Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation

Peter Nyers

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429809873
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Derecho
• Categoría: Derecho migratorio

Deportation has again taken a prominent place within the immigration policies of nation-states. Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation addresses the social responses to deportation, in particular the growing movements against deportation and detention, and for freedom of movement and the regularization of status.

The book brings deportation and anti-deportation together with the aim of understanding the political subjects that emerge in this contested field of governance and control, freedom and struggle. However, rather than focusing on the typical subjects of removal – refugees, the undocumented, and irregular migrants – Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation looks at the ways that citizens get caught up in the deportation apparatus and must struggle to remain in or return to their country of citizenship. The transformation of 'regular' citizens into deportable 'irregular' citizens involves the removal of the rights, duties, and obligations of citizenship. This includes unmaking citizenship through official revocation or denationalization, as well as through informal, extra-legal, and unofficial means. The book features stories about struggles over removal and return, deportation and repatriation, rescue and abandonment. The book features eleven 'acts of citizenship' that occur in the context of deportation and anti-deportation, arguing that these struggles for rights, recognition, and return are fundamentally struggles over political subjectivity – of citizenship.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of citizenship, migration and security studies.

1 The subject of irregularity

Enacting irregularity

This chapter is about the subject of irregularity, a formulation that can be unpacked in a number of ways. In the first place, irregularity has emerged as an important subject across a number of fields and professions. Academics, politicians, policymakers, economists, and other professions have laid claim to expertise about a range of ‘irregular’ events or activities: irregular migration, warfare, climate, financing, and so on. Irregularity has, therefore, emerged as an important object of inquiry, knowledge, and expertise. This has led to a proliferation of institutions, laws, and policies created to manage, regulate, or eliminate irregularity. In addition to being a site of knowledge, irregularity is also an important site of intervention, governance, and rule. But the proliferation of irregular knowledges and institutions also raises the question of subjectivity (cf. Walker 1997). Who is the subject of these inquiries, knowledges, and expertise? Who is the subject of these interventions, governances, and rules? Who are the subjects that are produced in, through, and against irregularity? The subject of irregularity that is the subject of this book is the irregular citizen.

What is irregular citizenship? I want to avoid proposing a general or definitive definition. What is better, in my view, is to approach irregularity as more of a question than as an opportunity to provide a general definition. As for citizenship, irregular citizenship is similar to all other forms of citizenship in that it is a contested site of social struggles (Isin et al. 2009). There is no singular way to define this identity. Accordingly, the aim of this book is to explore some of the multiple forms of irregular citizenship, investigate their origins, and elaborate on what they do, how they are enacted, and how they are put into practice. Let us begin, instead, by looking at someone who has been made into an irregular citizen. The example of Deepan Budlakoti is illustrative of irregularity as he is a Canadian citizen who has been made effectively stateless within his own country.

Act 1: Deepan Budlakoti: On 17 October 1989, Deepan Budlakoti was born in the Ottawa General Hospital, making him a birthright Canadian citizen. In 2011, he was told by government officials that he was no longer a Canadian citizen and, further, that he had never been a Canadian citizen. His birth in Ottawa would normally have made him subject to Canada’s territorial birthright laws for conferring citizenship. Over the years, the state seemed to confirm his formal membership by issuing him various documents normally reserved for citizens, including a birth certificate and passport. The government became interested in unmaking Budlakoti’s citizenship while he was in prison after being convicted of firearms and drug charges in 2010. Budlakoti served a prison sentence of three years and eight months, during which time he completed his high school diploma, took university level courses, and was recommended for early parole because of his model behaviour. Meanwhile, an unnamed correctional officer decided to conduct a ‘profile’ of Budlakoti and contacted immigration officials to review his citizenship. Suddenly, midway through his sentence, Budlakoti was transferred from prison to an immigration detention facility – in other words, to a facility reserved for non-citizens who are scheduled for deportation or who are waiting for documents to confirm their claimed identity. It was there that immigration officials informed him he ‘was not and has never been a Canadian citizen’ and, further, that he was ‘inadmissible to Canada for reasons of serious criminality’. Budlakoti was then issued a removal order; he was to be deported to India – the country of his parents’ birth, but with which he has no familiarity or social connection. In a very short period of time, Budlakoti was transformed from an incarcerated citizen into a deportable foreigner. Once he was released from immigrant detention, he was still treated like an irregular migrant. He had to abide by strict limitations on his residency and freedom of movement, and he is the subject of regular surveillance by border officials. In order to work, Budlakoti must apply like another foreigner for a work permit. Since the government of Canada defines a work permit as ‘a written authorization issued by an officer that allows a person who is neither a citizen nor a permanent resident to work in Canada’, he was established as a non-citizen in the eyes of the administrative apparatus of the Canadian state. However, the designation ‘migrant worker’ would be a misnomer because without a passport Budlakoti cannot travel and he would be denied the right to access consular services abroad. ¹

