The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement

by Nicholas De Genova

Overview

This important collection examines deportation as an increasingly global mechanism of state control. Anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, and sociologists consider not only the physical expulsion of noncitizens but also the social discipline and labor subordination resulting from deportability, the threat of forced removal. They explore practices and experiences of deportation in regional and national settings from the U.S.-Mexico border to Israel, and from Somalia to Switzerland. They also address broader questions, including the ontological significance of freedom of movement; the historical antecedents of deportation, such as banishment and exile; and the development, entrenchment, and consequences of organizing sovereign power and framing individual rights by territory.

Whether investigating the power that individual and corporate sponsors have over the fate of foreign laborers in Bahrain, the implications of Germany's temporary suspension of deportation orders for pregnant and ill migrants, or the significance of the detention camp, the contributors reveal how deportation reflects and reproduces notions about public health, racial purity, and class privilege. They also provide insight into how deportation and deportability are experienced by individuals, including Arabs, South Asians, and Muslims in the United States. One contributor looks at asylum claims in light of an unusual anti-deportation campaign mounted by Algerian refugees in Montreal; others analyze the European Union as an entity specifically dedicated to governing mobility inside and across its official borders. The Deportation Regime addresses urgent issues related to human rights, international migration, and the extensive security measures implemented by nation-states since September 11, 2001.

Contributors: Rutvica Andrijasevic, Aashti Bhartia, Heide Castañeda , Galina Cornelisse , Susan Bibler Coutin, Nicholas De Genova, Andrew M. Gardner, Josiah Heyman, Serhat Karakayali, Sunaina Marr Maira, Guillermina Gina Nuñez, Peter Nyers, Nathalie Peutz, Enrica Rigo, Victor Talavera, William Walters, Hans-Rudolf Wicker, Sarah S. Willen

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822345763
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2010
Pages:	522
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Nicholas De Genova has taught anthropology and Latino studies at Columbia University, Stanford University, the University of Bern, and the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago and the editor of Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States, both also published by Duke University Press.

Nathalie Peutz is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University.

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The Deportation Regime

SOVEREIGNTY, SPACE, and the FREEDOM of MOVEMENT

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Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4576-3

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Chapter One

NICHOLAS DE GENOVA

The Deportation Regime Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement

Of all the specific liberties which may come into our minds when we hear the word "freedom," freedom of movement is historically the oldest and also the most elementary. Being able to depart for where we will is the prototypical gesture of being free, as limitation of freedom of movement has from time immemorial been the precondition for enslavement. Freedom of movement is also the indispensable precondition for action, and it is in action that men primarily experience freedom in the world.-Hannah Arendt, "On Humanity in Dark Times" To be a human being in the true sense of the word, one has to be unsettled. -Vilém Flusser, "To Be Unsettled, One First Has to Be Settled"

If the freedom of movement is truly "elementary" and "prototypical"-and, furthermore, if it is fundamental-for any serious reflection on or practice of liberty, it is revealing that such a basic freedom has been relegated to an ominous political neglect as well as an astounding theoretical silence. Indeed, various formulations of such a freedom have been intermittently institutionalized since ancient times and then, after the founding of the United Nations in 1948, enshrined in article 13 of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet one can scarcely encounter a reference to the freedom of movement that is not immediately encumbered with the pertinent qualifications, limitations, and restrictions. Notably, the ineffable fault line in modern times for the positing of such a freedom has been the primacy, prerogative, and presumptive sovereignty of territorially defined ("national") states. If the freedom of movement has remained utterly beleaguered, its persistent and pernicious regulation has nevertheless become an evergreater preoccupation of these states in the reentrenchment of their spatial jurisdictions. This ever-increasing attempt to control human mobility tends to be promoted, in fact, as nothing less than a putative manifestation of these states' ("national") sovereign power.

