Banished to Jamaica: Portraits of Deportation

The UK’s deportation policies are experienced as banishment by many of those affected, especially for those defined as ‘foreign criminals’. Many of those who are deported as ‘foreign criminals’ have parents, siblings, partners and children who are British citizens. The recent charter flight to Jamaica - with 42 Jamaican nationals forcibly removed on a private flight - gained significant media coverage. People are discussing deportation: whether it’s fair to expel people from the only home they really know. In this talk, I provide some reflections from my own fieldwork in Jamaica and the UK, with deported persons and their friends and families who remain in Britain. I will consider the kinds of people who get deported, and the effects of their deportation on those removed and their loved ones. The stories of the people I’ve met provide a vivid account of deportation as the loss of home. The life stories of these individuals illustrate the ways in which immigration control reaches right into the heart of British life, carving divisions between friends, families and partners. And their stories show the ways in which immigration control interacts with other social divisions that social scientists are more used to theorising; namely, race, class and gender. In this talk I hope to offer some portraits of people affected by deportation, and question what they tell us about contemporary Britain.