deportation a way of life

ReviewsDeportation as a way of life

Aftermath: Deportation law and the new American diaspora. By Daniel Kanstroom.

New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012. 242 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-974272-1

The social, political and historical contours of deportation. By Bridget Anderson,

Matthew Gibney, and Emanuela Paoletti (eds). New York & London, Springer, 2013.

161 pp. ISBN 978-1-4614-5863-0.

It is one of our grave misfortunes as migration scholars to be living and working in The

Aftermaththe aftermath of an ever more global regime of deportation run amok. Daniel

Kanstrooms title is well chosen, indeed. It has nonetheless been a token of my own good

fortune to have the opportunity to read and be enriched by the scholarship in these two

volumes on the proliferation of deportation in recent years.

Providing many poignant examplessome deeply harrowing, others simply absurd, all

fundamentally perverseof Americans who have found themselves expelled (mainly, as

criminal aliens) from their home in the USA to the frequently unknown foreign

countries of their ostensible official citizenship, Kanstroom refers to a new American

diaspora. Indeed, the USA, as is well known, has become one of the premier sources of

what Peter Nyers has previously designated a new global deportspora. In the excellent

volume edited by Bridget Anderson, Matthew Gibney, and Emanuela Paoletti, we also

have occasion to encounter the new European diaspora. In the fascinating chapter by

Clara Lecadet, in particular, we get a glimpse of the make-shift ghettoes that have flour-

ished in the widely dispersed, externalized, and ever more elusive borderlands of

Europein this instance, curiously tucked away in a dusty abandoned village at the

edge of the Sahara on the border between Algeria and Mali. This way station for repatriates

to Malifrom places as disparate as Liberia, the Congo, and Bangladeshis one of a

proliferation of new spatial nodes along the convoluted routes by which Europe repels

illegal migrants who often have never yet set foot on European soil, with the dutiful

assistance of outsourced border policing and deportation regimes in places such as

Mauritania, Morocco, or Algeria, perpetrated against a motley crew of sub-Saharan and

other irregular migrants. Here, indeed, is one formation of Europes new deportspora,

subjected to myriad delays and reversals of fortune and trajectory, undergoing a kind of

temporal decompression and recomposition in their migratory energies, but largely

undeterred in the high-stakes drama of their particular stabs at global mobility.

We ought to be mindful here, nevertheless, of the important contrast between these

deportees from Europes externalized border controls in Africa and the sorts of de facto

Americans whom Kanstroom foregrounds in his narrative of a radical social experiment,

an increasingly aggressive, accelerated, and impervious deportation delirium or frenzy in

the USA that has literally come to banish into exile people who often have never known life

anywhere else. In one instance, we have the Kafkaesque operation of a kind of multi-sited

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and mobile Penal Colony that inscribes onto the migrants bodies their illegalization

through a compound relay of merciless severities and militarized obstacles in the preemp-

tive Border Spectacle of securing Europe from the spectral menace of an immigrant

invasion. On the other hand, we have the Kafkaesque Trial whereby a schizophrenic

life-long US resident, deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial in a court of law, is

sentenced to a psychiatric institution only then to be secretively transferred into an immi-

gration detention prison, denied medication, and subjected to deportation with no right to

legal counselto be discovered by his bewildered family several weeks later, homeless and

helpless on the streets of the Dominican Republic (Kanstroom, p. 104). In Lecadets ac-

count of what I am calling the new European diaspora, deportation is merely a part of

migration and does not necessarily mean return (Anderson et al., p. 150); for Kanstrooms

profoundly domesticated foreign non-citizens whose deportations convert them into

Americans in exile, immigration judges can be found to admit that they are sometimes

sending medically vulnerable deportees to almost certain death simply because that . . . is

the law of this land (p. 138).

Here, we must contemplate the vexed and vexing figure of the Rule of Law, which

remains for Kanstroom (a legal scholar and legal advocate) an obscure object of desire.

On the one hand, Kanstrooms book is a brilliant and studiously detailed, meticulously

documented exposition of what in fact deportation doeshow it works, and what real

effects it producesas a law enforcement system that governs the lives of . . . many

millions of noncitizens in the USA (p. 30). On the other hand, it is an admirably impas-

sioned but carefully reasoned intervention on behalf of a comprehensive revision of im-

migrant detention and deportation law and policy. In both respects, Aftermath is a stunning

success and, even as it is articulated to a non-specialist readership, a major contribution to

scholarship. And yet, in ways that are (for this reviewer, at least) almost mind-bogglingly

devoted to the notion that the deportation dragnet can be appropriately mitigated by a

spirit of fair play, Kanstroom proposes a reinvigoration of the Rule of Law (for non-

citizens, rather than against them!) and a restoration of systemic integrity through mod-

