Enduring Uncertainty. Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 2017
In 2006, the then Labour Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, was sacked after it emerged that over the course of seven years, over a thousand released foreign national prisoners had not been considered for deportation. Following the media revelations, the deportation of foreign national offenders became top priority for the Home Office. Under the UK Borders Act 2007, therefore, a foreign national will be served with an automatic deportation order if they have been sentenced to twelve months or more of imprisonment. The serving of an automatic deportation order, however, rarely results in its swift execution. As Ines Hasselberg asserts in this book, deportation can be delayed for a long period of time due to legal and human rights constraints, immigration appeals, and lack of cooperation with receiving states. While most studies on deportation follow the trajectories of those displaced, Hasselberg's work focuses on those stuck in a 'legal limbo' as they fight for their right to family life and access to the place they call 'home'. In a move which deserves great credit, Hasselberg also pays particular attention to the family members of those marked for deportation. Not only are family members also forced to endure the same uncertainty but, as Hasselberg demonstrates, their testimonies and actions are crucial for the success of foreign national offenders' appeals. In providing insights 'into how deportation and deportability translate into social reality and how it impacts upon the lives of those whom it affects the most', the book takes shape within the already existing scholarship on detention, deportability, and the securitisation of borders (p.145). In particular, the book follows the argument that researchers should focus more on the legal production of deportability and illegality, rather than solely on the illegal migrant (De Genova 2002). Following a particularly thoughtprovoking ethics section, the first main chapter of the book lays down the theoretical groundwork needed for understanding deportation not as a singular event but as both a process and 'a practice of state power embedded in anxiety, uncertainty and unrest' (p.40). This is followed by a concise examination of the recent socio-political developments that have led to the increased deportability of foreign national offenders in the UK. These developments, as noted by Hasselberg, include New Labour's use of 'bogus' refugee rhetoric to enforce harsher detention and deportation methods, the abovementioned media crisis in 2006, and the increased cooperation between the UK Border Agency (UKBA) and Her Majesty's Prison Service (HMPS) in the management of foreign national prisoners. The following chapter, the first of four empirical chapters, focuses on foreign nationals' encounters with the UK's legal institutions, the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal in particular. The chapter commences with a clear overview of the Immigration Appeals System, through which foreign nationals must navigate in order to appeal against their deportation decisions. In rich ethnographic detail, Hasselberg recounts the emotional strain of the appeals process on both foreign nationals and their relations, as the 125
Reshaping possible futures: Deportation, home and the United Kingdom
Anthropology Today, 2016
In this article I examine how foreign nationals in the United Kingdom (UK) envisage the possibility of a forced return to their countries of origin. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in London among foreign national offenders appealing their deportation at the Immigration Tribunal, I show how preparations for an eventual return were seldom made by those appealing deportation, even if the prospect of their forced removal and its implications for the family left behind was constantly on their minds. Appealing deportation can be a long process; living with the risk of being deported strongly impacts on the plans the migrants had devised and hoped for before deportation intruded into their lives. In this sense, and in the course of the deportation process, migrants have to reshape their sense of possible futures to include family separation and possible departures – deportation being only one of these. Generational differences and sustained transnational connections were influential in the reshaping of these possible futures. The data presented shows how for most research participants deportation means ‘leaving the UK’ and not ‘returning home’.
Editorial Introduction: Deportation, Anxiety, Justice (2015)
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies., 2015
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 deportation’ 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 ‘deportation corridor’, 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.
From immigration detention to destitution
The immigration detention estate in the UK is expanding – as of 30 September 2014, 3,378 people were held under immigration rules. Immigration detainees may have claimed, but been refused, political asylum and may have lived here for many years before losing their entitlement to stay. Detention is not always the end of their story in the UK however, and I aim to show how migrants stay in the UK, often for many years, with diminishing rights and in fear of re-detention, destitution and deportation. ...
Immigration detention is a central tenet of the British government’s response to immigration but remains under-theorised in academia. This article uses testimonies drawn from anthropological research conducted with detainees at an Immigration Removal Centre to examine lived experiences of immigration detention and explore the relationships between detainees and the British state. It suggests that despite being a space of extreme control (both in terms of legislation and daily practice), immigration detention is beset with uncertainty and confusion. Examples are given of chronic instability in relation to mobility, violent ‘incidents’, time frames and access to information. The article examines the repercussions of such instability on individuals and coping strategies employed. It argues that immigration detainees live in a context of continual crisis, in which profound uncertainty becomes normalised. This disorder should be understood as a technique of power, with governance through uncertainty constructing certain immigrants as expendable, transient and ultimately, deportable
Critical Criminology, 2020
In the context of heightened debate around increasingly hostile immigration policies, the detention and deportation of people with long-standing connections to the United Kingdom (UK) have, within the last few years, received public attention. Such individuals—people who were born in or came to the UK as children—make up a significant proportion of the “foreign criminal” population in detention. This article examines how those individuals with long-standing links, who also have criminal convictions, are often “erased” by the British state. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with men currently and formerly held in immigration removal centers, I argue that institutional failings in immigration and local authority care “guide” some who grow up in the UK toward (and into) the criminal justice system. Shunning responsibility for these failings, the British state enacts a further punishment through immigration detention and attempted deportation. Despite acts that resist and problematize foreignness, detained “Brits” experience specific harms that change the way they feel about identity and belonging in Britain. These processes highlight the ways that national identity and immigration status intersect with class, gender and race to produce traumatic experiences of cultural denationalization.
