Citizenship, deportation and the boundaries of belonging

Abstract

Taking the growing use of deportation by many states, including the UK and the USA, as its point of departure, this article examines the implications of deportation for how citizenship is understood and conceptualised in liberal states. We follow scholars such as Walters (2002, Citizenship studies, 6 (2), 265–292) and Nicholas De Genova (2010, The deportation regime: sovereignty, space and freedom of movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 33–65) in seeing deportation as a practice that is ‘constitutive of citizenship’, one that reaffirms the formal and normative boundaries of membership in an international system of nominally independent states. However, we draw on the UK to show that, as a particularly definitive and symbolically resonant way of dividing citizens from (putative) strangers, deportation is liable to generate conflicts amongst citizens and between citizens and the state over the question of who is part of the normative community of members. Such conflict is, we show, a key and everyday feature of the many local anti-deportation campaigns that currently operate in support of individuals and families facing expulsion in liberal states. Although often used by governmental elites as a way to reaffirm the shared significance of citizenship, deportation, we suggest, may serve to highlight just how divided and confused modern societies are in how they conceptualise both who is a member and who has the right to judge who belongs.

Keywords:

• deportation
• citizenship
• membership
• anti-deportation campaigns

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Michael Keith, Sam Ray and the journal's two anonymous referees for helpful advice and assistance with this work.

Notes

1. Of course, deportation, undoubtedly, also plays a key role in constructing citizenship in non-liberal states. It is, however, reasonable to assume that the options for questioning and contesting who is subject to deportation power are considerably more constrained because of the restrictions placed on actions of civil society.

2. In Germany, annual deportations, although averaging slightly below 10,000 in the 1980s, ranged between 20,000 and 50,000 in the 1990s (Ellermann 2009, pp. 18–20). In Canada, the number of deportations (broadly defined) reported rose by 50% between 1999 and 2008 (McGill Tribune, 20 October 2009).

3. This figure does not include removals at the port, and neither does it include participants in the ‘assisted voluntary return’ scheme. There were no specific figures given for removals of foreign national prisoners, these were first given in the 2009 immigration statistics. After 2 years of focused efforts to remove this group, there were 5530 deportations of foreign national prisoners in 2009.

4. See http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/documents/employersandsponsors/listemployerspenalties/