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Introduction
Deportation, Anxiety, Justice: New Ethnographic Perspectives
Heike Drotbohm and Ines Hasselberg
This paper introduces a collection of articles that share ethnographic perspectives on the intersections between deportation, anxiety and justice. As a form of expulsion regulating human mobility, deportation policies may be justified by public authorities as measures responding to anxieties over (unregulated) migration. At the same time, they also bring out uncertainty and unrest to deportable/deported migrants and their families. Providing new and complementary insights into what ādeportationā as a legal and policy measure actually embraces in social reality, this special issue argues for an understanding of deportation as a process that begins long before, and carries on long after, the removal from one country to another takes place. It provides a transnational perspective over the ādeportation corridorā, covering different places, sites, actors and institutions. Furthermore, it reasserts the emotional and normative elements inherent to deportation policies and practices emphasising the interplay between deportation, perceptions of justice and national, institutional and personal anxieties. The papers cover a broad spectrum of geographical sites, deportation practices and perspectives and are a significant and long overdue contribution to the current state of the art in deportation studies.
Deportation, the forced removal of foreign nationals from a given national territory, is not a singular event. It is a process that begins long before, and carries on long after, the removal from one country to another takes place. Deportation crosses places and spaces, connects countries and nations. Most important, deportation involves more than those who are or might be deported. The experience of deportation ties together deportable and deported individuals as well as their families with the decisions and actions of state officials, bureaucrats, lawyers and judges, it brings them together with security personnel, agents of border control and prison staff, it involves political activists, rights-focused non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as well as the media (Peutz 2006; Drotbohm 2013; Hasselberg 2013).
Throughout history, deportation has served as a key means of dividing insiders from outsiders, the wanted from the unwanted, the deserving from the undeserving (Walters 2002). Like other practices of expulsion and transfer of population groups, deportation has thus been intrinsically linked to the establishment of boundaries of belonging and, ultimately, to definitions of citizenship (Anderson, Gibney, and Paoletti 2011). While the categories of people targeted by forced removal have been changing over time, in present liberal democracies the status of ādeportabilityā (De Genova 2002) is restricted to foreign nationals.1 Particularly in the course of the last two decades, the territorial exclusion of unwanted foreigners, constructed as a threat to national security, has become an important tool of current policies of migration to act both as deterrent and control (De Genova 2007; De Genova & Peutz 2010). In Europe and North America, the quest for border-based national security has led to a substantial transformation in the application of immigration penalties, culminating in the ānormalisationā of the administrative entanglement of detention and forced return (Bloch and Schuster 2005; Kanstroom 2007, 2012). This development contributed to a discursive association between terrorism, security and immigration, resulting in a rising application of deportation as a tool to effect departure (Coutin 2007; De Genova 2002, 2007; Pratt 2005). The term ādeportation turnā (Gibney 2008) is now commonly used in the literature to capture this significant change in the governing of mobile and immigrant populations.
Scholarly interest in deportation has accompanied these developments and a set of excellent historically and empirically grounded work on deportation has been provided by social scientists focusing on the intersections between the acceleration of transnational labour migration, the illegalities constituted and regimented by migration law and the multiple dimensions of citizenship (De Genova 2002, 2007; Coutin 2003, 2007; Nyers 2003; Zilberg 2004; Inda 2006, 2013; Kanstroom 2007, 2012; Gibney 2008; Peutz 2006, 2007; Peutz and De Genova 2010; Willen 2007; Bosworth 2008, 2011; Ellermann 2009; Anderson, Gibney, and Paoletti 2011; Drotbohm 2011, 2012; Feldman 2011; Khosravi 2010; Aas and Bosworth 2013; Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013; Das Gupta 2014; Golash-Boza 2014). In her contribution to this special issue, Susan Bibler Coutin discusses the particularities of deportation studies in relation to both security studies and migration studies. With regard to prospects, condition, direction and outcome of migration, deportation studies question assumptions already taken for granted in migration studies. Additionally, deportation studies examine not only the human impact of closing borders and surveillance but also macro-level perspectives, governmental positions, political regimes and the societal effect of involuntary return (Coutin 2014).
This special issue is the outcome of an international workshop at the biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, with the overall theme Uncertainty and Disquiet, which took place in Nanterre, France.2 Comprising six empirical papers, and a discussion note by Susan Bibler Coutin, this collection of papers seeks to complement the present body of literature on deportation in a number of ways: first in establishing a transnational perspective over the deportation corridor, second in reasserting both the emotional and normative elements inherent to deportation policies and practices and third in presenting ethnographically grounded accounts of different elements and perspectives.
The ādeportation corridorā
Referring to the processual quality of deportation described above, we intend to establish a transnational perspective over the ādeportation corridorā, which covers different places, actors and institutions. A comparable approach has been introduced by Nathalie Peutz, who argued for an āanthropology of removalā, which would include not only the different domains and sites of experience, such as imprisonment, detention, deportation, return, but also the different types of organisations and institutions involved (Peutz 2006, 218ā219). Corridors are spaces of in-between-ness and movement, connecting and referring to rooms of clearer positionality, assignment and representation. In many corridors of institutional spaces, empty chairs signal the passive, waiting position to which actors have to submit themselves; corridors here host an atmosphere of clear hierarchies, governing and spatial order. In contrast to those spaces, they refer toāthat appear clear, agreeable and invitingācorridors are often poorly lit, shady and suspect. They may be impersonal and affectively cold as nobody is supposed to live in them. By connecting the notion of the corridor to the enactment and the experience of deportation, we wish to highlight a spatial, institutional and affective state of transit, which appears permanent and transitory at the same time. We also pinpoint dichotomies such as inside/outside, centre/margins, inclusion/exclusion, which are produced through the process of deportation.