Amid proliferating spectacles of increasingly militarized border policing and the expanding purview of securitization in all aspects of travel and transit, globally, deportation has thus recently achieved an unprecedented prominence (see, e.g., Bloch and Schuster 2005; De Genova 2002; Fekete 2005; Hing 2006a; Kanstroom 2007; in this volume, see also Peutz; Walters). Associated with the ascendancy of an effectively global, neoimperial sovereignty (and a more general rescaling of various state functions and capabilities), a decidedly inverse relation may be detected between the distinctly waning fortunes and diminishing returns of nationstate sovereignty, as such, and the exuberant attention to ever more comprehensive and draconian controls that states seek to impose upon the most humble cross-border comings and goings-and settlings-of migrants (cf. Bosniak 1998, 2006; Dauvergne 2007; Nyers 2006a). At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was commonly considered to be frankly unconscionable, even by some immigration judges, to inflict the plainly punitive, "barbarous and cruel" hardship of expulsion on unauthorized but otherwise lawful long-term migrants and their families (see Ngai 2005, A21). By century's end, deportation had become utterly banal. Indeed, despite the inevitable and irreducible historical specificities of particular states' legal bulwarks concerning the regulation of immigration (De Genova 2002), the practice of deportation has nonetheless emerged as a definite and increasingly pervasive convention of routine statecraft. Deportation seems to have become a virtually global regime.

DEPORTABILITY AND STATE SOVEREIGNTY

A paramount task of social criticism, according to Giorgio Agamben, concerns identifying "where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures converge" (1995/1998, 6). Plainly, deportation is precisely such a point of intersection. In deportation, the whole totalizing regime of citizenship and alienage, belonging and deportability, entitlement and rightlessness, is deployed against particular persons in a manner that is, in the immediate practical application, irreducibly if not irreversibly individualizing (see Walters, this volume; for further examples in this volume, see especially the essays by Bhartia; Castañeda; Coutin; Gardner; Maira; Peutz; Talavera, Núñez, and Heyman; and Willen).

The extravagant and truly unforgiving individualization that comes with deportation may nowhere more tellingly be illustrated, however, than in the breach. Here it is instructive to consider the case of Elvira Arellano. Previously deported in 1997 and then arrested during an immigration raid in 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, where she worked "illegally" cleaning the passenger cabins of commercial airliners, Arellano would appear an improbable candidate for Time magazine's list of "People Who Mattered" in 2006, where she was counted alongside George W. Bush (as well as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice), Hugo Chávez, Pope Benedict XVI, and Kim Jongil, among others. Thus Arellano was aptly depicted in 2007 as "perhaps the most famous undocumented immigrant" in the United States (Terry 2007). Yet even her tireless anti-deportation activism seems unlikely to have ever garnered such renown. On August 15, 2006, however, in defiance of a final order to report to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for deportation to Mexico, Arellano (with her eight-year-old son, a U.S. citizen) publicly took refuge in Chicago's Adalberto United Methodist Church, where it was proclaimed that she and her child would be provided "sanctuary." Arellano's humble but courageous act of civil disobedience forcefully challenged immigration authorities to storm the premises and apprehend her.

Arellano remained confined to the storefront church and a small apartment above, as well as its modest enclosed parking lot and garden, for the year that followed. Her captive deportability arose amid a spectacular escalation of workplace and community immigration raids (initiated in April 2006 in response to the mass protests in defense of "immigrants' rights" and unabated during the subsequent year). Moreover, Arellano's public act of defiance flagrantly spited the U.S. immigration authorities' bombastic declaration of an avowed but absurdly implausible mission "to remove all removable aliens" (USDHS-ICE 2003, ii). Much as it may seem paradoxical, the deportation regime in which Arellano was embroiled nonetheless reserved its sovereign prerogative, during the year that ensued, to look the other way and bide its time. Confronted with an audacious affront to its juridical order, the sovereign power of the U.S. state was pressed to decide on the remarkable quandary presented by one Elvira Arellano. In response, the U.S. state tacitly instituted a peculiar state of exception whereby the law was suspended rather than enforced (Agamben 2003/2005). What appeared, however tentatively, to be Arellano's de facto immunity from deportation was indubitably a testament and a tribute to the vitality and potential volatility of the mass social movement from which her bold but desperate act of insubordination arose. It was likewise a measure of the state's prudent assessment of the movement's demonstrable success at garnering significant public sympathy. Undoubtedly the state's reluctance signaled a palpable gain for the movement and also a definite victory (albeit only in the strictest and most narrow sense) for a person prepared to make extraordinary sacrifices not to be deported. Nonetheless Arellano incurred not merely a dramatically more excruciating kind of deportability but also a radical immobilization-a veritable encirclement, an asphyxiating abrogation of her freedom of movement.