erately flexible ideas of discretion, judicial oversight, and a humane understanding of basic

human rights principles, especially those that mandate proportionality and reject arbitrari-

ness whenever state power is brought to bear against people, regardless of their legal status

or their location (pp. 21011). In this regard, Kanstrooms vocation as a practitioner of the

law seems to require a liberal faith in its essential legitimacy and perfectibilityin spite of

all the evidence of his own truly breathtaking research. Thankfully, Kanstrooms deep

practitioners knowledge is so comprehensive, his legal scholarship so rigorous, and his

critical scrutiny so unrelenting and unforgiving that this book can be understood to defy its

authors optimistic professional faith and supplies an invaluable body of research for the

elaboration of discrepant sorts of analysis. And this is truly the hallmark of the best kind of

scholarship.

The public demand for deportation processes and migrant detention to comply with the

requirements of transparency and the Rule of Law is precisely the contradictory subject of

an astute ethnographic chapter by Nicolas Fischer in The Social, Political and Historical

Contours of Deportation. Paradoxically, it was the revelation of a clandestine jail in France

for migrants awaiting deportation in the 1970s that led to the legalization, institutional-

ization, and then much wider expansion of immigrant detention itself. Rather than spaces

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of exception or excess, then, the detention centers were routinized. With specialization also

came new requirements for professionalization. Thus, the imperative to protect the

rights of migrants undergoing deportation came to be integrated into the very organiza-

tion of the detention prisons. Moreover, Fischer carefully demonstrates how the location of

independent lawyers inside French detention centers in order to challenge the deportations

of some migrant detainees actually serves to reinforce and restabilize deportation for others

who cannot qualify for relief from expulsion. Insofar as these advocates work to mobilize

every possible legal defense for those who can satisfy the stipulations for various legal

remedies, they must sort and rank the various cases of the individual detainees. Thus,

their legal expertise actually implicates them in the differential enforcement of deportation,

and thus also in what Foucault called the differential management of unauthorized mi-

gration, more broadly (Anderson et al., p. 126). Hence, Fischer demonstrates how these

humanitarian advocates become an important component of a larger professional appar-

atus dedicated to the legal and sociopolitical production of borders. By rendering more

legible the differences between deportable and undeportable illegal foreigners, further-

more, Fischer calls our attention to a gap between deportation policies and their effective

enforcement that contributes to perpetuating the existence of an underclass of precarious,

deportable immigrants who may not be legalized, but who will very unlikely ever be

removed from the territory (p. 139).

Comprised of a short Introduction by the co-editors and eight chapters, Anderson,

Gibney, and Paolettis edited volume as a whole provides a very fine complement to

Kanstrooms account of The Aftermath, but in ways that are freer to analytically interrogate

practices of deportation and detention as a particularly sharp and resonant way of asserting

state power (Anderson et al., p. 1). In addition to the chapters that I have opted to discuss

in more detail, the volume includes fine chapters on similarly fascinating and diverse topics:

a historical comparison of the construction of European-origin Mormons and Turkish

Muslims as excludable categories of migrants to the USA on the basis of allegations of

polygamy; a study of the European Unions returns directive (seeking to harmonize de-

portation practices) and how its approval came about with the consolidation of new pres-

sures toward consensual politics in the previously more contentious European Parliament;

an analysis of local and sub-national responses to migration and how they shape migration

policy in liberal democratic states, specifically comparing Ireland, the USA, Australia, and

South Africa; a study addressing the significant gap between migrant detention and actual

deportations in The Netherlands, and therefore examining the informal or unofficial func-

tions of immigrant detention, whereby a putatively administrative procedure serves the

effectively punitive ends of deterring unauthorized residence, controlling pauperism

among destitute migrants, and performatively addressing political anxieties by symbolically

re-asserting state control; and an ethnographic study of the anti-terrorist securitization of

small businesses in Italy providing long-distance telephone services, whereby inspections

triggered random discretionary identity checks and thus became the routine occasions for

deportation raids against undocumented migrants, generally.

The Social, Political and Historical Contours of Deportation foregrounds the consequences

of deportation for the society that does the expelling (p. 1) as a membership-defining act

dedicated to asserting the value and significance of citizenship and reinforcing the distinc-

tion between citizens and non-citizens in terms of the citizenrys (unconditional) right to

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residence in the state (p. 2). This perspective is an instructive one that precisely telescopes

the spatial underpinnings of the social and political contours of national membership and

the variegated juridical statuses of those relegated to a condition outside of citizenship in

its contemporary configurations. However, even this working definition implies a liberal

leap of faith that seems to disregard the fullest (illiberal) extent of acts of sovereignty within

the toolkit of liberal statecraft that have variously served to constitute and regulate citizen-

ship. We need only be reminded of various historical examples of statutes for the denatur-

alization (and exclusion) of undesirable citizens, which span from the disqualification of

women from their birthright citizenship for marrying alien men through to the mass

deportation of German Jewsand communists, queers, Gypsies, and so onto Nazi

forced labor camps, and finally, to their extermination. Hannah Arendt famously discusses

this conundrum in terms of the perplexities of human rights, but it may be equally com-

pellingly analyzed in terms of the aporias of citizenship itself.

