Search

The recent geo-politicisation of return migration warrants deep consideration of the politics of return and reintegration. A focus on geopolitics prefigures the study of reintegration not just as circumstantial to the lives of migrants or the formal strategies of states but also as deeply embedded in the historical socio-cultural and political contexts where it takes place. In introducing a set of papers that explore these links from different angles and based on research from around the world, this article argues that return and reintegration constitute a qualitatively different process from immigration and integration in the receiving countries, first and foremost because the sending state—a key actor in the reintegration process—is in a position of geopolitical power marginality. Indeed, the strategies of all the stakeholders implicated in reintegration are closely linked to the geopolitics of migration governance. In these contexts, migrants’ intimate, as well as pragmatic, strategies of reintegration and re-migration are an expression, as well as a trigger, of multi-scale geopolitics. There is a distinct contrast between the emphasis on borders and securitisation in high-income countries and the informality and precarity of the way that migrants have to manage their ontological security in the process of return and reintegration. Reintegration should thus be understood as a process contingent upon different and, often, incongruous legal, political and socio-economic elements, as endorsed and employed by the different stakeholders involved.

This article analyses the unprecedented decision taken by the Israeli state in 2005 to legalize the status of non-Jewish undocumented migrants’ children. In explaining how the plight of culturally assimilated non-Jewish children succeeded in penetrating the hermetic ethno-religious definition of citizenship in Israel, the article focuses on the subtle yet critical influence of kinship on modern state-making and the affective fashioning of national belonging. By insisting on treating culturally assimilated non-Jewish children as Others, Israel increasingly ran the risk of unveiling the feeble construction of the Jewish nation in terms of kinship as ‘one big family’. The Israeli media increasingly began to question the refusal of the state to recognize children who were evidently ‘Israelis in every way’. Such a development, as some Israeli politicians undoubtedly realized, could have potentially been more detrimental to the mythological foundations of the Jewish state than the ‘adoption’ of a few hundred non-Jewish children.

Contributors to this special issue realised that reflecting on experiences of getting access (or not) can tell us something important about the institutions we aimed to study and, more broadly, about the migration control field. Put differently, attempts at approaching and approximating state actors within a charged field exposed us to some of its most fundamental organising principles. We have, therefore, set ourselves the task in this issue of SA/AS to ask and answer the following question: What do attempts at studying migration control tell us about the state? Our exercise is, thus, squarely set as an attempt to intervene in a burgeoning debate around the ways in which the ‘anthropology of the state’ can develop. Both the issues at stake – the management of undesired others – and the field in which we conduct our studies, migration control administrations, are indeed changing to become acutely central to the governing of our societies. By gathering findings from different research projects across Europe, this special issue offers a comparative perspective on some of the most salient features of the migration control field from the eyes of ethnographic researchers in search of access.

Methodological accounts often deliberately omit the role that luck plays in getting access to challenging research sites. Indeed, it sounds unprofessional and feels unsatisfying to attribute luck to our work. ‘I hope to get lucky’ will not go down well with most supervisors or as part of any grant proposal. We should, however, consider that luck literally stands for the probability that certain events might take place under certain circumstances. Reflecting on our luck can therefore help us to expound important features that structure the probability of getting access. In my case, getting access to the Spanish state deportation regime could never be anticipated or secured simply in line with the importance of my project or my academic credentials. Obtaining formal approval from the Spanish authorities proved to be impossible, but I eventually achieved access in a messy way that involved many informal interactions and much uncertainty. Accounting for my months-long attempts, I show how luck sensitised me to officials’ ample discretionary power and pervasive sense of impunity in producing an image of ‘the state’ as unpredictable and opaque. This image induced the strong sensation that my fieldwork crucially depended on the whims of particular officials.