If the law regarding Arellano's actionable deportation was at least temporarily set aside, therefore, the norm of her deportability remained rigorously in-force. Thus the "state of emergency" that long defined her more mundane condition as an undocumented migrant worker remained not the exception but rather, precisely, the rule (see Benjamin 1940/1968, 257). For if the state's seeming indecision may yet have been apprehensible as a kind of decision, might we not detect that the efficiency of Arellano's deportability was exorbitantly enhanced, under these exceptional circumstances, by the deferral of her actual deportation? It is precisely in deliberations over the exception, Agamben (1995/1998, 2003/2005) would contend, that the sovereign power of the state is constituted. Thus, in the face of imminent deportation, Arellano effectively exchanged the life of an undocumented migrant worker (for whom onerous exploitation was the quotidian price of her routinized legal vulnerability as an "illegal alien") for one of self-selected captivity and a heightened and unrelenting exposure to the unfathomable caprices of the state (albeit accompanied by an improbable sort of individual celebrity). Upon the one-year anniversary of her defiant custody, Arellano announced in a press conference that she would soon abandon her church sanctuary in Chicago by traveling to Washington, D.C., to participate in an immigrants' rights protest as an anti-deportation activist. She then momentarily returned to public life by surreptitiously traveling to Los Angeles, where she addressed a similar rally and then was swiftly apprehended (now as a "high-profile criminal fugitive alien") and summarily deported. Arellano's deportation came, notably, only once she had violated the tacit terms of her voluntary internment.

SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE

What, we might ask, do examples such as Elvira Arellano's besieged condition of deportability serve to illuminate, if not the outright and agonistic politicization of her (bare) life? The concept of bare life, elaborated by Agamben (1995/1998), in its barest distillation, is only apprehensible in contrast to the plenitude of ways in which human beings really live, namely, within and through one or another ensemble of social relations. Bare life is thus a conceptual foil for all the historically specific and socially particular forms in which human (biological) life is qualified by its inscription within one or another sociopolitical order. That is to say, "bare" or "naked" life may be understood to be what remains when human existence, while yet alive, is nonetheless stripped of all the encumbrances of social location, and thus bereft of all the qualifications for properly political inclusion and belonging (cf. Agamben 1999/2002). Agamben's poignant formulation of bare life has enjoyed a rapid and increasing prominence in critical scholarly discourse, but as is often the case with currency, its accelerated circulation has also entailed a certain inflation and consequent devaluation. That is to say, the concept of bare life has been rather too presumptively reduced to a figure of mere "exclusion." Agamben's formulation is rather more subtle, however, as it revolves around "the zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion," whereby bare life is produced by sovereign (state) power. Bare life, then, presents itself as the "originary political element." As a "threshold of articulation between [human life as] nature and [human life as] culture," it must be perennially and incessantly banned from the political and legal order which is enacted and orchestrated through the state (Agamben 1995/1998, 181). Nevertheless this banishment or abandonment of bare life by sovereign (state) power, which excludes it from all political life and denies it any juridical validity, implicates it in "a continuous relationship" (183). Indeed, inasmuch as it is precisely the regimentation of our social relations and identities by state power that radically separates the phantom of our naked (animal) life from the real (social) lives we lead, bare life perfectly "expresses our subjection to political power" (182).

