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Embarking on an Anthropology of Removal by Nathalie Peutz This article calls for an ethnographic and theoretical investigation of removal (and specifically, deportation) that would broaden our understanding of the significance of this purportedly routine state practice. Based on fieldwork conducted in Somaliland in 2002 and 2003, it takes as its text the narratives of a group of Somalis deported from the United States and Canada following the events of September 11, 2001. As “criminal aliens,” the majority of these men (and one woman) had been incarcerated both as prisoners and as administrative detainees before being deported unexpectedly to stateless Somalia. Yet, the somewhat exceptional nature of this particular deportation highlights the various political and social exclusions that might be overlooked in the more regular instances of deportation (e.g., that of “illegal” immigrants and rejected asylum seekers). By following the trajectories of these Muslim deportees from incarceration in the host state to reincorporation/alienation at home, it points to the legal and financial domains that underpin present-day practices of deportation and the embodied and chronotopic experiences they effect. Further, this article outlines how future anthropological work on removal might proceed while underscoring the relevance of this field to the studies of citizenship and transnationalism, globalization, and governmentality.

Monday, I do the interview with a representative of the FBI. Me and him are joking. He says: do I go to a mosque? Do I pray? I said: “No, I go to your local clubs, man.” He says: “Do you drink alcohol?” I said: “Yeah.” He said: “What’s your favorite?” I said: “Hennessey.” I mean, we’re just talking like two regular human beings but he’s writing this down and at the same time he’s cracking up. (“This guy doesn’t look like he’s your profile of some weirdo that might do something!”) He looked at my rap sheet. He said: “You know, you don’t even have a criminal record.” I said: “Other than for the assault.” He said: “Yeah, but for the assault. You don’t have nothing else on there,” he says. He asked me another few questions about do I know about al-Ittihad, any representatives in it: do I know any Somalis that belonged to al-Ittihad? Because they were closing down al-Barakaat in Minneapolis and he’s just [asking] basic questions. I’m like, I don’t even know these. I don’t even go to no mosques. How am I supposed to know these people? I hang out at clubs on Friday and Saturday nights. What am I supposed to be, hanging around at the mosques, reading the Koran, with a bottle of Hennessey in my hand? I mean, he was cracking up. He finally put his signature on it and said, “Uh, you know this is out of my hands. You seem like, you know, a young man, American as apple Nathalie Peutz is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ 08544, U.S.A. [npeutz@ princeton.edu]). This paper was submitted 17 IX 04 and accepted 16 V 05.

pie. I don’t know why I’m doing this, but it’s my job so I’ll just pass it on to the supervisor.” And I guess the supervisor must have put his signature on the paper and said: Put this guy on the plane.” —Tariq, July 2002 The word banish rhymes with vanish. Through banishment or deportation there is the literal threat of invisibility. Not only when the event is concretized, but in the anguish and the uncertainty leading to that. Made invisible. Made meaningless. Superfluous. To others. To ourselves. —Margaret Randall, 1987 On February 7, 2002, Tariq was surprised by a home visit from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).1 Told by his deportation officer that he was wanted for questioning, Tariq was taken to the Oakland city jail, where he spent the weekend waiting for his Monday interview. During the week he was transferred twice, and on Thursday, February 14, 2002, before his lawyer could challenge the deportation, he and 30 other Somali nationals were deported to Mogadishu, Somalia. The deportation of an individual may take only a few days, 1. On March 1, 2003, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the bureau of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). As the majority of my interlocutors discuss INS activities previous to its reconfiguration within the DHS, this article refers primarily to the now defunct INS. With regard to immigration services or enforcement occurring since March 2003 or for theoretical purposes, I refer to the DHS as a whole.

䉷 2006 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2006/4702-0001$10.00

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but the significance of this episode—replicating and engendering as it does histories of suffering and subjection—will continue to reverberate in the lives of the deportees and their kin. As a starting point, it is worth asking whether deportation may be experienced and thus theorized as a kind of reversed refugee-ness: instead of being forced to leave one’s nominal home, deportees are forcibly repatriated. This is a question of subjectivity and categorization: who the deportees are and how they may figure in the anthropological literatures on displacement and belonging. After a decade of intensive anthropological scrutiny of transnationalism and globalization, the premillennial enthusiasm for transcendent flows, organizations, and beings has waned as anthropologists are called upon to confront the tenacity of the state (even a “failed” one) and the inevitable logic of its exclusionary practices, especially in an era of global terror (Aretxaga 2003). Previously, in an attempt to determine what was new about globalization at the turn of this century, anthropologists were constructing labels to explain what were deemed emergent modes of (transnational) personhood and often privilege: “flexible citizenship,” “cultural citizens,” “discrepant cosmopolitans,” and “creolized cultures.” This literature’s main shortcoming, however, was that the hackneyed concept of the “transnational” never gained the explanatory power it needed to determine who was or was not a transnational subject or “agent” (Ong 1999, 93) and what exactly such disparate groups—refugees, transmigrants, expatriates, investors, aliens, hybrids, travelers, nomads, and anthropologists—might have in common (a transnational subjectivity?). Although this problem is not solved by my adding another cluster to this list, I here propose “deportee” as a “contrast category” (Ong 1999, 43) that catapults the state and its exclusions directly into the transnational arena and shows how neoliberal globalization generates a disturbing sort of immobility (and opacity) for some individuals in conjunction with the more transparent “flexibilities” forced upon others. This article suggests, then, that a “trans-statal” (Kearney 1995) category and, therefore, subject (Hacking 1999) is newly coming into focus even as its very formation hinges on the person’s being made invisible, meaningless, and superfluous to the nation-state. It is not only the deportee who is (symbolically) cast outside the state and into a “state of exception” (Agamben 2005) but also “enemy combatants” and “rendered” citizens: subjects that are made to inhabit “zones of indistinction” (Agamben 1998; Walters 2002, 22) in which they are placed “outside the realm of law” (Mayer 2005) and, for legal reasons, cannot be brought back in. Deportations are not new, of course, nor are the recently disclosed renditions.2 Nevertheless, these practices of removal are becoming 2. The U.S. government renders (forcibly removes, via jets registered under dummy corporations) terrorism suspects to other countries where, technically still in U.S. custody, they are detained and tortured while the United States can think itself acting in compliance with the law (Mayer 2005).