9. The contours of deportation studies
Handbook of Return Migration, 2022
Across the world, deportation politics is a topic of both urgent and long-standing political concern. In the United States (US), the Trump election-campaign promise of deporting millions of irregular immigrants led to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations deporting more than 300,000 so-called unauthorised immigrants to Central and South American countries such as Mexico, Puerto Rico and Brazil in 2018. Yet, these operations were still smaller in scale than under the Obama administration, where an annual average of around 400,000 were deported between 2012 and 2014 (Gramlich, 2020). Similarly, the European Commission's (EC) 2020 Migration Pact described the upscaling of deportations from the Schengen space as 'a fresh start [that strikes] a new balance between responsibility and solidarity' (Stevis-Gridneff, 2020). This, even though the Commission had voiced a similar focus many times in the previous years-for instance when the controversial European Union (EU)-Afghanistan Joint Way Forward statement aimed at deporting at least 80,000 rejected Afghan asylum-seekers from European asylum systems (EEAS, 2016). So-called Western countries have been instrumental in facilitating this 'deportation turn' whereby governments increasingly rely on the technology of the forced removal of asylum-seekers as a way of addressing domestic political controversy. However, countries from the so-called Global South, including Thailand, India and South Africa, have also recently been upscaling the use of this political technology. In 2016, for instance, an estimated 1 million people were deported to Afghanistan, a number which included more than 400,000 and 250,000 people from Iran and Pakistan, respectively (Majidi, 2017, pp.4, 8-9). Among the international organisations (IOs) working with humanitarian and migration management operations, the 'repatriation' of people has long been among the stables of standard durable solutions. This has the effect of narrating the deportations of irregular migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers as misplaced anomalies reinserted into the state-based international system and its 'national order of things' (Malkki, 1995). Consequently, as a political technology enforcing socio-normative boundaries between membership and non-membership, the differential ascriptions of rights, duties and the legitimacy of the use of force, deportation gives rise to crucial political, ideological and ethical debates, as Kalir forcefully argues in Chapter 6 of the Handbook. Through five interlinked sections, the present chapter introduces central conceptualisations and discussions through which the interdisciplinary field of deportation study has evolved. After a brief introductory literature overview, the first section sketches a central approach in deportation studies-namely, regimes of sovereign biopolitics. The second section then moves on to discussing deportation in terms of continuums and corridors. The third section adds to this a new perspective on deportation politics as markets and technologies, before the fourth section discusses issues of race and postcoloniality in deportation. The fifth section relates the
Journal of Sociology, 2019
The past five decades have witnessed a dramatic growth in immigration controls. The external controls have expanded, but at the same time, there has been a proliferation of internal control measures. The British state has increasingly resorted to using penal machinery to punish people who violate immigration laws. Individuals can now be prosecuted under the criminal law and receive custodial sentences for immigration crimes. This article draws upon narratives, interviews and experiences of asylum seekers who were imprisoned for such crimes, in order to understand how their trauma is exacerbated and ways in which injuries are strategically and deliberately inflicted by the state and built within legal and policy frameworks. It draws attention to the racist nature of the crimmigration system and production of violence.
Coerced to Leave: Punishment and the Surveillance of Foreign-National Offenders in the UK
2014
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London among foreign-national offenders facing deportation from the United Kingdom, this paper seeks to examine how foreign-national offenders experience and understand state policies of control. Worldwide, foreign-nationals are increasingly subject to forms of state surveillance, not just when crossing borders but also during their stay within a given state’s territory. Detention centres, weekly or monthly reporting requirements, and electronic monitoring are already common migrant surveillance strategies allied to deportation policies in many countries across the globe. These forms of state control are conceived legally as administrative practices necessary to control foreign-nationals whose status is still being adjudicated and to enforce the removal of unwanted foreign-nationals. Consequently, these strategies are not inflicted through a judicial process, even though these same practices are used within the context of penal incarceration and supervision. The lived experience of deportability and associated state surveillance highlights the punitive and coercive effects of detention and related conditions of bail. Ironically, but perhaps not unintentionally, those who are deemed a risk and subject to surveillance and banishment are therefore constantly feeling vulnerable and in need of protection. Because they do not consider themselves a risk to society, the foreign-national offenders interviewed for this study understand state surveillance not as a measure of control, but rather as punishment for wanting to stay. In their eyes, it is designed to coerce them to leave. An examination of the experiences of detention and bail reveals how such forms of surveillance work to discipline deportable bodies.