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Exporting risk: Deporting non-citizens
... As many scholars have noted, while deportation is formally categorized as an administrative measure, due to its punitive character it can be better conceived of as a 'blend of civil and criminal law' -especially in the light of the burden imposed (Aliverti, 2012: 425;cf. also Bosworth, 2016;Dow, 2007;Kanstroom, 2000;Kaufman, 2014;Weber and Pickering, 2013;Zedner, 2015). Because the factual consequences of deportation are undoubtedly heavy and punitive, this circumstance might lead to different understanding of what is 'punishment' especially for immigrants who are embroiled in the criminal and immigration system at the same time. ...
... Earlier studies conducted among deportees have reported feelings of social exclusion, stigmatization and rejection (Brotherton and Barrios, 2009;Macías-Rojas, 2016;Schuster and Majidi, 2015), all feelings in sharp contrast with the preventive nature of administrative measures. Drawing the boundaries of punishment within this hybrid legal system is not solely a theoretical exercise, but it is inherently connected with the question of how far governments can conceal the exercise of penal sovereignty under largely uncontrolled administrative powers (Aliverti, 2012;Barna, 2011;Dow, 2007;Kanstroom, 2000;Weber and Pickering, 2013;Zedner, 2015). As stated above, this article seeks to contribute to the debate on punishment and border control by providing an empirical account of how deportable foreign national prisoners construe their meaning of punishment. ...
... Foreign national prisoners are not only serving their sentence in 'special' penitentiary facilities designed to host who come uninvited to the Netherlands, but they are also waiting to be expelled from the country. It is worth noticing that not all of them will meet this fate: while deportation may appear as an exercise of state unilateral power and control, this conception is misleading (Weber and Pickering, 2013). Deporting someone requires bilateral agreement between states -which often fails. ...
This article explores the challenges that (cr)immigration practices pose to draw the boundaries of punishment by examining foreign national prisoners’ penal subjectivities. More exclusionary and draconian migration policies have blurred the boundaries between border control and crime control, creating hybrid forms of punishment that, even if officially claimed as measures outside the criminal justice realm, inflict pain and communicate censure. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews with foreign national prisoners facing expulsion in the Dutch penitentiary facility of Ter Apel, we detail how hybrid (cr)immigration practices are capable of imposing and delivering meanings that go well behind rooted significances and aims of administrative measures. Traditionally designed with preventive purposes, administrative measures have now become part of a project of social exclusion and reaffirmation of the worth of citizenship. This circumstance raises problematic questions for the legitimacy of the criminal justice system in dealing with non-citizens.
... 154 As Weber and Pickering demonstrate, fears surrounding likely deportation have been related to high levels of stress and suicide amongst non-citizens. 155 The second Guden principle (loss of opportunity to remain in Australia) lends support to Grewcock's argument that despite formal separation between administrative deportation and criminal punishment, in practice, deportation for criminal offending results in the imposition of additional hardships or punishing consequences. 156 Significantly, when a person is deported pursuant to section 200 or their visa is cancelled under section 501, that person will be banned from applying for any visa (other than a protection visa) whilst in immigration detention, and permanently excluded from Australia once removed from the country. ...
It was once a criminal offence for a ‘prohibited immigrant’ to be found within Australia. Today, the mandatory detention regime sees the issue of whether a non-citizen may enter or remain in Australia as one solely within the ambit of administrative law. Yet non-citizen status continues to have consequences in criminal courts. This article examines the question of ‘what does criminal justice look like for non-citizens’ from two angles: the effect of character-based deportation upon the criminal sentencing process; and the differential punishment of non-citizens. It is argued that the sentencing of non-citizens in Australia is produced across an unstable boundary between immigration law and crime, creating a different, and diminished, criminal law for non-citizens.
