MIGRATION STUDIES

VOLUME 1  NUMBER 2  2013

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Reviews
Deportation 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.
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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 ofcial 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 ourished 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 preemptive 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 immigration 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 account 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 gure 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 impassioned but carefully reasoned intervention on behalf of a comprehensive revision of immigrant 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 noncitizens, rather than against them!) and a restoration of systemic integrity through moderately exible ideas of discretion, judicial oversight, and a humane understanding of basic human rights principles, especially those that mandate proportionality and reject arbitrariness 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, institutionalization, 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 organization 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 migration, more broadly (Anderson et al., p. 126). Hence, Fischer demonstrates how these humanitarian advocates become an important component of a larger professional apparatus dedicated to the legal and sociopolitical production of borders. By rendering more legible the differences between deportable and undeportable illegal foreigners, furthermore, 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 ne 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 ne 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 deportation practices) and how its approval came about with the consolidation of new pressures 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, specically comparing Ireland, the USA, Australia, and South Africa; a study addressing the signicant gap between migrant detention and actual deportations in The Netherlands, and therefore examining the informal or unofcial functions 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-dening act dedicated to asserting the value and signicance of citizenship and reinforcing the distinction 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 congurations. However, even this working denition 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 citizenship. We need only be reminded of various historical examples of statutes for the denaturalization (and exclusion) of undesirable citizens, which span from the disqualication 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 nally, to their extermination. Hannah Arendt famously discusses this conundrum in terms of the perplexities of human rights, but it may be equally compellingly 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-dened 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 punitive 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 pregured the mass deportation of Jews (both foreigners 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 specicity, rather than presupposed as an effectively dening, 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 migrantsindenitely 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 selforganization 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
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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 scholarship on global domestic service. Lutz focuses on migrant domestic workers in Germany. She points out that, to understand 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 specic experiences of migrant domestic workers and can be useful to compare the experiences of migrant women in other labor-receiving countries, although