Neither citizen nor migrant, Budlakoti’s situation demands a new appellation – irregular citizenship. While human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have characterized Budlakoti’s case as ‘unique’ (Neve 2015), his story speaks to wider political controversies about the status of citizenship today. Citizenship is not only harder to obtain, it is easier to lose. The loss of citizenship, moreover, is being experienced in both official and unofficial forms. Citizenship can be legally rescinded or formally revoked; but it can also be unmade by being made unworkable. We are witnessing a struggle around a complex political process that I call the irregularization of citizenship. I use the term ‘irregularization’ to emphasize that irregular citizenship is not a static identity, but an activity and a process that requires dynamic creative energy to achieve this unmaking of citizenship. People are not irregular; they are made irregular – irregularized – by power relationships (including relations of struggle) that are the subject of investigation in this book.

How is irregular citizenship made? How does irregularization unmake citizenship? How is it put into practice and enacted? Budlakoti’s case provides some insight into the complexities and common dynamics that arise in making irregular citizenship. His irregular citizenship, like many of the other cases discussed in this book, was enabled through a convergence of processes of racialization, externalization, exceptionalism, accidents, and – not least of which – contestation. Let us examine each of these dynamics and processes in turn.

First, the dynamic of racialization is key to understanding how Budlakoti’s citizenship was unmade. While a person’s ‘deportability’ (De Genova 2002) depends upon a number of factors, key among them is the way that people are, or are not, racialized. One can speculate whether it was Budlakoti’s brown skin and dark beard that prompted the prison official to single him out, create a profile, and instigate an investigation about his citizenship status (Stasiulis 2017). This speaks to the ‘stickiness’ (Ahmed 2004) of irregular citizenship. Whether it is understood as a status, affect, or act, irregularity ‘sticks’ to certain subjects, peoples, and identities more than others. Sara Ahmed has theorized these ‘sticky attachments’ as involving the repetition of certain words to produce certain affects through their reiteration. So the regular and repeated depiction of irregular migrants, for example, as racialized subjects carry ‘traces of context’ that prevent other irregular subjects (such as irregular citizens) from taking on new meanings and identities (Ahmed 2004, 92). To be sure, the majority of irregular citizens that populate this book are racialized subjects in the countries in which they live. This racialization has been a key factor in making irregularity work.²

Second, the dynamic of externalization was a key element in the attempt to transform Budlakoti into a foreigner. For deportation to work there needs to be a state to which the deportee can be ‘returned’. In other words, deporting non-citizens normally requires that they be citizens somewhere else. Their irregularity or illegality here works on the assumption that they are regular and legal subjects elsewhere. How else could Canadian officials declare with a straight face that Budlakoti was ‘inadmissible’ even though he had lived his entire life in the country? Externalization worked at the level of political belonging as well. The attempt to ‘repatriate’ Budlakoti to India (a country that he had never visited) was based on the assumption that his essence as a political being resided in that country, and not in Canada. What is noteworthy about this form of externalization is that it underscores how state citizenship is never only a ‘domestic’ category. Citizenship plays an integral and constitutive role in the larger international system of states; it is one of the central practices that goes into constituting, reproducing, and normalizing the international system of states. In this way, citizenship and deportation work together as key elements in a global regime that Barry Hindess (2000) has named the ‘international management of populations’. Here, we can see a theme that will be sustained throughout the book, which is the significance of the externalizing dynamic of irregularity. Irregular citizenship links up with deportation because its foreignness needs to be displaced, expelled, and externalized.

Third, irregularization is closely related to, but distinct from, the politics of exceptionalism. This came into play in Budlakoti’s case in the context of the government’s effort to deport him to India. This was immediately stymied by the Indian government, which has never recognized Budlakoti as a citizen and has refused to authorize his ‘repatriation’. India’s position is that Budlakoti obtained his citizenship the same way as the vast majority of Canadians: that is, through a regime of territorial birthright citizenship. With certain exceptions, anyone born on Canadian territory is automatically a Canadian citizen. Being born to non-citizen parents, as Budlakoti was, does not constitute an exception to this norm. Being born to diplomatic staff of a foreign government, however, does register as one of the few exceptions to this rule. The principle of ‘diplomatic exception’ has long been a key pillar of diplomatic practice. While it allows foreign diplomatic staff to be exempted from the jurisdiction of local laws, it also prevents them from benefiting from certain rights and privileges that normally come with residing in a state’s territory. An important exemption is being conferred national citizenship through the territorial birthright regime. But while Budlakoti’s parents did come to Canada as members of the household staff of the Indian Ambassador, they left their jobs at the embassy six months prior to their son’s birth. By the time Budlakoti was born, his parents were working in a local Ottawa doctor’s office. They would continue to reside in Ottawa, obtain permanent resident status, and eventually become citizens of Canada. All signs indicated that Budlakoti was a citizen, too. He was issued various state documents that are exclusively reserved for Canadian citizens, including a birth certificate issued by the Province of Ontario and, later, when he was a teenager, a Canadian passport. Indeed, Budlakoti would consistently point out this key fact when defending his status as a Canadian: ‘I had every document a Canadian would have’ (Keung 2013).