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increasingly ingrained in our political and cultural landscape as governments eager to assert their sovereignty in an “age of terror” team up with private corporations experienced in the industrialization of confinement and exclusion. Accordingly, the study of removals—in contrast to and conjunction with the study of departures, transitions, and arrivals—is critical and should enrich the anthropologies of citizenship and governmentality, transnationalism, globalization, and the state. What might the anthropology of removal—and, specifically, deportation—look like? William Walters has identified a number of studies of expulsion in its more shocking form (e.g., ethnic cleansing, political exile, transportation of criminals) but concludes that “deportation, because it remains embedded within the contemporary administrative practices of Western states, strikes us as less remarkable” (2002, 266). Indeed, it is only recently that social scientists have started to examine deportation as something other than an inevitable component of migration. Barring studies in international law and policy sciences, research on deportation has been limited to the evaluation of isolated historical cases (Davies 2001; Gabriel 1987; Randall 1987) and theoretical analyses of exclusion, deportability, and “illegality” (Bhabha 1998; DeGenova 2002). To the extent that there is an emerging field of deportation studies, it is being shaped by the examination of deportation as an instrument of population regulation (Hindess 2000; Simon 1998), as a political process with genealogical roots in historical forms of expulsion (Walters 2002), and as a disciplinary practice that transnationalizes immigrant identities and urban geographies (Zilberg 2004). Nevertheless—and for reasons that vary according to location—little progress has been made in eliciting the narratives of those who are deported both before their journey and after their arrival in their purported homeland. With the notable exception of Zilberg (2004), it has been mainly journalists and novelists who have managed to track or imagine the responses of deportees in adjusting to their new or unchosen locations (diGiovanni 2002; Gordimer 2001; Sontag 2003). Yet, given the numbers of people forcibly deported from the United States every year (up to 186,000 in 2003),3 it is high time that the ethnographic dimension of deportation was explored more fully. Using the Somali example cited above as a case study, this article aims to fill a significant gap in the literature by following the trajectory of deportation through the narratives of deportees and to argue for an anthropology of removal that would address the legal domain, the financial domain, the embodied experience, and the chronotopic experience of deportation. This framework is only a skeletal model of the many ways in which such an analysis can take shape; whereas 3. In fiscal year 2003, the number of “formal removals” from the United States was 186,151 while the number of “voluntary departures” was 887,115 (see USCIS table 41, http://uscis.gov/graphics/shared/statistics/yearbook [accessed March 10, 2005]).

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this article focuses on the deportees’ reports of their imprisonment, detention, deportation, and return, other sites for ethnographic inquiry should include the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the private corporations that benefit from these practices of exclusion, the transnational organizations or local networks that, in some countries, assist arriving deportees (Sontag 2003; Zilberg 2004), and the activist groups that rally the opposition to deportation. This specific group of Somalis—30 men aged 18 to 43 and a woman in her early 20s—was composed of U.S. and Canadian asylum seekers, legal aliens, and permanent residents. The majority, however, had lost their previous legal status and were now classified as “criminal aliens” who had served their prison sentences but had not yet been deported because of the continued instability in Somalia. Notably, the deportable are classified according to different criteria by the administration that orders their removal and the government that tolerates their return. Clan and subclan—not country of birth, state of residence, legal status, or criminal record—are what becomes relevant to these individuals when they learn that they are being deported.4 It is these genealogical distinctions that will guide their subsequent attempts to return to their “home” in Somalia. Whereas I had tried to place these individuals according to their state of residence in the United States or Canada, Tariq offered to “break [it] down” for me by clan: 15 individuals were from the Hawiyya clan, located primarily in the south and currently in control of Mogadishu; 5 were of mixed marriages between Somalis and Kenyans; and 11 were members of Isaaq, the clan located primarily in the self-declared independent state of Somaliland.5 I was introduced to Tariq in July 2002 in Hargeysa, Somaliland, by Nuruddin, a journalist who himself had been sentenced to deportation by the government of Oman for his role in organizing the Somali National Movement, a movement aimed at overthrowing the Barre regime. In Nuruddin’s case a deportation order to Somalia was tantamount to a death sentence, but through diplomatic pressure the order had been revoked. When I met Tariq, he had been living with his grandfather for four months. He agreed to an interview and spoke at length about his childhood on a U.S. Aramco base in Saudi Arabia before moving with his family to the United States, where they had hoped to achieve “the American dream.” After detailing his multiple jobs, Tariq arrived at what he described 4. In reviewing my transcripts, I noticed that I had framed each interview with an opening question about birth. I wanted to know where these individuals had been born, where they “belonged,” and which territory could claim them. My preoccupation with the place of their birth unconsciously mirrors the very mentality that assigns “rights” territorially and then seeks to consign individuals to their proper territory once their rights elsewhere have been taken for granted. 5. The Republic of Somaliland, known as the British Somaliland Protectorate until its colonial independence and subsequent unification with Italian Somalia in 1960, declared its independence from Somalia on May 18, 1991, after a decade of fighting against the regime of President Mohamad Siyaad Barre. Since then, the Somaliland state has been pressing for international recognition of its sovereignty.

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as his “one mistake.” In 1994 he was driving a taxicab when a passenger attempted to mug him, and Tariq, having beaten the passenger before leaving him on the sidewalk, was charged with assault and lost his permanent-resident status. Eight years later, as a direct result of this event, Tariq was “put on the plane.” Writing about deportation raises a number of methodological and ethical concerns. Practically speaking, the deported are difficult to locate—and not only because deportation itself is an exclusionary practice, a removal from as opposed to a placement in. Deportee, like refugee, is a legal category that is applied to individuals in vastly different circumstances and often for limited periods of time. At best, deportees may form what Malkki (1997:99) calls an “accidental community,” but even then their identity as a group is tenuous and fleeting. One-third of these Somali deportees had traveled north to Somaliland, where they were residing alone or with family but ran into each other on occasion. While a few had become friends, chewing chat (Catha edulis, a mildly narcotic leaf chewed daily in the Horn of Africa and Yemen) together and assisting each other when needed, it was arguably only my interest in their lives that framed them once again as a “community.” Other methodological challenges involve the difficulty of gaining access to and being present at the various sites of the deportation grid: the DHS offices, hearings, and detention centers, the airports, with their security teams and antideportation activists, and the families affected at home and abroad. The deported themselves are made to vanish, figuratively and sometimes literally (Bach 2001), and even if they can be located may be embarrassed to speak of this stigmatized encounter or fearful of government reprisals “at home.” Thus, in many cases, they are effectively silenced as well. Similarly problematic is the ethical quandary of such an ethnography’s mimicking and continuing the surveillance of already interrogated individuals and reifying the category of the deported. Nicholas DeGenova discusses both these issues: “By constituting undocumented migrants (the people) as an epistemological and ethnographic ‘object’ of study, social scientists, however unwittingly, become agents in an aspect of the everyday production of those migrants’ ‘illegality’—in effect, accomplices to the discursive power of immigration law” (2002, 423). He concludes that social scientists ought instead to study “illegality” and deportability as sociopolitical conditions generated by law, citing as a model Susan Bibler Coutin’s research on Salvadoran immigrants’ legalization struggles, which she structures as “an ethnography of a legal process rather than of a particular group of people” (2000, 23). This critique is more than relevant to the subject of deportation and the deported. However, it is important to note that deportees are removed physically from the social landscape, thus becoming all too invisible as people or as “objects” of study, and that the deported discussed in this article wished to have their stories circulated, mainly in the media but also in legal and academic circles. Already bereft of status, they had little