... Deportation decisions are predominantly intended to reduce the risk to the deporting state. Weber and Pickering (2013) use the terminology 'exporting risk' through return: by returning non-citizens and using political rhetoric against them, the state is portraying the reduction of risk or 'threat' to society from those who are different and could have a negative societal impact through crime. It is this constructed 'threat' of criminal non-citizens and the action of deportation to remove such a threat that I argue is being prioritised over the material threat of COVID-19. ...
While global travel largely stopped and borders closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, states continued to deport individuals who had been sentenced for committing criminal offences. In Australia and New Zealand, questions over whether and how deportation of migrants during a global pandemic should occur were raised: weighing up arguments of legality, public health, and security. This left many migrants uncertain, isolated in immigration detention waiting for an unknown departure date. The decision was made to continue the deportation process for many, and in some cases breaches of public health restrictions were the basis for deportation. Once deported, mandatory quarantine on arrival under COVID-19 restrictions highlights and exacerbates the challenges that returning offenders normally face. These include extended detention periods; surveillance through detention and monitoring; and securitised discourse by the media and public creating ongoing stigma. This snapshot enables us to understand how states prioritised the removal of ‘the crimmigrant other’, a securitised threat, while facing the material threat of COVID-19.
... Deportation decisions are predominantly intended to reduce the risk to the deporting state. Weber and Pickering (2013) use the terminology 'exporting risk' through return: by returning non-citizens and using political rhetoric against them, the state is portraying the reduction of risk or 'threat' to society from those who are different and could have a negative societal impact through crime. It is this constructed 'threat' of criminal non-citizens and the action of deportation to remove such a threat that I argue is being prioritised over the material threat of COVID-19. ...
The geographic isolation of Pacific states and people has meant that the region has managed to avoid the direct consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the indirect consequences have nevertheless been significant. This article attempts to answer the question: what are the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for understanding security in the Pacific Islands? To do this it considers three key questions. First, what does the COVID-19 pandemic reveal about the nexus between security and development in the Pacific? Second, does the concept of resilience offer an effective way to frame the Pacific response to the pandemic? Third, is there an optimal balance between isolation and globalisation for enhancing security and development in the Pacific?
... This norm is radically overturned by the bordered penality directed against non-citizens by the Australian state; the riskiness of the non-citizen offender is magnified to 'an irremediable and illegitimate character flaw justifying permanent expulsion from the community' (Grewcock, 2014: 133). Having established a particular group of offenders to be exceptional risks, Australia proceeds to absolve itself of responsibility for them by 'exporting' their risk (Grewcock, 2014;Weber and Pickering, 2013). ...
Australia’s detention-deportation regime is setting the agenda for New Zealand’s domestic criminal justice system, with implications for criminological understandings of ‘crimmigration’ and ‘bordered penality’. In response to recent changes in Australian migration law which have seen an increased number of deportations to Aotearoa New Zealand, the New Zealand government introduced legislation, the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) (“ROMI”) Act 2015, which created a monitoring regime for returning New Zealanders convicted of criminal offending in an overseas jurisdiction. The sentence an individual is subject to in Australia is extended, both geographically and temporally, creating multiple punishments for this particular group of offenders. While ostensibly modelled from domestic parole arrangements, in practice the ROMI regime entails greater restriction while offering less in the way of legal protection. The differential treatment of returning New Zealanders is sustained through their discursive construction as both “criminals” and de facto “aliens”. By treating returnees as threatening outsiders to be contained, rather than vulnerable people to be supported, the New Zealand state also extends the risk logics underpinning the Australian regime. Although the ROMI Act is novel, the regime conforms to the racialised patterns of exclusion and criminalisation which have persisted in Aotearoa New Zealand since colonisation.
... Public opposition to these policies has focused on the inhumanity of deporting long-standing residents who may have little knowledge and few support structures in the country to which they are returned (Grewcock 2014). There is no academic literature as yet on criminal deportation from New Zealand, the third developed nation contributing to deportation across the Pacific. 1 The exporting of risk is an inherently supra-national practice, not least because governments are forced to deal with officials in countries of return in order to effect these expulsions (Weber and Pickering 2012). Beyond this, however, it appears that little thought is given by governments to the impact of deportation within receiving countries. ...
