Deporting children

Ondertitel:policy framing, legitimation and intersectional boundary work

Immigration controls today are viewed as an inseparable part of nation states’ right to exercise their sovereignty, control their borders and thereby influence who can access their territory and become part of their community of members. Deportation, or the compulsory return of non-citizens to their country of nationality, is crucial in this process, as the act of relocation re-affirms the ‘proper place’ that individuals allegedly belong to. It is this intrinsic connection between deportation and membership that makes deportation a contentious, politicized policy measure that regularly sparks public opposition and debate. In this dissertation, I hold that such contention is especially strong when states seek to deport illegalized migrant children, since the latter occupy ‘difficult territory’ in migration management: as children, the state considers them deserving of protection, while as immigrants, the state seeks to exclude them. Their claims to belong in their state of residence, the overarching children’s rights regime, as well as the imaginary in the Global North of children’s innocence all complicate the societal ends that deportation allegedly serves. Drawing on critical migration and border studies, feminist theory and interpretative policy studies, this dissertation thus questions how states that seek to deport children in the face of such disputes, legitimize the need to do so. Even though in recent years, critical migration and border scholars have made progress in understanding how ‘power-holders’ – understood as state and non-state officials involved in deportation procedures – legitimate exclusionary migration policies along a duality of compassion and repression, they have done so by referencing immigrants prone to deportation as if they were a relatively undifferentiated population at the bottom of the social hierarchy. I argue that this approach misses important variety in the technologies of deportation governance, and therefore devote specific attention to the importance of imaginaries of children’s ‘physical and social identity’ for migration control. Drawing on about 350 documents and 61 interviews with deportation actors in Belgium and the Netherlands, the dissertation provides an answer to this question in four empirical chapters, which each look at the techniques and narratives of legitimation at the ‘frontstage’ or ‘backstage’ of politics; targeted at different audiences. Overall, it finds that power-holders attempt to acquire legitimacy for the deportation of illegalized migrant children by deliberately drawing attention away from the underlying moral-political conflict and the hardships deportation poses for children. Instead, I show in Chapters Two and Five that deportation policy actors emphasize the diligence of procedures and their compassionate way of working to the wider citizenry, positioning deportation as a measure of last resort that results from due process. As the procedures leading up to an eventual deportation are ‘diligent’ and ‘compassionately enforced’, thus putting caseworkers’ work in a humanitarian light, deportation is framed as eventually a legitimate measure to take. Chapters Three and Four examine power-holders ‘self-legitimation’ and show that these actors at the same time emphasize the potential danger children and their families pose to the citizenry, sustaining the necessity to remove them. Crucially, these latter narratives are largely dependent on what I call ‘intersectional boundary drawing efforts’, emphasizing the forms of social behaviour and identities that delineate illegalized children and their families from the wider citizenry. These particularly pertain to the behaviour assigned to children and parents, including the ways childhood should play out and how parents should ‘properly’ parent their children. While these securitizing narratives should serve to sustain the decision to deport, my dissertation finds that their exclusionary potential is mediated by a humanitarian, morally felt need to protect children from potential harm. A humanitarian engagement with children, spurred by the paternalistic need to assist and care for them, can thus also complicate the protection of territorial sovereignty and instead delay, adjourn or suspend deportation procedures. Altogether, this dissertation firstly shows the need to differentiate among illegalized immigrants in seeking to fully understand the rationales and techniques that states deploy to justify their deportability. I argue that the current dominant frameworks hold only limited explanatory value for children. While my findings in part confirm studies that identify how the securitization of deportable immigrants fuses with a humane portrayal of power-holders and their procedures, it at the same time shows that deportation actors cannot merely instrumentalize a caring discourse in order to make children subject to mobility control. The morally felt need to assist and care for them may also act against their exclusionary goals. The dissertation furthermore shows the crucial analytical value of both intersectionality and interpretative policy analysis for deportation studies. The former reveals how migration governance always relies on and reifies hierarchies of inequality related to gender, race, class, age and culture and complicates our current understanding of the workings of securitization and humanitarianism. Interpretative policy analysis enables a refocus on ‘the internal life’ of policy-making and the multiplicity of meaning-making within it. It reveals the absence of a single, encompassing rationale structuring deportation governance and instead points to the continuous ‘repair work’ through which the deportation regime comes into being. In Chapter Six, I combine these two approaches and propose an analytical framework that helps migration policy researchers to expose the ways in which policies (re)produce social difference through gendering, racializing, classing and sexualizing discourses, and to critique the power relations that sustain them. Finally, my dissertation points to the need for scholars of deportation to more explicitly grapple with the impacts on knowledge production of their positionality and engagement with power-holders.

Jaar van publicatie:2022

Trefwoorden:Doctoral thesis

Toegankelijkheid:Open