Deportation, Crisis, and Social Change

In contemporary migration policy and practice across the globe, deportation has emerged as an apparently inevitable response to real, or otherwise perceived, migration crises. A skeptical attitudetoward the analytic use of “crisis” in the context of deportation is called for, as is the need to concentrate on the political genealogy of the term, which culminates in the justification of “emergency” policies and the implementation of new measures of control. Yet, at the same time—when states govern undocumented or unwanted residents through deportation and employ the notion of crisis for justifying irregular and often violent acts towards deportable subjects—a situation emerges that indeed sha…