This chapter analyses the experiences of isolation, precarity, and resilience of Dominican deportees. The context of reception of persons deported from the USA to Latin American and Caribbean countries is highly dependent on the cultural context and laws of each country. However, recent research has shown that deportees suffer isolation and stigmatisation that has clear effects on their social and labour market reintegration. This chapter, drawn from 46 interviews with Dominican deportees, explores how highly stigmatised individuals with minimal job experience find opportunities in the precarious and informal Dominican labour market. The ability of Dominican deportees to re-integrate is in part due to their ability to access the limited labour market opportunities, as well as through remittances from family members in the USA.
Continuing from Chap. 4 with the theme of death, Chap. 5 asks about the circumstances in which tens of thousands of migrants crossing the Mediterranean have been left by EU states to drown, being rescued at sea by civilians, and then are returned to Libya or Turkey. Especially since 2015, a plethora of studies has emerged on this question of ‘push-back’ by the EU. This chapter shows how selective visa regimes punish those most in need of protection, as EU member states decide who will survive and who must risk death by drowning. EU member states do not even bother to identify the border-dead; that too is done by NGOs instead of governments. Why do EU member states go to such lengths (and spend so much money) in order to avoid moral, legal and historical, post-colonial responsibilities for those fleeing danger and disaster to the islands and shores of Europe? This chapter includes testimonies of the life and near-death experiences of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean.
Climate change is the most significant global risk of our time. Environmental shifts are already creating multiple insecurities for humans, land, oceans and whole life systems, including the potential loss of nation-states and mass population displacements. Despite this, the mass uncertainties caused by industrial emissions are persistently denied and minimized by states and corporations focused on economic growth, technological development, institutional competitiveness and resource extraction. This chapter reflects on how modern societies have responded to climate change risks by developing increasingly secure border controls. It exposes three principal risk-prevention techniques—hostile legalities, hostile solidarities and hostile hospitalities—that together operate to blame, responsibilize and control those least responsible for climate change, while taking the focus away from polluting states and corporations to address their globally threatening activities.
Since 2015 millions of migrants have paid smugglers to take them across borders. In response, states have increasingly arrested smugglers, hoping to morally condemn smuggling, and to decrease the rate of inward migration. This article argues that, even if a state is justified in morally condemning smuggling, and justified in decreasing inward migration, arresting smugglers is a disproportionate response for reaching these ends.
The clans of the ‘ndrangheta, from the Southern Italian region of Calabria, have become the wealthiest and most powerful Italian mafia groups, allegedly present in over 25 countries around the world, undisputed oligarchs of the cocaine market, and reliable criminal partners for other criminal groups around the world. Their presence in Europe, Canada, the USA, and Australia, mainly, has been certainly facilitated by the mass migration from Calabria in the past century while current criminal relationships are rekindled thanks to the availability of faster communication and means of travels. Moreover, the Calabrian region is exceptionally challenged in its development and in the implementation of innovation strategies, which is the cause and effect of the mafia presence. The ‘ndrangheta clans are poly-crime criminal networks and they engage in a variety of criminal and semi-legal activities, from illegal waste dumping to online gambling, from European Union (EU) fraud to the flower industry, and from money laundering to renewable energies. The purpose of this chapter is to present the ‘ndrangheta clans in today’s forms, by looking at some of their international activities and their sources of economic power by specifically focusing on the way the clans exploit local economy to foster their global reach.
Manuel Castells (1996) famously argued that human processes are increasingly operating according to the logic of flows and it has now become commonplace to analyse movements of people, information and commodities in terms of flows. However, scholars have been slow to capture the dynamics of border enforcement practices in these terms. In this article, we argue that ‘deportation’ can best be understood, not as a discrete practice that is unidirectional, territorial and wholly controlled by individual states, but as a range of diverse practices used by states (and sometimes undermined by other parties) to try to control the circulation of people within a dynamic supra‐national space. By focusing on ‘mobility control continuums’ operating in selected countries at the peripheries of Europe, we capture the dynamics of state intervention in trans‐border flows and thereby contribute towards developing concepts and methodologies for the criminological study of border controls that are ‘sensitive to the complexities of the global’ (Aas 2007).