In many countries, the law permits state authorities to detain noncitizens before deportation. Typically judicial decisions about preremoval detention must be made within a short period of time during which deportable noncitizens are held in police premises, and depending on the country detention may last just one month (e.g., France) or up to 18 months (the Netherlands). While previous research has explored various dimensions of noncitizen detention including the legal procedure, health consequences, the condition of detention centers, and the lives of deportable noncitizens, the empirical assessment of the determinants of decisions on preremoval detention are largely unexplored. Using data from court proceedings of police petitions of detention in Spain and a quantitative strategy, in this article we undertake an empirical analysis of noncitizen detention combining personal background of deportable noncitizens, legal factors of the case, and the behavior of different actors involved in the procedure. To do it, we fit models that take into account variation occurred at judicial district levels. Results indicate, on the one hand, that relevant actors involved in the procedure use different informational cues to decide on cases. On the other hand, the role of prosecutors and attorneys during hearings proves also relevant to predict detention.

This article proposes the term Departheid to capture the systemic oppression and spatial management of illegalized migrants in Western liberal states. As a concept, Departheid aims to move beyond the instrumentality of illegalizing migration in order to comprehend the tenacity with which oppressive measures are implemented even in the face of accumulating evidence for their futility in managing migration flows and the harm they cause to millions of people. The article highlights continuities between present oppressive migration regimes and past colonial configurations for controlling the mobility of what Hannah Arendt has called “subject races.” By drawing on similarities with Apartheid as a governing ideology based on racialization, segregation, and deportation, I argue that Departheid, too, is animated by a sense of moral superiority that is rooted in a fantasy of White supremacy.

The treatment of illegalized migrants in Western liberal states has been often characterized by a duality of compassion and repression. Within this dyad, repression is said to be applied with the right hand of the state by the police, border control, refugee status determination units, etc., and compassion with its left hand by social workers, medical staff, as well as civil society organizations and humanitarian agencies. Drawing on the toil of deportation caseworkers in the Netherlands, this article argues that compassion is prevalent not only among those who show benevolence and support illegalized migrants but also among many who work on the repressive side of the divide. However, expressions of compassion by deportation caseworkers do not seem to mitigate an otherwise repressive bureaucratic work. Instead, compassion often helps caseworkers to furnish a comfort zone in which emotions can be discharged and from which caseworkers neutralize potentially disruptive affective dynamics by experiencing them as intrinsic to the law they implement. Compassion not only fails to produce vertical commonality with deportable migrants in vulnerable positions; it also willfully fosters the self‐image of civil servants as humane and sensitive actors as they effectively implement controversial state policies.

In 2009, in a move to improve the situation regarding the deportability of illegalized migrants in Spain, a left-wing government led by the Socialist Workers’ Party drafted a new policy aimed at focusing police efforts exclusively on the deportation of ‘foreign criminals’. Ethnographically tracing the enforcement of deportation by a central police unit in Madrid, this article shows how the practical implementation of a policy that seemingly sought to limit the use of deportation in fact allowed for continuous and even reinvigorated deportation practices aimed at all categories of illegalized migrants. Operating under the idea that they were now fighting ‘dangerous criminals’, many police agents felt increasingly motivated about carrying out deportations and reassured about the morality of doing so. Rather than focusing on illegalized migrants who had been indicted for serious crimes, most police agents considered anyone with a police record to fit their target group. As a result of the specific police interpretation of the new policy, the deportability of illegalized migrants in Spain was not only increased but also left to be enforced according to the racialized and racist ideas of police agents. The article argues for the need to scrutinize all new deportation policies within Western liberal states in terms of their effect on deportability by highlighting entrenched and institutionalized forms of racism against illegalized migrants within the police force.

I will know what I precisely want to say in this piece only when I finish writing it. This enigmatic sentence is not meant as an alluring opening statement, nor is it a sign for an experimental literary method that I will be employing in this essay. For what it’s worth, this sentence captures my principal insight into the process of writing. It is an insight that I gained after years of experiencing much frustration with writing, after producing endless drafts of the same text, after nights and days spent on trying “to get it right,” after struggling not to...