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to lose but perhaps something to gain from scrutiny of their cases and a public debate on deportation law. From the perspective of the host state, the removal of “illegal” or “criminal aliens” and “enemy combatants” or “terrorists” brings a certain closure to their cases, allowing for a general lack of interest in what happens to them as soon as they are outside of its borders. A study that repudiates this easy closure by showing the continuing rupture endured by the deported, their families, and their communities would at the very least resist the removal of these individuals from academic spaces, if not from physical ones.

The Legal Domain: Crime and Banishment The increasing criminalization of immigrants and asylum seekers in the United States and in Europe has been well documented (Bhabha 1998; Morris 1997; Simon 1998; Welch 2003). Although the “detention” of entering and deportable aliens corresponds to just a fraction of the extensive domestic corrections industry, it replicates the performance of what Lorna Rhodes describes as “a kind of social, economic, and political ‘magic’ by ‘disappearing’ large numbers of poor and minority people” (2001, 67). The “magic” of domestic prisons lies in their power to repress disorder, create jobs in economically depressed areas, obscure the extent of unemployment, add to census figures where needed, and conceal racism while disenfranchising a large proportion of the African-American community. Apprehended criminal aliens are disappeared into the same system and often twice, first as criminals and then as “civil detainees.” Yet, it is not enough that aliens are housed within this “second country” (Rhodes 2001, 68) inside the nation’s borders. Instead, many are removed from the “second country” to a “third country” outside—their purported homeland or a “safe” third country or a camp—in a move that Jacqueline Bhabha calls “double jeopardy”: a double punishment that “violates human rights norms of nondiscrimination and presumptions of equality of treatment before the law” (1998, 615). But a double punishment requires double the work and cost on behalf of the penalizing state. This raises the question why it is not enough that criminal aliens (often permanent residents) serve their sentences before being released again to their previous situation and status. What role does deportation play for “us” (the citizens who may be incarcerated but not deported)? Walters demonstrates that deportation is a governmental practice that is “constitutive of citizenship,” policing migration on a global scale and disciplining the migrants at home (2002, 267). Meanwhile, as a practice aimed only at noncitizens, modern deportation reinforces the citizen-alien divide. Linda Bosniak (1998, 30) observes that the “hardening [of] the distinction between citizen and noncitizen” stemming from the legal impetus for making citizenship “count for something” has resulted in the devaluation of the alien. Essentially, the conception of citizenship as a national project takes as fact

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this distinction; the presence of aliens is what defines “our” privilege(s) as citizens. This identification of self through the immigrant Other is especially relevant to the American myth, argues Bonnie Honig (1998) in an article demonstrating a national reliance on “the foreigner” as one who, through naturalization, performs the act of consent to the regime. This “good” immigrant, however, is always shadowed by the “bad” immigrant: the “illegal” alien who does not consent to American laws and to whose presence Americans do not consent. Honig points to the way the “illegal” immigrant “slides from being a person defined by a juridical status that positions him or her as always already in violation of the (immigration) law to being a daily lawbreaker” (1998, 15). When it comes to “criminal aliens,” the metaphor of illegality ricochets between juridical status and social behavior in such a way that a criminal alien is forever a danger to society. Hence, criminal aliens make convenient scapegoats, and through their deportation “the violence within the national community is displaced to an insider-outsider, a familiar stranger forcefully cast out of the polity” (Aretxaga 2003, 397) The definition of citizen-self through the alien-other and the consequent purging of the “bad,” “illegal,” and nonconsenting (read: ungrateful) alien within is a partial answer to the question of the role that deportation plays for the nationstate. Yet, there is something more than the cleansing of self and society at stake here. Jonathan Simon points out that imprisonment is “a tool of accountability, guaranteeing that a person is on hand and in a certain condition” (1998, 600). Conditions may be horrible, but they are observable (more or less); by placing people under control and rendering their status legible, the imprisonment of aliens “remains a status that tends to be generative of [their] rights.” In the following two examples, deportees discuss how it was in prison that they “learned the law” and started to regard themselves as rights-bearing subjects. It was also from prison and through his imprisonment that at least one deportee was able to challenge the very “legality” of the judicial system. Through the act of deportation, however, the state relinquishes all accountability, and the deportee is divested of his legal rights as well as his access to the state apparatus of the deporting state and, in extreme cases, of the “receiving” state. In 1988, at the outset of Somalia’s civil war, Nasser came on a student visa to the United States, where he attended English-language classes and worked various jobs. In 1990, he applied for asylum and received his permanent-resident status. Then, as he put it, he ended up at “the wrong time, the wrong place.” He claimed to have been framed in a drug deal involving 50 dollars’ worth of cocaine. As he had been found guilty twice already for driving under the influence, he was sentenced to five years in prison with two years suspended. He claims that the judge should have informed him that, not being a citizen, the conviction would render him deportable. It was not until later, in jail and during his INS detention, he said, that he “learned a little bit about the law, but it’s too late, you know.”