This article considers the future of punishment in a world shaped by competing and reinforcing forces of globalization and nationalism. In it, we call for a wider conversation about the growing interdependence between criminal justice and migration control and of its implications for many of the key concepts and approaches within the field of punishment and society. The article examines the renewed salience of defending borders and drawing boundaries between members and non-members, as well as the shifting focus of penal power from issues of imprisonment and morality, towards questions of immobilization and expulsion from the polity. By doing so, it also addresses the gaps in the existing theories and narratives about penality, which fail to take properly into account the implications of global connectivity, while overlooking enduring matters of racial and class inequity. Finally, the article points out how the progressive destabilization of citizenship and the precarity of membership and belonging are inimically linked to increasingly potent exhortations of penal power that affect us all.
This article analyses 10 years (2004–2014) of An Garda Síochána controlled drug data to investigate the impact of economic recession and globalization on the Irish illicit drug market. The limited international literature on recessions and drug markets suggests that economic downturns can increase both drug consumption and dealing. Gardaí data may, however, suggest that the 2008 Great Recession reduced drug use and dealing, yet increased the cultivation and manufacture of drugs: trends which largely conflict with the international literature. Two testable hypotheses are drawn from the data: (1) net consumption and trade of illicit drugs were reduced by emigration triggered by the Great Recession; (2) the Great Recession forced an adaptation in the market which sped up the process towards import substitution of cannabis cultivation. The article concludes by investigating how recent changes highlight the globalized nature of Irish drug markets before proposing avenues for further research.
Viewed from a government perspective, the practice of deporting convicted non-citizens can be characterised as the exporting of risk. However, ethnographic research is increasingly identifying the risks of stigmatisation, discrimination and victimisation faced by deportees themselves, following return to their countries of citizenship. In this chapter, Weber and Powell use interviews conducted with deportees, law enforcement officials, and community organisations in Samoa, supplemented by UNESCO research on criminal deportation in the Pacific, to identify cycles of criminalisation and exclusion arising from criminal deportation from Australia, New Zealand, and the USA. They trace the initial construction of convicted non-citizens as unacceptable risks to community safety, and discuss the mechanisms by which these constructions are maintained and sometimes modified, transferred or magnified in the aftermath of forced returns.
The significant concept of ‘crimmigration’ has evolved to explain how criminal and immigration laws have begun to merge, expanding state powers to surveil, control and punish. States use crimmigration processes to reinforce cultural, political and moral boundaries. In doing so, states frequently displace principles of punishment or rights in favour of promoting compliance, security or belonging. In relation to the case of New Zealanders detained–deported from Australia, this article illustrates new forms of crimmigration. First, crimmigration is expanding in a context of neoliberal responsibilization. Given the gradual removal of economic supports or political inclusion, ‘non-citizens’ share a deeply precarious space, and more groups are being made ‘at risk’ of crimmigration interventions. Once likely to focus upon certain populations, especially on ‘race’ or nationality grounds, crimmigration now engages all ‘non-citizens’. Second, crimmigration has expanded to include pre-emption – ‘non-citizens’ are targeted not just on account of their criminal behaviours but also their perceived associations, ‘risky’ behaviours or suspicious associations. Finally, and third, crimmigration strategies have expanded across borders, in ways that fundamentally distort established legal principles on the ever-shifting grounds of security. The contagion of crimmigration creates multiple punishments for ‘non-citizens’ that far surpass the nature of their offending or their ‘risk’ to society.