El trabajo presenta las principales conclusiones de una investigación empírica sobre los expedientes de internamiento tramitados en la provincia de Barcelona en el año 2015. A partir del análisis de 575 expedientes y del uso de una metodología innovadora, se arroja luz sobre el perfil de las personas extranjeras afectadas por el internamiento, así como sobre los criterios que emplean los diversos agentes que intervienen en esta decisión: policías, fiscales, abogados y jueces de instrucción. También se ofrece información sobre la detención que precede a la solicitud de internamiento y sobre las órdenes de salida obligatoria que se pretende garantizar mediante esta forma de privación de libertad. Todos estos datos permiten poner de relieve cuál es el funcionamiento real del internamiento y los criterios que se emplean en la aplicación de la normativa vigente.---This paper contains the most important findings of an empirical research on the detention files of undocumented migrants for the purpose of removal processed in the province of Barcelona in 2015. The analysis of 575 files with an innovative methodology offers relevant information about the profiles of deportable migrants and the way in which all involved actors (police, state prosecutors, lawyers and judges) behave. The study gives also information about the detention that precedes all files, as well as about the deportation order that should be executed thanks to pre-removal detention. All these figures show which is the way in which pre-removal detention works and which are the criteria that are used in the implementation of the legal rules that govern preremoval detention of undocumented migrants.

Translocality as an analytical concept appears to have ignited the imagination of many scholars who are considering and reconsidering multiple mobilities in space and time. In different academic quarters, there is a perceptible increase in the scope of social issues and the breadth of geographical locations that fall under a translocal magnifying glass. The conceptual appeal of translocality, I believe, has much to do with its transitive character. The seductiveness of transitive concepts was...

In Spain, the national and local authorities boast in recent years about their progressive programs for the integration of Roma migrants from Romania. Many state efforts to work with Roma on their integration are specifically directed at women. Economic integration into the waged labor market is considered a major goal as it, supposedly, leads to the empowerment of Roma migrant women while also securing decent standards of living for entire families. This article argues that integration programs adversely result in the further discrimination and exclusion of those they pretend to relief. This adverse result is produced through a two-tier intervention in the lives of Roma families. The caring state works with a general category of ‘vulnerability’ for targeting populations, in which Roma migrant women are specifically incorporated through designated social programs. The performance of Roma as the subject–object of these programs is carefully evaluated. According to these evaluations, Roma women often fail to meet the normative standards of ‘good mothers’, ‘decent wives’, and ‘diligent workers’. Subsequently, to deal with ‘failing subjects’, the disciplining state, a-la Foucault, inflicts an array of penalties on Roma women and their families: cut-offs of social benefits, evictions from poor dwellings, withdrawal of children’s custody, and forced removals to Romania. We thus argue that initiatives by the caring state (and civil society) often prescribe or go hand-in-hand with repression from the correcting state. In welfare states, social programs can thus conclusively ‘evidence’ existing stereotypes about marginalized Roma families and about women in particular.

In this theme section we explore why and when states knowingly refrain from recording people and their activities. States are not simply in pursuit of enhanced “legibility”; at times they also need to be able to “look away.” In explaining strategies of nonrecording, our focus is on how subjects negotiate with state recording agencies, how nonrecording relieves state agents from the burden of accountability, how the discretionary power of individual state agents affects (non)recording in unanticipated ways, and how states may project an illusion of vigorous recording internationally while actually engaging in deliberate nonrecording. Presenting case studies from China, Greece, the Netherlands, India, and Romania, we show that strategies of nonrecording are flexible, selective, and aimed at certain populations—and that both citizens and noncitizens can be singled out for nonrecording or derecording. In analyzing this state-produced social oblivion, divergences between national and local levels are of crucial significance.

