Gardner 2010; Lesch 1979; Taagepera 1980). In illegality studies, deportability is constructed as inherently tied to illegality. Deportability is a means of guaranteeing a vulnerable and cheap pool of ‘disposable’ labour were ‘some are deported in order that most may remain (undeported) – as workers, whose pronounced and protracted legal vulnerability may thus be sustained indefinitely’ (De Genova 2009: 456).

Longva (1999) writes about labour migrants in Kuwait being in check due to their imminent deportability. In Kuwait, the violation of moral norms is an offence conducive to deportation, a vague term that has the potential for arbitrary use, and hence leaves immigrants in a constant state of fear that is exploited by their employers (see also Gardner 2010). Mountz et al. set out to examine how ‘immigration policies shape identities through both their texts and their effects’ (Mountz et al. 2002: 246). In particular, the authors look at Salvadoran migrants in the US holding ‘temporary protected status’, which, by perpetually granting them only temporary protection from deportation, places their lives in limbo, in a constant state of transition where the uncertainty of the future curtails any attempt to make the most basic decisions. Willen (2007) examines the impact of illegality on migrants’ sense of embodiment and experiences of time and place in Israel. She does not assume that all migrants are victims of structural violence and social suffering, but rather documents how the new ‘arsenal techniques’ developed by the Israeli Immigration Police criminalise undocumented migrants, and how the ‘newly intensified threat of arrest and deportation began to reverberate into every corner of migrants’ complicated lives’ (Willen 2007: 17). Like Mountz et al. (2002) and Willen (2007), Burman (2006) focuses on migrants’ fear of deportation (in her case, in Montreal), revealing how they are haunted by their deportability and insecurity. Like Willen, she examines how migrants’ deportability affects their sense of time, space and mobility. Focusing on ‘how absence is lived presently – how it is kept moving, not still’, Burman reveals ‘how absence is made presence when those left behind develop a well-founded suspicion of the state, one that transforms their sense of possible futures’ (Burman 2006: 281).

These and other recent studies of illegality and ethnographies of the lives of undocumented migrants have emphasised feelings of constant fear and insecurity, and detailed strategies of evasion and invisibility (Castañeda 2010; Talavera, Nunez-Mchiri and Heyman 2010; Wicker 2010; Willen ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction An Ethnography of Deportation From the UK
• Chapter One The Politics of Deportation
• Chapter Two Living the Law
• Chapter Three Surveillance and Control
• Chapter Four Undecided Present, Uncertain Futures
• Chapter Five On Compliance and Resistance
• Conclusion
• References
• Index