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On the very day of his release, Nasser was picked up at the county jail by INS officers, who took him to another Virginia jail where he was held for nine days to be classified. I asked Nasser on what charge he was held, but Tariq, who was present during this interview, answered for him: “You committed the felony, you did the time; now you’re a danger to society, and we can’t release you on the street. And there are laws in Washington that support this.” Here Tariq is referring to the 1996 immigration legislation that had created new mandatory detention provisions for “criminal aliens” found deportable under its reforms. Noncitizens convicted of certain crimes— aggravated felony, drug trafficking, drug abuse, terrorist activities, multiple crimes of moral turpitude, or one crime of moral turpitude resulting in a one-year sentence—are to be detained immediately following their release from incarceration and held until their removal. Legally, these individuals are not prisoners but civil detainees held under similar legal stipulations and physical conditions as asylum seekers awaiting refugee status, undocumented immigrants awaiting removal, and other noncitizens who cannot be deported because they are stateless or originate from countries whose governments have collapsed. Awaiting deportation to Somalia—a country that had been without government from 1991 until 2000, when a transitional but extremely weak government was appointed—Nasser became an indefinite detainee who, like other “long-term unremovables,” was not awaiting any impending decisions or transfers. He was simply waiting. Nasser says that he was held in INS detention from February 1995 to May 2001. Originally placed in a Bureau of Prisons facility intended for INS administrative detainees, he was later transferred to local county jails in which the detainees were commingled with the inmate populations. The increase in the number of noncitizens detained as a result of the 1996 legislation impeded the INS from housing all its detainees in federal detention centers, and instead it had to contract out to private corrections companies or rent space in local jails, often for twice the amount charged for county inmates (Human Rights Watch 1998). In fact, “In some states, local taxes have been eliminated due to the profit made through housing the INS’s detainees” (p. ii). This was not lost on my informants, many of whom complained about the “prison business” and told me specifically how much the INS had been paying to house them. Another deportee, Abdullahi, told me that he had filed for a writ of habeas corpus to challenge the indefiniteness of his three-year detention. He explained how, as a teenager, he had narrowly escaped being drafted for the Ogaden war, moved to the United Arab Emirates, where he finished high school, and then in 1984 traveled to the United States on a student visa to complete his studies. He attended community college but was having difficulty “dealing with the system” and “kind of drifted along” until he “became an alcoholic.” In 1991 he was granted protective status, but after a slew of arrests (jaywalking, possession of marijuana, public drunkenness, littering) his status was revoked, and in 1994 he became “de-

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portable.” Because of the current unrest in Somalia, Abdullahi was released under supervision, but a felony charge for possession of cocaine (which he disputes) landed him back in jail. After serving over one-third of his 90-day sentence, he had been “released” for good behavior and transferred immediately to immigration hold without leaving the county jail. It was during this period that he “learned the law” and filed for a writ of habeas corpus. Following a number of intrastate transfers to local jails, he “had [his] day in court” and was granted a conditional release. He entered a rehabilitation program administered by the Salvation Army, surmounted his addictions, and found a maintenance job at a yacht club that would enable him to rebuild his credit and his life. It is uncertain how long Abdullahi or Nasser—who after his release remained in the area of his last incarceration and got a job in a local processing plant—would have been able to remain in the United States on the grounds of Somalia’s disintegration. Both stressed the satisfaction they received from their jobs (specifically, from “hard work”) and from finally moving forward. Tariq believes that he would have stayed in America, eventually undergoing naturalization with his family, “if psycho number one over here hadn’t bombed the Twin Towers.” Whether or not, as Tariq claims, it was “Osama [who] kicked in the door,” the post–September 11 atmosphere of anxiety and racial-religious profiling probably did affect their cases, even though INS spokesperson Russ Bergeron asserted that theirs was just “a rather routine removal process” (Hutchinson 2002). It has been noted that, of the 300,000 foreign nationals who have remained in the United States after having been ordered deported, the Justice Department has prioritized the deportation of the 6,000 noncitizens from “countries where al-Qaeda support is strong” (Cole 2002, 975). In February 2002, the same month that the foreign media speculated that the U.S. military would target “anarchic” Somalia, Nasser and Abdullahi were picked up by the INS and detained one last time. Nasser had just returned home from work when immigration officers came to his door. The same day Abdullahi was picked up at the yacht club where he worked and found himself a week later in Mogadishu in his janitorial uniform. Although not as quick as Tariq to attribute his unexpected deportation to terrorist plots and counterterrorism responses, Abdullahi still believes that it had something to do with his own role in “kicking in the door” of the business of indefinite detention.

The Financial Domain: The Business of Deportation It should not be surprising that the booming U.S. “prison industrial complex” would provide fertile ground for the growing industry of removals, which not only replicates the containment model but also models new methods of economic rationalization: flexibility, low-cost buildings, less organized labor, and increasing privatization (Simon 1998). In-

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deed, the deportation process as a whole is perhaps best described as an industry (Walters 2002, 266) that employs airlines, pilots, and private security companies in addition to DHS officials, deportation officers, and detention center staff. Tellingly, antideportation activists now target the commercial viability of deportation by creating mock company web sites, staging protests at airports, and distributing literature to passenger-consumers on how to disrupt deportations occurring on their flights (Walters 2002). The transfer of bodies cannot be executed today, however, without the prior determination of where they belong. Foreign bodies are made legible through a number of techniques requiring expert knowledge; in England, for example, the government has employed linguists to determine the dialect of origin of its asylum seekers (Barnett and Brace 2002). Further studies of the business of deportation may help to illuminate what appears to be an expanding relationship between government and privatization in today’s “security” state. Walters has pointed to the use of deportation as a “corollary” to labor immigration in the sense that it can “regulate and enforce the return of these temporary hands during times of economic downturn” (2002, 279). What other corporations or individuals may profit from the outsourcing (and offshoring) of corrections? Much as overdeveloped countries export their toxic wastes to the “TwoThirds World,” the practice of deportation supplies corporations with a lucrative export of bodies while representing for others (Southern governments or weaker states) an import of “dangerous” or “polluting” matter. Governments and multinational corporations are in the business of exchanging bodies: workers for the unwanted. The deportation of these Somalis was one of a number of joint U.S.-Canadian operations administered by the Justice Prison Alien Transportation System (JPATS), established after September 11, 2001, to divide deportation costs between the two North American countries (McClintock 2004). Ali, one of the Canadian-Somalis who had been arrested for “hustling dope,” described his surprise at his encounter with the militarism of the U.S. government’s counterterrorism measures: They took us to Buffalo to a very private military airport. Next thing is, there was all U.S. marshals over there, guns, everything, very scary! See, in Canada it’s different from America, it’s like the immigration don’t even carry guns. But in America, it was like, yo’ mate, it was a terrorist movement. They did terrorism to us. They kidnapped us. All these guys pointing guns at us; if you do any small mistakes, you could be shot right there.