Fourth, throughout Budlakoti’s struggle there has been the mobilization of the discourse of the accident as a political technology to unmake citizenship. Citizenship revocation is commonly justified on the grounds that there has been a fraudulent misrepresentation of a fact, usually done during the immigration or refugee determination process. In Budlakoti’s case, however, the alleged ‘error’ in conferring birthright citizenship was claimed by the state. The results, however, are the same: the subject is subsumed in the legal and institutional network of detention, deportation, and citizenship revocation. The Canadian government’s position was that Budlakoti’s birth certificate, health cards, and passports were all ‘issued in error’ and were a ‘mistake’. Budlakoti’s citizenship was an accidental form of citizenship, and overcoded with the themes of uncertainty, contingency, and chance. So in addition to being deemed accidental – the result of an ‘error’ and ‘mistake’ – he is cast as an undeserving citizen. At the same time, however, we see the accident working in another way, as an accident for the state and the interstate system. The failed deportation of Budlakoti represents a breakdown of the international governance of citizenship. If citizenship is a central part of the ‘international management of populations’, as Hindess (2000) persuasively claims, then Budlakoti’s case is an acute case of mis-management. As we saw above, Canadian authorities were keen to ‘repatriate’ Budlakoti to India, but India does not recognize him as a citizen and will not accept him. Hence, Budlakoti remains in Canada as an irregularized citizen.

Finally, contestation runs throughout the process of constituting citizenship, irregular or otherwise. Despite the extensive efforts of the Canadian state to unmake Budlakoti’s Canadian citizenship, this process of irregularization was not entirely smooth or seamless. The emergence of the Justice for Deepan campaign has been active in providing legal and court support as well as to raise the profile of his case with the broader Canadian public. This has resulted in ongoing coverage of his case by major Canadian newspapers and media outlets, such as the Toronto Star, Globe & Mail, and National Post. Support for Budlakoti has come from over five-dozen social justice groups, labour unions, and other civil society organizations, including Amnesty International and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Public forums at Carleton University, the University of Ottawa, and the Peoples Social Forum in Montreal have provoked broader discussions on the meaning of statelessness, citizenship, and belonging. Rallies in support of Budlakoti have been organized in Ottawa, Kingston, and Toronto. And, of course, in an age of digital citizenship (Isin and Ruppert 2015), the Justice for Deepan committee has taken full advantage of social media, online petition sites, and crowdsourced funding appeals to help mobilize support for Budlakoti’s case. An online ’zine called Statelessness: Justice for Deepan was produced by the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) at Carleton University in 2015, and a documentary film called Illegalized explores the complexities of Budlakoti’s case and its link to broader struggles around migrant and citizenship rights. In the realm of academia, studies of Budlakoti’s case have been published in social justice journals (e.g. Stasiulis 2017).

Like any power relationship the process of irregularization does not operate smoothly or without friction. Irregular citizenship is a key site of struggle over citizenship, and this struggle involves a multiplicity of actors and interests who have coalesced to variously enable or resist the power of racialization, externalization, sovereign exceptionalism, and accidentalization. Resistance, therefore, is not something for the margins, or a footnote to the dominant narratives of official state discourse. Contestation is integral and co-constitutive of this entire process. In this way, when speaking of ‘irregular citizenship’ we should not assume that the regular and the irregular are separate and discrete phenomena. They are co-constitutive. Irregular citizenship, therefore involves both relations of control and resistance, domination and freedom, rights and rightlessness, isolation and solidarity. Can citizens who are unmade into irregular citizens successfully reverse this change in their status? What kind of social mobilizations can contest borderzones that disaggregate citizenship into ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ forms? Answering these questions will animate much of the discussion of all the acts of irregular citizenship featured in the chapters to come.

Vocabularies of irregularity

How citizenship is made and unmade can be drawn out by a critical reflection on the language, terminology, and discourse of irregularity. The ‘irregular’ is often represented as separate and distinct from ‘regular’ forms of activity. Irregular warfare, for example, is said to be distinct from conventional warfare, lacking as it does the formal institutions, laws, customs, uniforms, and open display of weaponry favoured by ‘regular forces’. Indeed, one prominent scholar in International Relations has defined terrorism as the ‘irregular use of violence’ (Lake 2002, 17). Irregular migration is similarly said to be distinct from regular migration, following routes and favouring documentation that is outside the no...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Citizens of the deportspora
• 1. The subject of irregularity
• 2. Abandoned citizens
• 3. Accidental citizens
• 4. Irregular economies of rescue and revocation
• 5. Irregular returns: Repatriation from below
• 6. Liberating irregularity: Democratizing borders in sanctuary cities
• Conclusion: Unsettling irregular citizenship
• Index