Enduring Uncertainty: Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life

By Ines Hasselberg.

What effect do British policies of deportation have on those facing deportation and their families? What strategies are devised to cope with and react to deportation? In what ways does deportability influence one’s sense of justice, security and self, and how does that translate into everyday life? In this book I address these questions through an examination of the deportation and deportability of foreign nationals convicted of one or more criminal offences in the UK.1 Taking London as the site of my field research, I explore the way foreign nationals’ deportability is felt, understood and experienced, as well as the strategies they deploy to cope with and react to their own deportation, or that of a close relative. Facing deportation implies the establishment or reinforcement of a relationship between the migrant and the host state. How that relationship develops and the resulting consequences are addressed here from the perspective of deportable migrants and their close relatives.

New York; Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 2016. 188p.