No place like home? The International Organization for Migration and the new political imaginary of deportation

ABSTRACT

Programmes to encourage the return of migrants living with irregular status are prominent in many OECD countries. Bearing titles like ‘assisted voluntary return and reintegration’ (AVRR), they are often rationalized as a more humane alternative to forced deportation. Critics question their voluntariness, suggesting they are actually an extension of the deportation apparatus. While broadly sympathetic to these criticisms, this paper offers a novel perspective on AVRR. We argue AVRR is reshaping what we call the political imaginary of deportation. Focusing on the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a leading architect of AVRR, we insist scholars take seriously the visual images and narratives through which voluntary return is discursively constructed. First, we discuss the political imaginary, and clarify what this concept brings to deportation studies. Second, we present a mapping of the political imaginary of deportation as this appears within IOM information campaigns concerning AVRR. We organize this material i­n terms of three analytics: returnees as activists, return journeys as homecoming, and deportation as self-reinvention. In the eyes of many activists and migrants, deportation has very negative and painful connotations. We show that IOM reimagines the landscape of deportation in a positive light. We call this move the deportation twist.

KEYWORDS:

• Deportation
• political imaginary
• IOM
• migration
• voluntary return policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Gibney’s definition applies to deportation largely as it is practised in contemporary liberal democracies. But as he recognises (Gibney 2013, 119), deportation has historically and politically taken other forms where it is conducted on a collective rather than individual basis, and not restricted to the non-citizen (see also Walters 2002).

2 While we treat assisted voluntary return in this paper as a modification and extension of the contemporary deportation regime there are certainly other ways one could enhance its intelligibility. For example, one could relate AVRR to the historical field that legal scholar Park has called ‘self-deportation’ – ‘a variety of state-sponsored coercive removal that assigns some agency to individuals in their own removal’ (Park 2018, 1884). As she sees it, self-deportation is ‘the removal strategy of making life so unbearable for a group that its members will leave a place’ (2018, 1879). The UK government’s policy of ‘hostile environment’ (recently renamed ‘compliant environment’) can certainly be located in this field. So can the situation in the US where a combination of poor job prospects and heightened risk of incarceration and deportation leads some unauthorised migrants and their families to undertake a ‘preemptive return’ (Boehm 2016, 9–10) to avoid entanglement in formal deportation procedures (Medina and Menjivar 2015, 2124).

3 We lack the space here to discuss residual forms at any length. Williams (1977) notes that residual forms can either be cultural practices that have not died out or they can be forms that are reactivated and reanimated in the present within political struggles. One move that campaigners have made to protest deportations from the EU is to mobilise images of slave ships like the famous diagram of the Brookes (e.g. see the cover of Corporate Watch 2013). By summoning memories and images of racialised and genocidal forced movements they put residual forms to use in contemporary politics.

4 The ‘success stories’ were smooth narratives in that we found few expressions of ambivalence, regret, or uncertainty; no data are also data but we cannot be certain about the edited nature of the material we examined.

5 IOM, Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration 2016 Key Highlights https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/our_work/DMM/AVRR/AVRR-2016-Key-Highlights.pdf

6 ICMPD, Reverse Migration: Supporting Sustainable Return of Migrants through Private-Public Multistakeholder Partnerships https://www.icmpd.org/our-work/capacity-building/european-and-global-initiatives/reverse-migration-suprem/#:~:text=The%20project%20is%20associated%20with,of%20origin%2C%20having%20received%20substantial. Accessed May 13, 2021.

7 IOM, Reintegration Handbook. Practical guidance on the design, implementation and monitoring of reintegration assistance, 2019. https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/iom_reintegration_handbook.pdf Accessed September 5, 2020.

8 European Commission, “No place like home” Nationwide campaign on safe migration launched in Africa., 24th August 2020 https://ec.europa.eu/trustfundforafrica/all-news-and-stories/no-place-home-nationwide-campaign-safe-migration-launched-ghana. Accessed May 10, 2020.

9 IOM, The Story of Alfusainey, the Gambia, 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJrlszQGfg0. Accessed May 8, 2021.

10 IOM, The Story of Rosamond, The Gambia, 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C19WCVw-t7I. Accessed May 8 2021.

11 For example, see the important website and project, Migrant Voice. https://www.migrantvoice.org/index.php/migrationmatters/80

12 IOM, Gambian Returnees Band Together to Fight the Backway, Life After Return series, 30th September 2019 https://medium.com/@UNmigration/life-after-return-8bc7d765820a. Accessed September 20, 2020.

13 See for example IOM, Stories of Reintegration, 2013 https://publications.iom.int/fr/books/stories-reintegration-0 or IOM, Migrant Stories, https://www.iom.int/press-room/migrant-stories. Accessed July 21, 2020.

14 European Commission, From migrants to activists: returned migrants advocate for legal migration, 2nd May 2019 https://ec.europa.eu/trustfundforafrica/all-news-and-stories/migrants-activists-returned-migrants-advocate-legal-migration_en. Accessed July 20, 2020).

15 Interestingly, Bartels (2017, 323) observes how migrants have also borrowed from practices typically associated with activism in their demands for AVRR. She cites the case of sub-Saharan migrants protesting at the IOM headquarters in Morocco for the ‘right to return voluntarily’ following the cessation of IOM’s AVRR project.

16 EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, Towards Sustainable Reintegration: EU-IOM Joint Initiative for Migrant Protection and Reintegration three tears on, 20th December 2019 https://ec.europa.eu/trustfundforafrica/all-news-and-stories/towards-sustainable-reintegration-eu-iom-joint-initiative-migrant-protection_en . Accessed September 5, 2020.

17 IOM, Young Ethiopian returnees share their harrowing irregular migration experiences, 14th May 2019 https://medium.com/@UNmigration/yusuf-embraces-his-mother-bultuyoung-ethiopian-returnees-share-their-harrowing-irregular-afa54e69220b. Accessed July 15, 2020.

18 The original German folk song tells of a boy who leaves home and returns as a man.

19 IOM, Deborah, from migrant’s hell to business management in Nigeria, 30th April 2018. https://www.iom.int/video/deborah-migrants-hell-business-management-nigeria. Accessed September 7, 2020.

20 IOM, This is my story: giving voice to returnees, IOM Publication, 2017, p.22.

21 IOM, This is my story: giving voice to returnees, IOM Publication, 2017, p. 26.

22 IOM, 2018 Return and Reintegration Highlights, 2019, p.17. https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/our_work/DMM/AVRR/2018_return_and_reintegration_key_highlights.pdf

23 Numerous examples can be cited here, from Little Red Riding Hood, to Hansel and Gretel and Hans in Luck.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant # 435-2017-1008).