God brought you home – deportation as moral governance in the lives of Nigerian sex worker migrants

ABSTRACT

Set in Nigeria among deported sex worker migrants and the institutions that seek to intervene in their migration, this article explores how deportation serves the dual function as a tool for migration governance as well as a tool for moral governance. Deportation has often been analysed from a Global North perspective and as a technology of migration governance imposed upon migrants and their nation states in the Global South. Yet, among Nigerian institutions working with deportees, such as anti-trafficking institutions, as well as among the deportees, the analysis shows how invoking the powerful languages of God, morality and nation-building, deportation emerges as a technology of moral governance – a site for reconfiguring, circumscribing and actively practicing what it means to be a legitimate Nigerian citizen.

KEYWORDS:

• Nigeria
• deportation
• religion
• human trafficking
• migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While Benin City is in everyday language termed Benin, it should not be conflated with Nigeria’s neighbouring country (to the West) the Republic of Benin.

2. Names that would allow the identification of any person(s) described in the article have been removed.

3. Twenty-eight of the women were former sex workers in Europe of which most had been there five to six years before their return to Nigeria.

4. In IOM’s definition, AVRR is the program that returns and manages the reintegration of migrants, such as identified victims of trafficking, who are unable or unwilling to remain in host countries and wish to return voluntarily to their countries of origin (IOM 2012).

5. I use the term deportation to refer to a range of practices that go under different terms, such as observed departure, forced removals, juridical deportation and AVRR. Building on Anderson, Gibney, and Paoletti (2011, 549) I see the core of deportation as the expulsion of individual non-citizens from the territory of a state by the (threatened or actual) use of force. I also apply the term ‘deportation’ and ‘deportee’ as used by the migrant women and their families who did not separate between those different terms.

6. The fieldwork was conducted between 2009 and 2012 in four periods in Denmark and Nigeria. The interviews were performed in English and Bini assisted by my Nigerian research assistant.

7. My use of the term indentured sex work migration does not exclude human trafficking, but points to the way in which migrant labour is organized.

8. See e.g. Grewal and Kaplan (1994), Kempadoo and Doezema (1998), Brennan (2004), Grewal (2005), Kempadoo, Sanghera, and Pattanaik (2005), Bernstein (2010), Andrijasevic (2010), Doezema (2010) and Parreñas (2011).

9. While acknowledging their individual differences, for the purpose of simplicity I here collapse Catholic, Pentecostal and Protestant into Christianity.