The social field in which deportations of illegalized migrants are operationalized is often perceived to be comprised of two opposing sides that together form a deportation regime: on the one side, street-level state agents, on the other side, civil-society actors. Focusing ethnographically on deportation case managers and NGO workers in the Netherlands, a country known for its consensus politics, our study reveals significant convergences in the manners that illegalized migrants are treated by both sides in usage of terminology, handling of face-to-face interactions and worldviews on issues like belonging and justice. Given these convergences, we argue that the field in which deportation is being negotiated and practiced amounts to a continuum formed by state agents and NGO actors. We argue that a deportation continuum is underlined by shared political subjectivities and creates a sealed-off political realm that restricts the initiatives of activist citizens, imaginaries of citizenship and alternatives for deportation policies.

This paper contains the most important findings of an empirical research on the detention files of undocumented migrants for the purpose of removal processed in the province of Barcelona in 2015. The analysis of 575 files with an innovative methodology offers relevant information about the profiles of deportable migrants and the way in which all involved actors (police, state prosecutors, lawyers and judges) behave. The study gives also information about the detention that precedes all files, as well as about the deportation order that should be executed thanks to pre-removal detention. All these figures show which is the way in which pre-removal detention works and which are the criteria that are used in the implementation of the legal rules that govern preremoval detention of undocumented migrants. El trabajo presenta las principales conclusiones de una investigación empírica sobre los expedientes de internamiento tramitados en la provincia de Barcelona en el año 2015. A partir del análisis de 575 expedientes y del uso de una metodología innovadora, se arroja luz sobre el perfil de las personas extranjeras afectadas por el internamiento, así como sobre los criterios que emplean los diversos agentes que intervienen en esta decisión: policías, fiscales, abogados y jueces de instrucción. También se ofrece información sobre la detención que precede a la solicitud de internamiento y sobre las órdenes de salida obligatoria que se pretende garantizar mediante esta forma de privación de libertad. Todos estos datos permiten poner de relieve cuál es el funcionamiento real del internamiento y los criterios que se emplean en la aplicación de la normativa vigente.

Based on a nonconsecutive fieldwork of 6 months among different police units responsible for deportation in Spain, I explore the practices and dilemmas of police agents who detain and deport illegalized migrants. Police agents seem to be particularly torn between two dominant tendencies in enforcing deportation policies: first, the need to apply ambiguous policies and unsatisfying laws that can be interpreted in different ways by superiors and colleagues; second, the need to justify potentially immoral situations that are produced in interactions with deportable subjects. In addition, the work of police agents who handle deportation is often coming under heavy public critique by the media, NGOs and other non-state actors. The paper aims to highlights the ways in which the police are caught up in an indecisive space of implementation that is constructed top-down by policies and laws that are unable, or unwilling, to sensibly regulate the deportation terrain, and bottom-up by the complex lived realities of illegalized migrants and deportable subjects. Police agents are having much discretion in interpreting and implementing state policies according to their views and by injecting meaning into their deportation practices. An ethnographic exploration of police practices divulges the wide gamut of views and approaches that different agents adopt. The picture that emerges from this exploration is thus not of well-disciplined police that work in a regimented and uniformed manner, but of agents who struggle to reconcile their own moral and sense of doing meaningful policing work with the need to enforce deportation policies that are being ethically and legally contested by different state and non-state actors.

Since 2005 around 60,000 asylum seekers, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan, have entered Israel by crossing the border from Egypt. Notwithstanding the Jewish history of persecution, and Israel being a signatory to the UN Convention for the protection of refugees, modern Israel systematically refuses to grant a refugee status to asylum seekers. Since 2012, the tenacious hostile approach of Israeli policy-makers and state-agents towards asylum seekers has resulted in an outburst of racist verbal and physical attacks against them. This article analyses the socio-legal location of asylum seekers in Israel by examining how their position is articulated by different parties, deploying competing discourses of human rights, citizenship, security and sovereignty. The article advances that appeals—mostly made by critical non-governmental organisations (NGOs), journalists and academics—to human rights, Jewish morals and historic sensitivities are beguiling; while they arouse hopes for compassion and moral obligation, they are also used by mainstream Israeli politicians to justify the exclusion and deportation of so-called ‘African infiltrators’. A hegemonic ideology of ‘fearism’—which brands the Israeli national narrative and informs the notion of citizenship among Jewish Israelis—leads to the construction of asylum seekers as abject Others, who pose a threat to the Jewish state and to Jews' own right for secured citizenship.

