The Reversal of Migratory Family Lives: A Cape Verdean Perspective on Gender and Sociality pre- and post-deportation

Abstract

Deportation, as a coerced and involuntary mode of return migration, contradicts common assumptions and understandings of transnational livelihoods. This can be felt particularly strongly in the realm of the family—the social sphere where migration is facilitated and enacted. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in Cape Verdean transnational social fields, this paper applies a gendered perspective in examining how deportation affects individual positions within transnational families. It studies how female and male deportees try to re-establish their social and affective lives after their return and also takes into account the perspective of family members who continue to live in the (former) destination country and who have to cope with the absence of a deported relative. These findings reveal power relations and social inequalities produced by state removal, unfolding not only between states and non-citizen residents but also among family members whose lives are divided involuntarily by state borders. The article comes to the conclusion that deportation not only ‘reverses’ the position of migrants in their (alleged) countries of origin but also that these processes of ‘reversal’ extend to all achievements of migratory family lives—both in the migrants' country of origin as well as in the country of destination.

Keywords:

• Deportation
• Transnational Families
• Law and Family
• Gender
• Return Migration
• Cape Verde

Acknowledgements

This essay is based on anthropological fieldwork in Cape Verde, which was divided into two parts (October 2006−July 2007 and March−April 2008) and was financed by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in the form of a postdoctoral scholarship. My attendance at the meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in 2012 was financed by the International Research Institute ‘Work and the Life-Cycle in Global History’ (Re:work) at Humboldt University in Berlin. I owe a special note of appreciation especially to Ines Hasselberg, my co-editing colleague, and also to Christin Achermann, Susan Coutin, Brian Donahoe, Barak Kalir and an anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Furthermore, I wish to express my gratitude to the Cape Verdean Instituto das Comunidades, the Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros and the Cape Verdean consulate in Boston for providing valuable background information and statistics and to those individuals I met in the field who shared their time and gave insights into their perceptions of life.

Notes

[1] Due to the increasing application of deportation measures, the deportation of more than one member of the same family occurs more and more frequently. For ease of reading, I will use the singular in reference to deported family members, and only indicate plural deportees where relevant.

[2] Each of the nine Cape Verdean islands has a tendency to certain migration destinations, which is the result of historical migration patterns. For instance, the two eastern islands, Sal and Boavista, have huge diaspora populations in Italy, while Sao Vicente, one of the northern islands, has a strong migrant presence in England and the Netherlands (Carling 2001, 9). In the USA, larger Cape Verdean migrant communities can be found in the Greater Boston metropolitan area (Halter 1993).

[3] According to a statistical overview provided by the Instituto das Comunidades (part of the Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros, Cooperação e Comunidades de Cabo Verde), the number of deportations has increased annually. As of 2002, there were only a total of 460 deportees in the entire country, 449 male and 11 female (2%). Between 2002 and 2011, 857 Cape Verdean nationals were deported, 759 male, 98 female (11%). Until 2002, Portugal was the country sending back the largest contingent, but since 2002 the majority have been sent back from the USA. The majority of those sent back from the USA had been convicted of aggression (29%), possession and dealing of narcotics (82%), robbery (16%) and being undocumented (15%; Neves 2012). It is important to note that only a minority of deportees get registered at the moment of their entry into Cape Verde. Therefore, estimates of the actual number of deportees should be considerably higher.

[4] Government officials, especially in the USA, sometimes offer this option. Those who ‘self-deport’, an expression often used in Cape Verde, avoid getting a black mark on their immigration record and retain greater freedom of travel, albeit not to the country that was planning to deport them. For the case of the USA, see Walsh (2005).