The expulsion of irregular migrants has become a political priority in many (northern) EU member states. In countries such as Germany and the Netherlands this has resulted in a rather puzzling situation in which the capacity for the administrative detention of irregular migrants is increasing, while the number of effective expulsions seems to be decreasing. In this article two theoretical perspectives are used to analyse these developments: a perspective emanating from the criminological framework of the ‘new penology’ and one resulting from the ‘migration control literature’. These perspectives combined offer explanations for this paradoxical situation — by highlighting the importance of identification and the frustration thereof by irregular migrants and countries of origin — and for the apparent irrationality of the use of, sometimes very lengthy, administrative detention of irregular migrants.
Attempts by governments to control unwanted border crossings are a defining feature of late modernity; but the suppression of cross-border mobility is not new. In pre-industrial England the `masterless men' and `valiant beggars' were subjected to harsh measures designed to curtail their mobility. In this article, we observe that border control intensifies at times of tumultuous structural change when institutions capable of preserving the emerging economic and social order are largely absent. In a globally mobile society, we argue that `flawed consumers' and `suspect citizens' are the most likely to be earmarked for exclusion. This designation links historical conceptions of `the other' with the tropes of race, class and foreignness to underpin contemporary xeno-racism.
This article is an ancient Greek historian's response to an invitation to reflect upon modern liberal democratic deportation. The article identifies a revealing contrast between ancient Greek city-states and their modern republican successors. In ancient Greece, institutionalised lawful expulsion of non-citizens was not a major concern. Rather, it was lawful expulsion of citizens which was a prominent political issue, comparable to modern liberal democratic deportation. Indeed, modern liberal democratic deportation and associated rhetoric were significantly foreshadowed in the ancient Greek politics of expulsion: Greeks used and justified lawful expulsion of citizens as a means of constructing and reinforcing both state power and abstract, rationalistic norms of citizenship. The article suggests the hypothesis that the contrast between the ancient and the modern situations can be explained by the modern prevalence of universalist human rights norms, not politically influential in ancient Greece. First, human rights norms exert pressures on modern liberal democratic states, unparalleled in ancient Greece, to integrate and assist outsiders. Deportation is partly a reaction against those pressures, of a type unnecessary in the ancient Greek world. Second, although the modern liberal democratic analogues of Classical republican ideas, partly derived from their Classical antecedents, encourage lawful citizen expulsion, the modern citizen's inalienable human right to residence in his home state militates against it. Modern liberal democratic deportation of non-citizens, and associated rhetoric, can thus be interpreted partly as alternative outlets for the use of expulsion and exclusionary rhetoric to construct and reinforce complex norms of citizenship.
This paper discusses mental and psychological impacts of Australia's temporary protection visa (TPV) policy on individual asylum seekers. The paper is based on personal narratives constructed by individual asylum seekers during one-on-one interviews and aims principally to sketch the discursive manifestations of stressful events in the lives of TPV holders. The fact that refugees exhibit signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is not entirely new or surprising given the level of trauma, and in many cases torture and persecution, endured in the pre-migration phase.
What is particularly revealing among many TPV holders is the fact that their pre-migration traumatic experiences are compounded by a post-migration condition of being in indefinite "temporary" protection. This is further exacerbated by an awareness of the exclusionary discourses and policies advocated by the host government. Past trauma and persecution, combined with present family separation and social exclusion, further compounded by uncertainty about the future, results in almost chronic states of anxiety and depression among a significant number of TPV holders.<br /
Citizenship has become a buzz word of political discourse and policy formation. Recent formulations convey the message that rights are contingent on earning membership in a political community and carry corresponding responsibilities. Acquiring citizenship entails a more rigorous process of validation and conformity with prescribed norms. The notion of probationary citizenship (developed in respect of immigrants) is extended to all those whose standing as full citizens is in doubt. Citizenship comes to be used as a means of policing and a tool of the criminal law. Assertion of the state's duty to provide security for bona fide citizens provides the rationale for measures that are preemptive, exclusionary, and pay scant regard to procedural proprieties. They create a caste of outlaws and aliens whose status renders them suspect aside from any wrongdoing; whose interests are compromised in the name of protecting the public; and who must requalify to enjoy full citizenship. One means of resisting these trends is adherence to a liberal model of the criminal law and assertion of due process protections as security rights for all individuals against the state.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented migrants (including asylum seekers) in Stockholm between 2004 and 2006, additional interviews with police officers, deportation escorts and staff at Swedish detention centres and some fieldwork in Tehran in June 2005 and August 2007, this article examines the impact of Sweden's more restrictive asylum policy since the beginning of the decade. From a condition of `deportability' to incarceration in detention centres and then removal from Sweden, asylum seekers have been increasingly criminalised — their confinement and removal being seen as mechanisms for preserving national security. Focusing, in particular, on the techniques used by the detention apparatus to `humanise' and `rationalise' the confinement and expulsion of asylum seekers, it is argued that a discourse of `caring' and `saving' works, in effect, as a disciplinary mechanism that presents asylum seekers as responsible for their own detention and deportation.