One chapter, which is particularly pertinent to this point, concerns the inviability of mass

deportation in Weimar Germany. Annemarie Sammatino provides a fascinating account of

far-right demands throughout the 1920s for the mass expulsion of newly dislocated, more

or less stateless Eastern European refugees who arrived in Germany in unprecedented

numbers and with unforeseen suddenness following World War I and the Russian Civil

War. Efforts at border control proved untenable not only because the eastern borders were

ill-defined and porous but also owing to the indeterminacy between welcomed Germans

(from Poland and elsewhere, seeking refuge and deemed worthy of resettlement) and the

diverse surge of other newly displaced people (overwhelmingly equated with Jews). Later,

demands for the mass expulsion of the Eastern refugees remained frustrated, however, in

part due to a reluctance to provoke a Polish counter-expulsion of ethnic Germans and

thereby undermine German aspirations to recuperate territory lost as a result of the puni-

tive peace imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. What this chapter establishes persuasively,

therefore, is that the hysteria over an inundation of Eastern foreigners (read: Jews)

during the Weimar period chillingly prefigured the mass deportation of Jews (both for-

eigners and citizens) that would follow under the Nazis. In this regard, the volume

editors attribution of an unconditional equation of citizenship with the irreversible or

non-negotiable right to residence within the state is itself something best understood as

historically contingent, and thus, something to be accounted for in its historical specificity,

rather than presupposed as an effectively defining, stable, and enduring feature of

citizenship.

I have already discussed Lecadets remarkable ethnographic contribution from the edge

of the Sahara, concerning the heterogeneous assortment of West African deportees and

others forcibly returned by states to the north. It remains, however, to note that Lecadet

foregrounds precisely how these migrantsindefinitely stranded en route, often in a

virtually stateless condition, no longer in possession of any proof of their citizenship

re-inhabit their respective citizenship identities in their own autonomous forms of self-

organization in the ghettoes of the borderlands. Even when confronted with the utter

absence of their respective states and playfully, ironically deriding the abject failures of

these states to ensure for them any of the presumptive protections of citizenship, these

migrants invoke their citizenships as an organizing principle of their own autonomy

(p. 147) in the reconstitution of an ephemeral civil society at the margins of all state

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power (p. 151) and make a political statement of their own refusal to be abandoned

(p. 150).

Against all the hardships and outright cruelties that these deportation regimes muster

against the many and varied migrants whose struggles are documented in these two books,

therefore, we may yet be reminded of a telling lyric from Bob Marley:

Some people got hopes and dreams

Some people got ways and means

Nicholas De Genova

Goldsmiths, University of London

doi:10.1093/migration/mnt005

The new maids: Transnational women and the care economy. By Helma Lutz.

Zed Books, 2011. 241 pp. ISBN 978-1-8481-3288-7

With women constituting more than half of the migrant population, feminist scholars have

called attention to their particular experiences in the migration process. There are now

more than 100 million migrant women working as live-in or live-out domestic workers.

Their experiences are distinct due to the private nature of the household, the complicated

relationship with their female employers, the gendered nature of their work, the changing

relationship with their families due to overseas employment, and immigration regulations

governing domestic service. The domestic work that these migrant women perform creates

a complex unequal relationship between two groups of women positioned along social,

national, and global hierarchies. The demand for domestic service by middle class women

in developed countries and the provision of domestic labor by migrant women from less

developed countries result from a historical unequal development between nations and

regions. Lutzs book on the transnational care work adds to the existing feminist scholar-

ship on global domestic service.

Lutz focuses on migrant domestic workers in Germany. She points out that, to under-

stand their experiences, one needs to pay attention to how the regimes of welfare, gender,

and migration interact to produce the feminized labor migration. In the case of Germany,

its welfare system lies between the liberal Nordic model and the Southern European model,

with the state providing limited support for childcare and elder care. The German model

puts the responsibility of childcare on the family before children start school. The gender

regime refers to institutionalized gender inequality, which includes the states social policy

for the provision of care work. The migration regime refers to the states immigration

policies. The development of global domestic service in Germany is thus contingent upon

the intersectional dynamics of these three regimes.

Lutzs book makes important contributions mainly in its methodological approaches.

Her case study approach provides in-depth knowledge about how the particular national

context impacts specific experiences of migrant domestic workers and can be useful to

compare the experiences of migrant women in other labor-receiving countries, although

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deportation a way of life

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