To Leave or Stay?: Negotiating Migration After Deportation

• In Event: 20810 - Return Migration in the Era of Enforcement: Uncertainty and Transnational Lives

Abstract

A defining feature of the U.S. deportation system is that removal is often treated as a singular event or as the end of migration itself. Yet many deported migrants consider migrating again after removal. This study contributes to research on deportation and migration by examining how deported migrants make decisions about whether and how to migrate again. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with deported Salvadorans, I show that deportation intensifies pressures to migrate again while imposing new legal, economic, and physical constraints on future movement. In turn, these paradoxical forces produce divergent post-deportation mobility trajectories, such as adopting waiting strategies until reentry bans expired, pursuing alternative destinations where legal migration appears possible, and experiencing cycles of migration and removal while continually reassessing whether another migration attempt is worth the escalating risks. The findings show that deportation is not only a mechanism of exclusion but also a system that produces new patterns of mobility in an era of intensified immigration enforcement.

Author

• Adriana Ceron, Yale University