The globalizing world has been described as a `world in motion', permeated by transnational networks and flows of goods, capital, information and cultural symbols, as well as potentially risky individuals and substances. This article examines the implications of the various global mobilities for criminological theory, method and policy. The world of global networks and flows introduces new notions of social ordering and exclusion, as well as challenging the prevailing conceptions of society, community, culture and social belonging, while growing demands for control of global mobilities create a complex dynamics between the nation-state and the emerging `world risk society'.
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.
This article examines the detention and deportation of time-served foreign national prisoners in England and Wales. Drawing on penal policy and interviews with staff and detainees in prisons and immigration removal centres, it critically assesses the growing interdependence of the UK Border Agency and HM Prison Service. Whereas the removal of failed asylum seekers has generated widespread concern and activism, the deportation of foreign ex-prisoners is rarely noted. The foreign offender, it seems, has few advocates. For anyone interested in immigration control, however, the treatment of foreign national prisoners, both during and after their sentence, is compelling. On the one hand, they reveal a wider and deeper border, one that includes penal institutions located within the nation state. Along these lines, the absence of citizenship enables harsher and longer punishments, as ex-prisoners may be held for considerable periods of time post-sentence due to their complex immigration cases. On the other hand, however, the treatment of foreign ex-prisoners is not uncontested – prison employees and staff within the immigration estate express concern at their treatment under Immigration Act powers. In short, this article suggests that the detention and deportation of foreign ex-prisoners raise a number of troubling questions about both the nature of governance and the limits of the liberal project of inclusion in late modern Britain.
Deportation has traditionally been seen as a secondary instrument of migration control, one used by liberal democratic states relatively infrequently and with some trepidation. This secondary status has been assured by the fact that deportation is both a complicated and a controversial power. It is complicated because tracking individuals down and returning them home are time-consuming and resource-intense activities; it is controversial because deportation is a cruel power, one that sometimes seems incompatible with respect for human rights. In the light of these constraints, how can one explain the fact that since 2000 the United Kingdom has radically increased the number of failed asylum seekers deported from its territory? I argue in the article that this increase has been achieved through a conscious and careful process of policy innovation that has enabled state officials to engage in large-scale expulsions without directly violating liberal norms.
This study examined the incidence of suicide and self-harm in asylum seekers in the UK, both those in detention and in the community. The investigation revealed that data recording is seriously flawed or sometimes non-existent. However, the scanty data those were available from Immigration Removal Centres, coroners' records and Prison Ombudsman's reports showed high levels of self-harm and suicide for detained asylum seekers as compared with the United Kingdom prison population. It is suggested that this could be attributed to routine failure to observe and mitigate risk factors. The author makes the following recommendations: coroners should record asylum seeker status and ethnicity of deceased, self-harm monitoring in the community should record asylum seeker status and ethnicity, health care in immigration removal centres should meet the same standards as UK prisons as a minimum, allegation of torture by immigration detainees should trigger a case management review and risk assessment for continued detention, and this process should be open to audit, and interpreters should be used for mental state examinations unless their English has been shown to the fluent.