Throughout my fieldwork among people who have been deported to Afghanistan, a term coming back in conversations has been bi sarneveshti, which literally means lacking destiny, or condition of destinylessness. The term expresses a feeling of uncertainty, suspension, and purposelessness, many experience after deportation. The term “destiny” coming from Latin is the root of the term “destination.” For many deportees the sense of lacking destiny is intertwined with lacking destination. A feeling of being lost is recurrent in the testimonies by deportees throughout all chapters in this book.
This book is about what happens to people after deportation. Deportation studies have increased drastically since the early 2000s; almost a decade after migration had been increasingly criminalised. Deportation studies started to grow at the same time as migration regimes increasingly adopted an approach based on “penality,” i.e., physical sanctions targeting non-nationals, manifested in detention and deportation, producing a general condition of “migrant illegality” and “deportability” (De Genova 2002).
Although there has been a growing literature on detention and deportation, academic research on what happens after deportation is scarce. The limits of deportation studies have often coincided with the national borders of the deporting countries. There is a risk that lack of attention towards what happens after deportation would naturalise and reinforce the idea of nation-states,—what has been called “methodological nationalism.” The body of literature—at least published in English—on what happens after deportation is small but nascent (e.g., Boehm 2016; Collyer 2012; Coutin 2016; Galvin 2015; Golash-Boza 2015; Hiemstra 2012; Schuster and Majidi 2013). This edited volume, covering geographical variety and with significant theoretical and empirical findings, aims to contribute to this new, but growing, research field.
Spatial and Temporal Stretching of Abandonment
Natalie Peutz’s (2006) call for an anthropology of removal has been a call for approaching deportation not as a simple and single relocation of a person from deporting country to the country of citizenship but rather as a process that spans long periods of time and geographical areas. Deportation involves a variety of people and institutions, deportees, their families and communities (Hasselberg this volume), and a set of economic relations (Walters 2016). Rather than a divided process in pre- and post-deportation, we see a spatial and temporal stretching of expulsion, from the condition of deportability in the host country to the “estranged citizenship” in the country of origin. The experience of many deportees is “double abandonment” (Lecadet 2013), expelled from one country and outcast in another. Like the condition of undocumentedness, social abandonment after deportation produces a “certain form of spatial and temporal distribution of possibilities” (Keshavarz 2016, p. 263). Deportation engenders an abject social status, a position in the society, formed by practices that continue long after the forced removal. Deportation and its outcomes, thus, stretch over several countries and over a longer period. Financial hardship, facing discrimination in the labour and housing market, stigmatisation, lack of access to social services and sometimes even protection, and cultural estrangement are usual difficulties with which deportees struggle.
The degree of success in becoming socially embedded in society after deportation (Ruben et al. 2009) depends on intersections of several factors, such as class, gender, age, and ethnicity. Social groups who generally experience a high degree of discrimination, such as ethnic minorities (see Khosravi 2016) and women (see de Regt and Tafesse 2015), face many more challenges to reach a state of embeddedness after deportation than other groups. Similarly, age is of significance as well. Younger deportees, who have spent their formative years in the country they were deported from, have more difficulty to establish networks and to find their place in the society. Not unusually, those who grew up in the host country do not even master the language, assumed to be their “mother tongue.” Furthermore, a gap between their education prior to deportation and the education system in the country they are deported to prevents them from moving forward. Likewise, skills they have obtained are not always relevant and educational certificates, if available at all, are not always translatable or recognised and, therefore, may not be useful after deportation (RSN 2016).
Furthermore, as chapters in this volume show, deportation generally affects both the deportees and the receiving communities negatively. Remittances, i.e., the source of livelihood for many poor families, vanish. Moreover, deportees find themselves in societies that are already struggling with high rates of unemployment, social insecurity, political instability, and, in some cases, with internal displacement. This may have been part of the context in which they or their family decided to leave in the first place.
Part of the condition of “estranged citizenship” is disrecognition of deportees’ citizenship. In some cases deportees have even difficulties to obtain ID cards in the countries they are citizens of. For instance, the majority of young Afghans deported from European countries to Afghanistan were born and grew up in Iran or Pakistan. Subsequently, it is not unusual that they are denied Afghan national ID cards, paradoxically, by the same state that let them be deported to Afghanistan as Afghan nationals. In other cases, the authorities stamp signs on ID cards of deportees, which consequently would lead to easily identifying them and thereby excluding them from labour and housing markets.