Stunned by the show of force, Ali was more astounded by the fact that he was to be deported by a Dutch airline rather than an American one. Others also took this as evidence that their deportation was illegal and concealed. The trip was not without incident. According to the deportees, the plane had been grounded in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport for a number of hours because of “technical

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difficulties” (Ibraahim). When the deportees protested, the pilot said, “It’s not secure. I’m not going to take this plane, this time, with this group” (Mubarak). The first pilot left, and the deportees waited for hours until “an American pilot came in from Holland. . . . He spoke to us in English. Said, “It’ll be a safe trip,” this and that. . . . At least we felt a little bit different [comparing him with] these Dutches, you know. A very open-minded guy” (Ali). The deportees all claim to have been sedated throughout much of the trip, attributing their stupor to “sleeping pills” (Mahmoud) in their beverages. Some recall waking up to an argument and seeing two of their co-passengers being held down and “[shot up] with drugs and stuff” (Omar). Apparently, after Ali had been escorted to the toilet by the security staff, he had refused to return to his seat. The security team had pinned him down, along with another deportee, and both were given injections by an Australian “doctor” (Ali). What is striking in their story—aside from the use of flexicuffs, sedatives, and tranquilization—is the welcome presence of the “American” in a situation characterized by an absence of governmental intervention and knowledge. During my interview with Nasser, at the point when he was telling me about the “Australian contractor” who “lives in London,” Tariq interjected the comment: “An American pilot wouldn’t have lifted that airplane off the ground; they would have been sued!” Nasser then affirmed that an American pilot would never have accepted such a mission, “so they knew they had to use another country or contractor. Contractor gets his money, so his security will do whatever you tell him. He has no country, so you don’t know how to get him. A good plan there.” What these foreign middlemen represent is a lack of accountability: nonstate actors that are international in origins and thus in a rather ambiguous relation to the jurisdiction of any particular national-state authority. In a sense, they resemble the deportees, unmoored from their place of belonging and difficult to trace. When an “American” pilot did eventually agree to fly, the deportees felt reassured. Perhaps the mere involvement of the American signaled that their removal might not go unnoticed. Once the plane took off, however, the pilot was no longer accessible, and the “Australian contractor” and the “Dutch crew”—corporate mercenaries—took control. According to Tariq, the Dutch government did not know that “there was a plane with people that were forcibly deported,” because if it had it “ would have let us out, or sent us back to the United States” (Omar). Although these deportees had already experienced a certain lack of government accountability during their imprisonment and detention, their comments here express a residual attachment to the notion that a government will comply with the “rule of law.” Without government control and regulation, however, the deportees are at the mercy of the even more formidable forces of global capital and exchange, for which deportation is simply business as usual. The deportees were acutely aware “that private companies make money from this form of suffering” (Walters 2002, 266).

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As with their knowledge of the value of their presence to local communities with county jails, many deportees claimed to know what their deportation was costing the INS and what it was earning those involved. Tariq said, “The little Australian guy told us he was getting $15,000 per head, just to transport us.” Having lost or invalidated their value as legal aliens, detained and deported individuals are revalued as quantifiable and lucrative “beds” or “heads” by and for the citizens and transnational actors who gain from this procedure. Once in Mogadishu, the deportees split up immediately into separate groups based to some extent on clan, age, and money. “So everything changes now,” Ali reports. “No more American mentality, no more Western mentality now. This is Somali now, now everybody’s got to go with his own clan.” Those from the ruling Hawiyya clan set out to locate family in Mogadishu. The rest made their way to cheap hotels from which they contacted their families back home, arranged for money transfers, and planned their departures for Somaliland, Kenya, or the Gulf. Perhaps it was in these simple and shared hotel rooms that the reality of their current situation finally started to sink in. Venturing outside mainly for meals and cigarettes—still nervous about the profusion of AK-47s and the threat of being kidnapped in an alleyway to be held for ransom—the men shared their meager resources and, in the case of the Isaaqs, waited for Daallo Airlines to fly them north to Hargeysa. Some tried to make the best of their situation: chewing chat, flirting with local women, and enjoying the general licentiousness of a city emerging from war. But even if they did drop their “Western mentality” as Ali claimed, their encounter with Mogadishu was, by most accounts, an encounter with their own foreignness.

The Embodied Experience: Deported Bodies and Phantom Lives Having been forcibly relocated and then dumped into a city (Ali: “This is the dumping place for all these reject outcasts”) where their movement was restricted once again because of fear, these deportees experienced their removal in a profoundly corporeal way. Moreover, the deportee body is doubly stigmatized—polluted and polluting—both in the host society and at “home.” Simply put, deportable bodies exude the danger of their transitional state(s); as ex-prisoners having “spent any time ‘inside’ [they are] put permanently ‘outside’ the ordinary social system” (Douglas 2002[1966], 121), and as aliens they are all the more outcasts. Similarly, deported bodies are suspected of carrying with them the pollution contracted abroad while also remaining anomalies at home, their forced return subverting the fetishized immigrant success story. Deportable/deported bodies are also racialized and gendered bodies. While I lack the space to discuss the racialization of citizenship and incarceration (Mauer 1999), it is important to note that these Somali deportees spoke of themselves as having been blackened bodies subject to systemic discrimination such as profiling and uneven sentencing. Although it