In many countries, the law permits state authorities to detain non-citizens who have pending deportation orders. As a measure against the right of liberty, international law, the EU legal framework and states establish a number of procedural safeguards, such as legal aid and judicial review. Typically the judicial decision about detention must be made within a short period of time during which deportable non-citizens are held in police premises, and depending on the country detention may last just one month (e.g., France) or up to 18 months (the Netherlands). While previous research has explored various dimensions of non-citizen detention including the legal procedure, health consequences, the condition of detention centers, and the lives of deportable non-citizens, the empirical assessment of the determinants of decisions on deportation are largely unexplored. Using data from court proceedings of police petitions of detention and a quantitative strategy, in this paper we undertake an empirical analysis of non-citizen detention combining personal background of deportable non-citizens, legal factors of the case, and the behavior of different actors involved in the procedure. To do it, we fit multilevel logistic regression models that take into account variation occurred at both court and judicial district levels. Results indicate, on the one hand, that relevant actors involved in the procedure use different informational cues to decide on cases. On the other hand, the role of attorneys during hearings proves also relevant to predict detention.

This chapter, focuses on Spain as a case study, draws attention to two cunning elements that are characteristic to programs of assisted voluntary return (AVR) across Europe: first, the very classification of these programs as being based in the voluntarism of the migrants; second, the implicit formulation with respect to a return of migrants to their ‘home’ (country). At first instance, the chapter demonstrates that these two guileful elements are problematical in their claims and manipulative in their formulation. Yet, the greater goal of the chapter is to argue that the couching of migrants’ assisted return in the language of voluntarism, patterned on positive notions of ‘home’, reveals the deeper neo-liberal ideological underpinnings of such programs as part of the ‘migration apparatus’ (Feldman 2012). Accordingly, I contend that so-called ‘voluntary return programs’ are based on the exact same logic that champions state sovereignty in justifying forced removals and violent deportations. I thus coin ‘soft deportation’ as a more appropriate term for referring to such programs, which are, de facto, an integral part of the overall bio-political scheme that absolves the territorial removal of illegalized subjects under state sovereignty.

In the Netherlands, there is increasingly critical debate about the government's top-down ethnic categorisation procedures and the assumption that analyses of integration should be based on internally homogeneous (and dichotomous) ethno-cultural blocks. While concerns about the ageing approach mount, no unified alternative framework has emerged. Informed by Brubaker's work on ‘groupism’, we provide an account of the currently dominant approach and outline an alternative vision of social divisions, exclusion and inclusion. More specifically, we offer a framework that can help researchers consider easing away from ethnic reification (as well as from the attendant analytic promotion of highly subjective notions such as ‘ethnic groups’) and towards analyses founded on more objective, ‘first-order’ social scientific categories. Making use of Elias's work on established and outsider dynamics, and dealing substantively with education, we flesh out how an alternative approach to in- and exclusion in contemporary Dutch society might be put to use. The goal, in short, is to assist researchers interested in a path leading to more grounded, relational and processual approaches to integration.