Furthermore, the hyper-visibility of deportees, tattoos, foreign clothing styles and body movements, accents, or their signed ID cards make them easy targets of police harassment. As several of the chapters in this volume show (e.g., Weber and Powell; Rodkey) deportees are often scapegoats for worsening crime and other social problems (see Kanstroom 2012). Deportees are a stigmatised group because they are seen as criminal, failed in the migratory project (Plambech this volume) and “culturally contaminated” (Hasselberg this volume; RSN 2016; Schuster and Majidi 2013). Post-deportation stigma is gendered. Labelling and stigmatisation of women is documented in several chapters. However, men also experience a gendered stigma while unable to be provider for their families (Golash-Boza 2013; Turnbull this volume). With marked bodies, deportees find themselves isolated in the community supposed to be their “home.” They hide themselves or try to pass as non-deportees for instance by “keeping up appearances” (Gerlach this volume). The condition of social abandonment is experienced by being regarded as both “failed citizen” and “failed migrant” before and after deportation.
Deportees in their country of citizenship are turned into denizens with limited access to their citizenship rights. As several chapters in this volume show, while stigmatised as deportee, people’s rights can be suspended, rejected, delayed, and denied. They are left vulnerable not only to the violence of the state, but also to the violence of ordinary citizens. Individuals may be in even more danger after the deportation than before, particularly in countries where seeking asylum or, as Alpes (this volume) shows, “none-admissibility” in the Global North is itself a punishable offence. This is how the condition of post-deportation characterised by fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and insecurity, resembles the condition of undocumentedness prior to the deportation.
Neoliberal Deportation
As several scholars have argued, deportation has become a crucial strategy for contemporary neoliberal capitalism (Andrijasevic and Walters 2010; De Genova 2002; Golash-Boza 2015). Deportation has been integrated into the neoliberal policies of social abandonment, that expose vulnerable groups to multiple expulsions from communities, the labour market, the housing market, the spheres of security, the health care system, the education system, and state protection. Without reducing deportation merely to the logic of neoliberalism, however, making visible that deportation is an instrument of neoliberalism, provides a perspective that helps us to clearly understand the current regime of deportation (see Andrijasevic and Walter 2010).
As the essays in this collection show, deportation means the withdrawal of the state, as provider of services and protection, both in the host country and the country of citizenship, while at the same time a moralising and “responsibilising” project aims to turn deportees into responsible, risk-taking, entrepreneurial, and ethical subjects. One deportation technique is to make deportees believe that they have control over their lives before and after deportation.
The deportee is regarded simultaneously both as a child unable to understand what is in his or her interest and as an adult responsible for his or her deeds and choices (Khosravi 2009). The adjective “voluntary” in relation to return/deportation shows the contradiction very well. As Andrijasevic and Walters (2010, p. 993) show, “voluntary” seems to designate in reality an absence of viable options rather than a deliberate choice. This self-governing aspect of deportation is a salient feature of neoliberalism (Golash-Boza 2015). The neoliberal moralising and educative feature of deportation can be seen in the etymology of the word deport, derived from Old French, and have same root as deportment meaning “to behave, to carry or conduct oneself well.” The pedagogical aspect of deportation is shown in several chapters. For instance Sine Plambech (this volume) demonstrates how women in her field study, in order to get financial assistance from the Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) programme, attempt to perform “the good deportee”, i.e., an entrepreneurial subject who is capable of self-management and self-development—the ideal neoliberal subject. Likewise, for Dominican deportees, a letter of good conduct (carta de buena conducta) is a prerequisite for gaining access to the labour market (Golash-Boza and Ceciliano this volume).
Neoliberal economic rationalisation has become increasingly incorporated in deportation logic, for instance through using economic incentives to turn a failed asylum seeker in the host country into a prospective business owner in the country of citizenship. Moreover, “management” of deportation has been conducted more and more in collaboration between governments, private companies, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), and development agencies (Collyer this volume).
The observations made in this book are in line with Golash-Boza’s argument (2015) that the emergence of the age of deportation is a consequence of the neoliberal cycle of global capitalism. She sees mass deportation as a part of the policy of controlling the surplus labour, interconnected with outsourcing, the privatisation of society, and withdrawal of the state. The neoliberal turn goes hand in hand with a system of global Apartheid that intends to sustain the class-based and racialised separation between those with the right to free mobility and those exposed to forced immobility. One function of deportation is to keep two worlds separated from each other. One cosmopolitan, a world of surplus rights of mobility, and the other one a world of checkpoints, borders, queues, gates, detentions, and removal.
The condition of deportability renders migrant workers to be a “distinctly disposable commodity” and creates a flexible and docile labour force (De Genova 2002). Deportation as a form of mobility control of workers is crucial for maintaining the wage gap between the Global North and the Global South. Deportation intends to immobilise work...