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is difficult to assess how typical this case study is of the average ratio of male to female deportees, it is likely that the number of deportable women will rise in conjunction with the increasing numbers of woman prisoners in the United States. What this example does show is that deportation’s disruptions—of family, of (re)production, of work—are gendered ones. Significantly, all these deportees placed tremendous emphasis on their desire for bodily acceptance. Several of the deported recounted acute physical discomfort upon their arrival in Mogadishu, worrying about their conspicuousness not only as Americans but also as Somalis. Two of the deportees, I was told, came from the same clan as the late Somali president, Siyaad Barre; this affiliation alone could be life-threatening. Additionally, most arrived wearing their work uniforms, brand-name athletic shoes, or tank tops— apparel that marked them for derision as well as theft. At least two of the younger men wore their long hair in a ponytail, a trait that Ali claims was viewed in Mogadishu as a sign of “wasted culture, a bad culture.” Of all the deported, the person who expressed the most concern about not fitting in was Deeqa. She had been deported in her “American” clothing—tight pants, a small Tshirt, and no hijab: “I was getting crazy when I was sent to Xamer [Mogadishu] ’cause I didn’t know how to deal with people, I forgot my culture, I cannot walk, I cannot wear the clothes I’m supposed to wear, I cannot have a conversation with a person because I’m scared who gonna kill you. Is this person gonna know you’re not from here?” These external adjustments are not superficial. A number of women in Somaliland expressed a similar anxiety about having to learn how to dress when returning to Somaliland from Europe or North America. A woman in her mid-20s who had grown up in Brooklyn claimed that after living in Hargeysa for more than a year and covering herself completely, people could still tell that she was “not from here” simply by her walk. Seemingly trivial but constant efforts to keep a scarf from sliding down the back of one’s head, to adjust one’s gait, and to pronounce words or use slang correctly constitute significant attempts at adapting one’s habitus to align with local norms. In this case, at least, the deported body is not only removed physically from her environment but also must hazard a physical transformation in order to reclaim her “belonging.” Consistent with Walters’s suggestion that the practice of deportation is invested with historical memory (2002, 276), Deeqa’s deportation replicated a history of loss. On the first day of our acquaintance, Deeqa told me that she had been two months pregnant at the time of her deportation. Recounting in detail her career success and her security in terms of marriage, close friends, and financial independence, she said that her immediate goal of starting a family had been interrupted by her deportation. It is easy to imagine how under these circumstances the fetus would have represented Deeqa’s hopes for her (and her family’s) future as well as a physical connection to her husband during a time of imposed separation. However, soon after her arrival in Mogadishu, she

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miscarried. She criticized the brutal treatment accorded her by the U.S. immigration officers and the substandard prison conditions during their one-night layover in Djibouti. She also talked about an earlier pregnancy that had resulted in the child’s being placed for adoption. Her narrative of this missing child developed into a longer, older narrative of the deaths of her father’s children and siblings during the Somali civil war. Unable to cope with further loss, her father had moved the family to the United States. Deeqa’s return journey to Somalia—a forced removal that reversed the original condition of forced migration—mirrored the loss of children and family and, as a narrative, symbolized the inability under such circumstances to create a future or to preserve a connection to one’s past. Nevertheless, within six months of her deportation, Deeqa would pride herself on having learned to dress and look just like a Somali woman—to the extent that no one would know, simply from her appearance, that she was “not from here.” Likewise, the deported men were wrenched away from their spouses and children in the West. While Deeqa focused on her loss of family, the men spoke regularly of their ruined careers and their failed productivity. Many of the men expressed their shame at having been returned to Somalia rather than returning of their own volition and with evidence of success. Even if they had amassed significant capital abroad, they were not given the time or the chance to liquidate it before their deportation; instead, they arrived in Mogadishu with whatever money had been in their pockets at the time of their arrest. Somaliland’s economy is fueled by remittances from migrant workers and family members abroad (Ahmed 2000). Whereas the deported had counted previously as potential remitters capable of supporting family in Somaliland, they would now have to depend primarily on remittances for their livelihoods and on relatives in Somaliland for housing, food, and cash. Their families were welcoming and did not begrudge them the assistance; yet these men had failed to live up to their society’s expectation of a prosperous and promising return. Their aberrant journey was a familial as well as a personal disappointment, and they were doubly disgraced. Rumors about the deportation preceded their arrival. In addition to their foreign dress and deportment and their lack of financial preparedness or street savvy, the shame associated with their deportation was manifested in speculation regarding the reasons for it. The deportees were met, both in Djibouti and in Mogadishu, with the suspicion of having been expelled from the United States for carrying HIV/AIDS or for being drug addicts. The deported bodies were deemed infected bodies—if not literally contagious, then at least metaphorically they embodied the danger of Western cultural contamination. In other words, they were deemed suspect because of their association with the United States much as in the United States they had been considered suspect for their connection to Somalia. The suspicion they raised on both continents had simply reinforced their growing mistrust of the motives for and the legality of their deportation.

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Of the three accusations leveled against them—AIDS, drugs, and terrorism—the latter charge was one that they could discount or appropriate. In contrast to drug use (too realistic) and AIDS (too shameful), a wrongful accusation of terrorism could be converted into a comical kind of symbolic capital. Whether or not they had ever been questioned along these lines, all of the deported men connected their deportation, to some extent, to U.S. suspicion of Muslims as terrorists. From the time of their arrival, many said, they were greeted as notorious celebrities by Djiboutian crowds who had come to the airport “to see al-Qaeda and al-Ittihad” (Nasser). In this case “government” was neither absent nor silent; according to the deportees, it was the Djibouti government that spread the news of their arrival and identified them as al-Qaeda members deported from the United States. Ali recounts his arrival in the following way: We were brought out like we are part of al-Qaeda. After this, September 11, whatever, we were considered as one of those terrorists. That’s how they make it up. Just to get rid of us, eh? Saying these guys are involved, whatever, but it was not written in the paper, it was not televised, it was not in the local news, nothing, secret mission; but, in the files maybe we are part of al-Qaeda, in their files. Secretly, you know? So, anyway, when we get in Djibouti, they were singing, the women: “La-la-la-la, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda.” They were making a lot of noise, making fun of us.

