Ground for Departability

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

Abstract

The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement regime has claimed 1.6 million “illegal aliens” have “self-deported.” The term “self-deportation” erroneously suggests, however, that migrants autonomously elect to re-migrate, exalting a vision of liberalism, freedom of movement, and the state’s benevolence. We introduce the neologism of departability to reframe and underscore how the state coercively and violently expels migrants outside formal deportation bureaucracies. Departability also centers migrants’ circumscribed agency and their alternative future projects and life potentiality elsewhere in the world by abandoning inhospitable socio-legal contexts. Extending sociological and anthropological perspectives within migration studies, we rely on nearly 200 interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with over 100 undocumented and formerly undocumented 1.5 generation (age-at-arrival between 0-17) Latin American immigrants from Illinois, California, and elsewhere to theorize departability. Conceptually, departability encapsulates 3 elementary processual and interrelated configurations: (1) an appraisal process, (2) reimagined temporal horizons, and (3) affect and embodiment. First, as a calculus of options pertaining to life chances within and beyond the U.S., migrants appraise and refuse the states’ violent conditions by abandoning long-term settlement. As migrants reimagine their potential future, they become disillusioned, and such affective sentiments–embodiments of fatigue and exhaustion–serve as catalysts for entertaining and/or enacting departure. While departability is indeed victory, the departed are nevertheless coerced and actualize states of despair, which ultimately demonstrate their legal domination and the power of state apparatuses. Departability–relational state-migrant socio-legal trajectories and departure processes– addresses our understanding of global life trajectories outside the U.S. and migrants’ homelands.

Authors

• Oscar Ruben Cornejo Casares, Davidson College

• Gabrielle Cabrera, University of Colorado, Boulder