Surely the politicization of Elvira Arellano's combined condition of deportability and containment did not evoke the iconic figure of bare life that Agamben identifies in the space of the Nazi concentration camps (1995/1998, 166-80), which many (rather too hastily) presume to be virtually dispositive of the concept. Nor did her insubordination resemble at all that of those unfortunates "abandoned ... to the most extreme misfortunes" (159), such as the "braindead" medical patient sustained by an artificial life-support system and rendered the prospective object of euthanasia (136-43, 160-65, 186). Much less may we discern any correspondence between her quite outspoken and passionate condition and that of the "living dead"-the so-called Muselmänner-whose utter loss of sensitivity and personality itself literally embodied the ultimate unspeakability of the Nazi extermination camps (1999/2002, 41-86; cf. 1995/1998, 184-85). Nevertheless, here, in this Mexican undocumented-migrant worker/mother's life, was indeed a life in its barest rudimentary outline, reduced to the most elementary facets with which human existence (as we presently know it) must, under ordinary circumstances, sustain itself-which is to say, by its labor. And here likewise was the unrelenting and unforgiving politicization of that life. What was at stake, after all, was whether Arellano would be allowed to simply live her life, mother her child, and earn her livelihood without exceptional obstructions and intrusions by the state-whether she would be left alone to eke out her subsistence within the wider (global) regime of the market, that is-or whether this individual migrant, whose real infraction was simply her free (transnational) movement and her "unauthorized" labor, would be coercively removed from the space of the U.S. nation-state. That space operates simultaneously as both the setting and the stakes of such struggles, as Henri Lefebvre notes (1974/1991, 386; cf. Isin 2002, 283-84), is a crucial point to which I shall return. As Linda Bosniak notes, "it is ... the very fact of their hereness"-which is to say, their presence, their being in space-"that renders [the undocumented] deportable" (2006, 139; italics in original). Relying on a palpably spatial metaphor, Agamben has characterized such a politicization of bare life as the defining "threshold" where the relation between the living (human) being and the sociopolitical order is substantiated, and where sovereign state power therefore presumes to decide upon and inscribe the humanity of living men and women within its normative order (1995/1998, 8). If Agamben therefore posits as his most elementary conclusion the proposition "that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original-if concealed-nucleus of sovereign power" (6), then such an inscription is fundamentally an incorporation while nonetheless a negation. Surely, illegalized migrant labor-and therefore also deportation-enacts exactly such a constitutive contradiction.

It is precisely their distinctive legal vulnerability, their putative "illegality" and official "exclusion," that inflames the irrepressible desire and demand for undocumented migrants as a highly exploitable workforce-and thus ensures their enthusiastic importation and subordinate incorporation. And this is above all true because of the discipline imposed by their ultimate susceptibility to deportation, their deportability (De Genova 2002; 2005, 8). And yet the sheer autonomy of migration (Mezzadra 2004), especially that of "unauthorized" migration, remains a permanent and incorrigible affront to state sovereignty and the power of the state to manage its social space through law and the violence of law enforcement. Thus deportation in particular must emerge as a premier locus for the further theoretical elaboration of the coconstituted problems of the state and its putative sovereignty, on the one hand, and that elementary precondition of human freedom which is the freedom of movement.

What, in the end, is movement-and therefore the freedom of movement-if not a figure par excellence of life, indeed, life in its barest essential condition? Here, of course, we must emphatically distinguish between freedom-as an ontological condition-and anything on the order of a "right" that has been so ordained within one or another normative or juridical framework. In this regard, the freedom of movement may best be understood, precisely, not as a "right"-and neither as something so juridical (and decidedly modern) as a "human right," nor anything so metaphysical as a putative "natural right." Likewise, the freedom of movement must therefore be radically distinguished from any of the ways that such a liberty may have been stipulated, circumscribed, and domesticated within the orbit of state power ("national," imperial, or otherwise). Instead I am underscoring the fact that human life, in its most apparently "biological" and socially undifferentiated or unqualified (animal) sense, is inseparable from the uninhibited capacity for movement which is a necessary premise for the free and purposeful exercise of creative and productive powers. The exercise of these vital powers is, plainly, the foundation for all properly social praxis. (And social praxis is what makes the life of the human species truly human, after all.) Thus the freedom of movement is inseparable from that still more basic human power which is generative of the very possibility of social life, namely, our capacity to creatively transform our objective circumstances.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction Nathalie Peutz Nicholas De Genova 1