Ali’s narrative contrasts the secrecy or silence of their U.S. departure with the racket made upon their arrival. Mubarak suggests that it was only through the scrutiny they received in Djibouti that he was able to understand why exactly he had been deported at this particular time: “We spent all the night [in prison]. In the morning, all Djiboutis came watching us, like a zoo: the terrorist guys, the terrorist guys. “What’s going on? Who is a terrorist?” “You! We came to watching you!” What?! Now we understand something. Now we get some answers.” Yet, when a draft of this article was given to him for review in 2003, Tariq refuted these stories and laughed loudly at the images conjured by Ali. According to Tariq, military men in riot gear had been present at the Djibouti airport but “without any AKs or modern weaponry.” However, women had not been singing “la-la-la, al-Qaeda,” although it was true that three prostitutes had come to the jail and handed out their phone numbers, welcoming the men to chew chat with them upon their release. “They thought we had money,” Tariq explained. Whether taunted or tempted by their female spectators, in essence these accounts reflect the deportees’ attempt to portray the objectifying nature of their deportation and return. Whereas corporations and governments may be dealing in bodies, the deportees must bank on their reputations: the chief social currency these cashless, jobless, and now no longer independent return migrants could realize lay in their claim of having been wrongly discriminated against. In his address to Minnesota’s Somali community with re-

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gard to the ten men deported from there, U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger portrayed this as but another “routine” deportation (Black and Leslie 2002). Yet the individuals in this group regarded their circumstances as anything but regular. In fact, a predominant way for these deportees to describe their shock, their fear, and their sense of the absurdity of it all was to compare their deportation to “one of those bad movies” (Tariq). During the interviews, the deportees made frequent reference to films in order to relate their experience: arrests, security forces, airport take-offs and landings invoking the glorified chase scenes of crime and action films. In many of these narratives, the deportees come to star in their own spectacular deportation. One film that became particularly central as a reference to what they would experience was Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, released nationally on January 18, 2002. Tariq criticized the film for being “just straight Hollywood, you know, they just put a total spin on reality.” For others, the main issue was not the film’s accuracy but how the fictionalized film or actual incident came to bear upon their lives. In recounting a conversation with “immigration guys,” Farah claimed to have said, “I don’t care about Black Hawk, you know, I’m doing good over here working, you know, my family is here. I see myself as a U.S. citizen.” He said the officers responded with, “We don’t care. We’re deporting you. They don’t like Americans—Somali people.” Farah uses Black Hawk as a symbol for what he is not and, at the same time, refers to the movie as an example of the U.S. xenophobia that triggered his deportation. As does Farah, Ali draws upon this film to accentuate the horror of the event. Instead of locating this connection in the U.S. treatment of Somalis, however, he places himself directly at the scene—importing himself, so to speak, into history: A: [The taxi driver] took us to the Olympic Hotel where Black Hawk, the movie, was shot down? The American plane was shot down? He took us there. That’s the hotel at where the Rangers came with their helicopters on top of the hotel. You can see it in the movie, that hotel, right? It was a tourist area for us, you know, we went to a historical place. We went to the roof, feeling nice, you know—oh, that’s where the Rangers came! Wow! Where’s the helicopter? We looked for the helicopter. I saw the helicopter, itself. P: Is it still there? A: Yeah, two guys are living in it. It’s like a nice condominium, you know. [He laughs, slapping his knee.] It’s so funny that I said, “Oh, no, I gotta go there and chew some green grass [chat] in that helicopter.” Just to make history, you know? “Oh, I was in that, you know, in that American thing, whatever.”

Although Ali corrects himself, noting that it was the American plane and not the movie that was shot (down) in Mogadishu, his slip of the tongue expresses the very connection that he is drawing between his presence in Mogadishu and the 1993

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battle and 2002 film. Not only does the story of Ali’s “making history” in Mogadishu turn his deportation into something exceptional but also it underscores his claim on America. He was in “that American thing”; he had slept “where the Rangers came.” For Ali and for the others, the ability to imagine themselves in a historic/Hollywood battle scene and their purported association with al-Qaeda gave them a sense, albeit limited, of empowerment. It projected them onto a larger stage where their deportation carried global meaning. That the association of the deportation with September 11, 2001, saved the deportees’ reputations is elucidated by the most public of accounts: the human-interest story. On October 30, 2002, nearly nine months after his deportation, Tariq publicized his experience in a one-page interview in The Republic, the leading of Somaliland’s three daily papers. Significantly, his story appeared in a column written by an ex-SNM fighter entitled “What Was Your Worst Experience?” that usually features accounts of former SNM members’ most frightening days in the bush and their near loss of life or limb. In this edition, Tariq detailed his arrival in the United States, his early work experiences, the fight that had led to his imprisonment for “failing to go to the police station,” where he had been on 9/11, his coworkers’ early suspicions of him as a Muslim, and his February arrest and deportation. In this account, Tariq’s crime was neatly erased from the public record. Instead, he was portrayed as a sacrificial animal, a “deer” struck unexpectedly by the “club” of U.S. suspicion and reactive treatment of Muslims following 9/11. His own culpability was omitted in favor of an emphasis on the physical ordeal of his deportation. Not only did this retelling mitigate the stigma of his forced return but it appropriated the very suspicions first raised against him to turn him into the victim of U.S. aggression, the survivor of a war against terrorism, and the hero of his (phantom) life.

The Chronotopic Experience: Return to Culture In addition to experiencing at least some degree of bodily subjection during their removal and upon their return to their purported homeland, many deportees are “returned” to a certain place and time in such a way that it can never be a homecoming for them, only another arrival. Elana Zilberg’s work demonstrates how deported Salvadoran immigrant gang youth must negotiate their “return” to a city remapped not only by the civil war but also by the geography of gang violence back in Los Angeles. While these youth suffer “spatial alienation and fettered mobility” (2004, 771) in this new environment, it is their very dislocation that drives in part the urban transformation and transnationalization of San Salvador. Zilberg’s study reveals “a structural interdependence and complicity in identity formation between the United States and El Salvador” (p. 774) that in this Somali example exists only to a limited extent. Although these Somali deportees represent similarly the “embodiment of a forced trans-

