Description
Projects such as the Title 42 expulsions in the US, the “Rwanda deal” of the UK, and the promised “deportation offensive” of the nominally centre-left German governing coalition are just the most recent advancements of an ever-expanding global deportation regime. The former Australian minister of home affairs, Peter Dutton, defined deportation as “taking out the trash.” Deportation studies, inspired by Agambenian security studies, tend to treat deportation as a normalized exception that permanently suspends civil liberties. Taking the logic behind Peter Dutton’s trash-allegory seriously, this paper offers an alternative explanation of deportation that centres the production of racialized expendability as a feature that is always already implicit in nationalized capitalism. The super-exploitation of racialized migrant populations manages fluctuating periods of growth and contraction. Deportation is a spatial realization of a cyclical process where migrant labour is used up; produced as superfluous to capital accumulation and the nation-state; and excreted. Rather than a ‘reserve army of labour,’ many people who are made deportable will never (again) be incorporated into these modes of production and citizenship. Instead, they are rendered as an outcast proletariat whose spatial removal becomes a service-commodity of a burgeoning deportation industry, and a source of legitimacy for the neoliberal security state. However, the people subject to the deportation regime show that this position of ‘existential surplusness’ (Hong 2011) is also a place of critique. From this position, detained and deported people challenge the deportation regime. In drawing attention to the conditionality of national inclusion, they create possibilities for transversal, internationalist struggle.
