Barak Kalir

Short abstract: What happens to society when deportable people are bound up in social/family networks that consist of settled migrants and citizens? This panel will explore the impacts of deportability on the process of settling in 'hostile environments,' and how this affects citizens, as well as non-citizens. ​

Long abstract: States around the world are openly cultivating 'hostile environments' toward non-citizens in efforts to root out individuals who have entered illegally, overstayed visas and/or committed certain criminal offenses. But what happens to society when such deportable individuals are bound up in social and family networks that consist of settled migrants and citizens? This panel will explore the impacts of deportability on the process of settling in 'hostile environments,' and how this affects citizens, as well as non-citizens. ​Unlike deportation itself, deportability (the threat of removal from a state) does not necessarily exclude migrants physically, but instead includes them socially, under conditions of protracted vulnerability. There is debate in the anthropological literature about whether deportable migrants are abject or autonomous subjects and whether deportability leads to health disadvantages or effective coping strategies. The economic hardships and anxieties that deportable migrants endure can manifest as illness and become visibly embodied as scars, tumors, etc. While active participation in collectives (religious groups, social movements, etc.) can be a way for deportable migrants to transcend abjection, there is also evidence that negative effects of deportability extend to migrants who are legally settled or even to children and spouses who are citizens of the host country. We invite contributions that address (but are not limited to) the following topics: experiences of structural violence among deportable migrants and citizens; spirituality and resistance to deportability; deportability and health in diaspora families; surviving/recovering from deportability.​

FREE DIGITAL COPY OF THE ARTICLE CAN BE DOWNLOADED AT:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7dyngKUGRTyrf7sITvit/full


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.

Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities examines how legality and other sources of authority intersect in the regulation of human mobility. The book focuses on the ethnographic exploration of the experiences and views of mobile subjects in the vast and rapidly changing continent of Asia. The contributors analyze tensions between the letter of the law and social legitimation, territorial boundaries and commodity flows, state practices and migrant subjectivities, and labour brokerage and national and international organizations. This volume offers key insights for students of globalization and transnationality and policy relevance for development practitioners, governments, and NGOs.

Barak Kalir is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He is Co-Director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, and Director of the Master Programme in Contemporary Asian Studies.

Malini Sur received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2012 and is a fellow at the University of Toronto in Fall 2012.

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 the Netherlands, there is increasingly critical debate about the government’s topdown 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."

Barak Kalir and Willem van Schendel, 'Introduction: Nonrecording states between legibility and looking away,'  Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 77 (2017), 1-7.        freely downloadable from
http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2017.770101

The study of deportation regimes has been on the rise in recent years, partly because deportation has not been successful in achieving its declared goal. There is little evidence from countries worldwide that deportation regimes manage to remove more than a tiny fraction of the population of illegalized migrants and rejected asylum seekers. Instead, deportation regimes should be seen, first and foremost, as a state mechanism for the production of deportable Others. The production of a deportable population within nation-states serves a wide spectrum of interests: it provides the national economy with cheap and unprotected labor, it scapegoats " illegal migrants " as the new " enemy " of the state and society, it boosts the securitization industry and it beefs up the state bureaucracy by increasing surveillance, militarizing borders and executing detention and deportation. The functioning of deportation regimes relies on the construction of a physical and legal infrastructure, on the work of committed civil servants, and on the fashioning of an ideological narrative that legitimizes its operation. At the same time, the running of state deportation regimes calls on multiple collaborations with civil society (e.g. managing so-called voluntary returns), private companies (e.g. operating detention centers), and other states (e.g. bilateral agreements). It is this meso-level of deportation regimes – the people that de facto implement them in various moments and sites – that is of interest to us. Given the disproportionality between the " crime " (not having administrative documents in order) and the sanction (becoming deportable Other), between legality and legitimacy, between abstract policies and concrete cases, we seek to interrogate the practices, views, narratives, ethical frames, and rationalizations of those who constitute the social life of deportation regimes. We welcome papers that engage the work of different actors along the " deportation continuum " (Kalir & Wissink 2016) and that are located at different sites along the " deportation corridor " (Dortbohm & Hasselberg 2015). We are especially interested in studies that shed light on how practices at the meso-level produce implementation deficits/surpluses and shape the de facto ways in which deportation is operated as a state project and in the lives of people who work for or are subjected to it. We appreciate proposals for panels or individual papers on all aspects of deportation, including the following: • Illegalizing migrants and rejecting asylum seekers (crimmigration, legal activism, local regulations)

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.