Part 1 Theoretical Overview

The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement Nicholas De Genova 33

Part 2 Sovereignty and Space

1 Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens William Walters 69

2 Immigration Detention and the Territoriality of Universal Rights Galina Cornelisse 101

3 Mapping the European Space of Circulation Serhat Karakayali Enrica Rigo 123

Part 3 Spaces of Deportability

4 From Exception to Excess: Detention and Deportations across the Mediterranean Space Rutvica Andrijasevic 147

5 Deportation in the US.-Mexico Borderlands: Anticipation, Experience, and Memory Victor Talavera Guillermina Gina Núñz-Mchiri Josiah Heyman 166

6 Engulfed: Indian Guest Workers, Bahraini Citizens, and the Structural Violence of the Kafala System Andrew M. Gardner 196

7 Deportation at the Limits of “Tolerance”: The Juridical, Institutional, and Social Construction of “Illegality” in Switzerland Hans-Rudolf Wicker 224

8 Deportation Deferred: “Illegality, ” Visibility, and Recognition in Contemporary Germany Heide Castañeda 245

9 Citizens, “Real” Others, and “Other” Others: The Biopolitics of Otherness and the Deportation of Unauthorized Migrant Workers from Tel Aviv, Israel Sarah S. Willen 262

10 Radical Deportation: Alien Tales from Lodi and San Francisco Sunaina Maira 295

Part 4 Forced Movement

11 Fictions of Law: The Trial of Sulaiman Oladokun, or Reading Kafka in an Immigration Court Aashti Bhartia 329

12 Exiled by Law: Deportation and the Inviability of Life Susan Bibler Coutin 351

13 “Criminal Alien” Deportees in Somaliland: An Ethnography of Removal Nathalie Peutz 371

Part 5 Freedom

14 Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement Peter Nyers 413

References 443

Contributors 483

Index 487

Editorial Reviews

This volume does a superb job of theorizing deportation beyond a mere act; in doing so we get a greater appreciation of how such acts are intricately linked to nation-state projects under globalization and have economic implications. It also points out the implications such a regime has for individuals’ experiences of freedom.

American Studies - Joanna Dreby

This collection is truly impressive. It demonstrates the importance of deportation as a mechanism for producing citizenship and alienage, nations, states, and territories in both theory and practice.

Bridget Anderson

This collection is truly impressive. It demonstrates the importance of deportation as a mechanism for producing citizenship and alienage, nations, states, and territories in both theory and practice.” - Bridget Anderson, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“This volume does a superb job of theorizing deportation beyond a mere act;
in doing so we get a greater appreciation of how such acts are intricately linked to nation-state projects under globalization and have economic implications. It also points out the implications such a regime has for individuals’ experiences of freedom.” - Joanna Dreby, American Studies

“The Deportation Regime is an important and timely book, both for theory and for politics. A series of well-written case studies (from across the world) accompanied by a smart introduction by Nicholas De Genova, the collection urges us to see the undocumented migrant/sans papiers/deportable alien/stateless citizen as paradigmatic of our time, as norm rather than exception, and thus as constitutive of sovereignty and the political today.”—Charles Piot, author of Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa

“This valuable collection of essays treating deportation as a distinct form of state social control shows convincingly that deportation demands more specific attention from social theorists. The ethnographically rich and theoretically informed essays provide fascinating case studies on the functioning of the deportation regime in different national settings.”—Linda Bosniak, author of The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemma of Contemporary Membership

From the Publisher

This volume does a superb job of theorizing deportation beyond a mere act; in doing so we get a greater appreciation of how such acts are intricately linked to nation-state projects under globalization and have economic implications. It also points out the implications such a regime has for individuals’ experiences of freedom.

Joanna Drebyn Studies

This collection is truly impressive. It demonstrates the importance of deportation as a mechanism for producing citizenship and alienage, nations, states, and territories in both theory and practice.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute - Bridget Anderson