Each year the Dutch authorities categorize scores of people as being “out of procedure” (uitgeprocedeerd). These are mostly “failed asylum seekers” who have exhausted all legal appeals in search of regularizing their status in the Netherlands. Out-of-procedure subjects, or OOPSs, have no formal rights and receive no state provision. They must leave the country voluntarily within one month or risk deportation. Many OOPSs who spent weeks or even months in Dutch detention centers are eventually released onto the streets, as the authorities cannot manage to deport them. This article interrogates the production and treatment of OOPSs as nonexistent human beings who are no longer considered by the state as “aliens” but merely as illegalized bodies. This intriguing case of the state deserting certain people within its sovereign territory is realized through a process of derecording OOPSs and formally pretending that they are not part of the governed population.

This article contends that an emerging ‘mobilities paradigm’ within the social sciences reproduces an analytical gaze that is predominantly fixated on the movement of people across national borders. This privileging of state borders and categories in many of the mobilities studies should alert us to the extent to which it brings novelty to our examination of human mobility in the world. By analysing the flow of migrant workers from rural China to Israel, this article demonstrates how new insights regarding the importance and meaning of crossing national borders can be generated by looking at mobilities through the eyes of those involved in them, allowing state categories and national borders to prefigure in the analysis to an extent and form that are relevant for migrants. The article depicts the mobility-ridden life of Tseng, who comes from a small village in Fujian province and who, after migrating internally in China several times, decides to go to Israel. Highlighting the importance of unequal capital accumulation in shaping human mobility, the article questions some taken-for-granted assumptions about the motivation and situation of those who exercise international mobility; it particularly upsets a prevalent association in migration studies between physical and socio-economic mobility.

Focusing on the particularities of migration management and bordering in Portugal, contributions to this Special Issue inevitably raise our awareness about a more universal form that increasingly structures the management of mobility in states across Europe and beyond. This universal form that dominates migration management is colonial in its constitution, global in its reach, technologically advanced in its control, dehumanising in its implementation, and oppressive in its essence. Inspired by articles in this Special Issue, this afterword suggests that a key for studying critically the spread of the universal form in its particular instantiation is a reorientation of the ethnographic gaze towards moral subjectivities of bureaucrats and policymakers in institutions that implement oppressive migration policies. We must attempt to trace, analyse and understand how state actors justify servicing a blatant new form of an Arendtian 'banality of evil' that leads to the dehumanisation and exclusion of illegalised migrants and refugees.

Since the late 1990s migration from Ecuador has diversified with migrants now targeting a range of new destinations. By highlighting the recent immigration of non-Jewish undocumented migrants from Ecuador to Israel this article looks to discern not only a new trajectory but primarily a new type of migrant. Empirical findings point in the direction of an increased number of migrants who operate their migration largely from outside the realm of transnational networks. These migrants have no established connection in their destination and they thus also base their decision to migrate there upon very little information which is usually obtained from an acquaintance who had been there. It appears that these migrants make their decision to migrate in an individual and hasty manner. Often they do not deliberate their migration plans with their close family and household. Nonetheless once they have successfully operated their migration independently they then regularly serve as pioneers who encourage and facilitate the migration of their relatives and friends. In an attempt to provide a sociological explanation to the motivational structure and the more individualist migration pattern of this new type of migrant this article proposes the conceptualization of the migratory option as a disposition inculcated mainly in large segments of the Ecuadorian low-middle class. A migratory disposition is being formulated as people try to make sense of migration-related transformations in both the physical and the social context in which they are embedded. These transformations impinge on peoples economic and social perceptions of migration encouraging them to credibly view the possibility to operate migration in an independent fashion. Concurrently potential migrants increasingly consider transnational networks as structures characterized by high levels of connectivity and receptivity toward compatriots in migration destination. Potential migrants thus become audacious in their willingness to migrate alone and connect to the network once in destination. Ethnographic data demonstrate that in most cases this strategy of migrants has been proven effective. Focusing on this new type of migration can help explain the changing role of transnational networks in the decision-making process of potential migrants. It might also clarify the limited effect that restrictive migration policies directed to curb the extension of established transnational networks have had on the continuation of migration. (authors)