The papers included here trace this ādeportation corridorā. Due to the temporal (and often financial limits of ethnographic fieldwork), our individual case studies do not cover the entire process and all actors of removal.3 Instead, we unite case studies under a corresponding perspective, each one covering different steps, stages and perspectives along the ādeportation corridorā in different parts of the world. Our ethnographies make clear that these different case studies can be understood complementary to each other. Additionally, our approach does exceed not only the boundaries of the territory but also the boundaries of state politics and hence, point to the limits of a state-centric model of sovereignty. Hence, from an empirical point of view, the situation and experiences met along a chronology of deportation are related, connected and constitutive to each other.
In this special issue, Heike Drotbohm examines the conflicts experienced within transnational families that are generated by the threat as well as the realisation of deportation. In her paper, she includes both the perspectives of family members staying behind in the country of destination and the problematic living conditions of Cape Verdean deportees after their involuntary return from the USA and their aim to reintegrate into rather hostile āhomeā communities. Other papers cover the conditions and experiences of deportability as well as the fear of and protest against deportation in the migrants' destination countries. Ines Hasselberg, concentrating on the British case, reflects on the impact that migrants' perception of their own deportation process bear in their perceived entitlement to participate in open forms of political action such as demonstrations and protests, while Barak Kalir takes a closer look at the Israeli case, where the public debate on the treatment of asylum seekers carries strong references to a Jewish history of persecution.
In addition to papers examining the situation of migrants under the threat of deportation, others examine the transient phase, which involves state measures such as arrest and detention, deportation flights as well as the political collaboration between the ācountry of originā and ācountry of destinationā4 that have to negotiate over the migrants' condition of return. In this special issue, Nicholas Fischer reflects on his fieldwork carried out in a detention centre located in the international airport of a French city, where he concentrated on the everyday interactions between detainees, the centre staff, lawyers and other professional groups.
Finally, two papers included here cover the situation of deportees in their alleged countries of origin. Treasa Galvin as well as Liza Schuster and Nassim Majidi elaborate on the situation of deportees returned to Zimbabwe and Afghanistan, respectively. Treasa Galvin centres on the normalisation of deportation in what has become a routine border crossing between Botswana and Zimbabwe, focusing both on the disruptive impact of deportability and actual removal, and on migrants' strategies to minimise its impact, while Liza Schuster and Nassim Majidi focus more specifically on the experience of returning empty-handed upon deportation to Afghanistan and the role that stigma has on deportees' aspirations to re-emigrate.
Additionally, we wish to expand the scope of deportation studies in terms of topographies. We do so by extending the geographical sites not only to cover Europe, Africa and Asia, but also, and most importantly, by going beyond the northāsouth perspective and including an examination of southāsouth deportation trajectories. Through contrasting examples of deportation, which occur within the so-called Global South, we are able to take into account the hierarchisation of different countries. This is an ordering undertaken not only by policy-makers and border control agents but also by migrants and their social communities who give meaning to different types of spatial mobility. Such is well evidenced in the above-mentioned contribution by Schuster and Majidi that reveals the different experiences of forced return according to the deporting region. In Afghanistan, as the authors so clearly show, not only migration but also forced return is now seen as part of a daily routine with neighbouring countries, such as Iran and Pakistan. This echoes Galvin's findings of deportation from Botswana to neighbouring Zimbabwe that point to the normalcy of deportation, despite the hardship that it provokes. Interestingly, however, Schuster and Majidi show that this perception of deportation as a side event is not applicable to those returning from further afield as Europe, the USA or Australia. In these instances, deportation is taken as a serious failure and deportees (and their families) suffer from high levels of stigmatisation.
All these insights make clear that deportation has become an often-experienced state practice, which can go along with a certain process of adaption and normalisation, while at the same time producing agency and resistance. We also consider those approaches that include the perspectives of different actors of the deportation process both in the countries of settlement and in the countries of origin. Alpes and Spire (2013), for instance, examined the decisions taken by visa officials at French consulates in Cameroon, Hall (2012) worked on the perspective of staff at a British detention centre and Vigneswaran's (2013) work relied on the work of South African immigration officials. Likewise, our special issue addresses the points of view and experiences not only of migrants themselves but also of politicians, government agencies, lawyers, civil society, agents of border control and deportees' family members. It does so by examining the perspectives and interests of different types of actors along the ādeportation corridorā such as: the production of, and response to, deportability among deportable migrants, their families as well as their ethnic communities, NGOs and political activists (Galvin 2014; Hasselberg 2014b; Kalir 2014); those involved in removal procedures and related practices, such as local government authorities, Human Rights advocates, medical staff as well as the detainees themselves (Galvin 2014; Fischer 2014); and finally, those actors coming together in the moment of arrival, when deportees have to familiarise themselves and resettle in often unknown āhomeā countries, in which they are received by state authorities as well as rather unfamiliar local communities (Dr...