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nationality” (p. 762), their identities seem to have become less trans- and more sub- (or parochial) through and after their deportation. I have earlier invoked Ian Hacking’s (1999) work on categories and subjectivities, in which he shows how the creation of new categories of people simultaneously creates new ways for people to be. Who we are, however, is not only how we are categorized but also the extent of our possibilities. With their possibilities now shriveled, I argue, these Somali deportees are required to narrow their identity, not broaden it. A few of them mentioned that they had been marked “black” in the United States but had reidentified themselves as “Muslim” (transcending race) while in prison. Upon their arrival in Somalia, however, race and religion no longer worked to differentiate or unite them. Instead, they were made to identify with clan and subclan in a geography mapped by genealogy and allegiances. In comparison with the returning diaspora juggling businesses, homes, and family in Somaliland and abroad, these deportees found their “forced transnationality” almost worthless as they were made to work at becoming Somalilanders.6 Many of the northerners were able to locate family in Hargeysa or other towns, in many cases bringing about reunions with grandparents, parents, or siblings for the first time since the war. The East Africans, in contrast, were not always able to track down relatives. Most rented small rooms in strangers’ homes; almost all had to learn how to speak proper Somali and navigate unfamiliar terrain. Ibraahim had been born in Kenya and lived there until his seventh year, when his family emigrated. His deportation to Mogadishu from Canada was his first encounter with Somalia. From Mogadishu he had considered traveling on to Kenya, but his father in Canada had warned him against arriving in Kenya without official documents. Consequently, Ibraahim moved to Hargeysa, where he awaits the outcome of a lawsuit filed by his father against the Canadian government claiming that his son’s deportation was conducted “illegally.” Not having been accustomed to identifying himself according to clan, Ibraahim struggles with his predefined place in the social landscape. Here Ibraahim describes a conversation with a police officer: He goes: “What’s your tribe?” I go: “I don’t know.” He goes: “What’s your tribe?” I go: “Muslim, bas [that’s all].” He started yelling, he goes: “You Muslim, huh? You”—what did he call me again? The Ethiopian thing, habashi—he goes: “You habashi [Ethiopian], huh?” I go: “No, I’m not habashi. I’m Somali.” “What’s your tribe? Who’s your father? Who’s 6. The (non)status of Somaliland presents its own paradox when it comes to deportation. European nations will not deport Somalis to southern Somalia as long as it remains unstable. They can, however, and do deport Somali individuals to Somaliland, which is recognized only for its “peace and stability.” Thus, while Somaliland is not recognized as a sovereign state, it is this very ambiguity that permits European states to return rejected Somali asylum seekers (regardless of “origin” within the pre-disintegrated Somalia) to the government of the north.

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your mother?” I go: “Even if I told you, you wouldn’t know them. Why do you want to know?” I call my dad, I go: “What tribe am I?” He goes: “Habar Yunis, something else, something else.” I go: “I’m sticking to just Muslim. If they want to shoot me, they can shoot me. I’ll die as a Muslim.”

Ibraahim’s claim to be “just Muslim” serves additionally as a claim against belonging in Somalia or Somaliland. Not only does he refuse to be placed by the Somalilanders but he rejects the idea of any association between these Somalis and himself: “In the Koran it tells you a Muslim is supposed to help a Muslim, no matter what. These people just changed the routine. So that’s why I don’t really talk to them, because it’s not really Islam what they do. It’s something else. They believe more in tribes than [in] Muslims.” Ali, who grew up in Tanzania, wishes similarly to distinguish himself from his alleged countrymen: “We [East Africans] are the most segregated Somalis in all Somalia, and we are smarter than all of them because we were born outside Somalia, we don’t believe what they believe, they call us sijuis.” Sijui—the Swahili term for “I don’t know”—is used by Somalis in Somaliland and in Somalia to refer to East African Somalis like Ibraahim who profess ignorance of their clan affiliation (McGowan 1999, 81). Ali explains that the joke, in fact, is on the locals, as the sijui do know their lineage but have made themselves free of it: It’s like when they come to us, they ask me, “Mahad shegtay?” [How are you?], “Nabad?” [Peace?] “What’s your tribe?” I know my tribe but I’ll say “sijui.” We go like this [shrugging his shoulders], “sijui.” It means “I don’t know.” Because I know, but we don’t want to be like them. You see, we all live together, we all love each other; we’re all more civilized.

Both Ali and Ibraahim, while being “ethnically” Somali, wish to differentiate themselves from the “national” Somalis living in Somalia and Somaliland by disavowing any knowledge of clan affiliation and, instead, (re)situating themselves within a greater geographical or religious community, East African or Muslim. Nevertheless, the experience of having grown up in between cultures and yet feeling estranged from one’s “homeland” is an experience not limited to the sijui. When I first met Ibraahim and asked him if he remained in contact with any other deportees, he claimed that he could introduce me to “about 20 other guys” who had been deported from the West by their parents. I thought that he must be exaggerating and failed to pursue this avenue. Weeks later, in another region of Somaliland, I was approached in the market by two teenage boys speaking distinctive English. The one with a Canadian accent recounted how his parents had taken him to Somaliland to meet his relatives and left him there without his passport or a return ticket. As of August 2002, he had been in Somaliland for five months, living with distant relatives and waiting to return to his Canadian home. The British-sounding teenager told a similar story. Just as I

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was wondering whether this might be a ruse, Deeqa and her coworker arrived. “Oh, you know them,” the coworker said, signaling toward the teenagers. “They were deported.” Deeqa explained that youth such as these had been in gangs or had been “hanging out with Rastafarians” at home. Their parents had worried about their losing their Somali culture, if not ending up in jail, and had decided to “deport” them (that is, forcibly remove them) to Somaliland, where they would be surrounded instead by traditional values. After I expressed my surprise at this parental response, Deeqa offered her defense, arguing that if these teenagers did end up in jail, they would probably be deported thereafter. Thus, it was wise for the parents to deport their children preemptively. In her study of the Somali diaspora, McGowan finds that “the greatest single fear expressed by Somalis in both London and Toronto was a concern that they would be unable to teach Islam, and an Islamic value system, effectively to their children in a Western environment—with its multiplicity of choices and its seemingly endless smorgasbord of competing values” (1999, 101). Somali parents were concerned about “losing their children”: losing them to an alien Western culture of individualism while also losing control over them. In a web-log posting entitled “Lost in America,” a Somali man argues that the Somali children who arrived in the United States at a young age “are almost lost culturally and many are in dire need for cultural restoration, and drug rehabilitation for some” (Gagale 2003). Strikingly, in this blogger’s view, it is government interference with respect to parenting and government laxity with respect to the “negative-cultural revolution of violent movies, video games, shootings, sex, and nudity” which contributes to this no-win situation for Somali parents. If parents attempt to control their children through disciplinary measures that include corporal punishment, then the government may take their children away from them; yet if these children are charged with any misdemeanors or felonies, then parents will lose their children to detention centers or government-enforced deportation. The only remedy, according to this posting, is “cultural restoration.” Cultural restoration is one translation for what the Somalilanders refer to as dhaqancelin, “returning to culture.” Accordingly, a teenager sent back to Somaliland or “deported” there by his or her parents is labeled a dhaqancelis: the story of parents suggesting a vacation in Somaliland and then deliberately leaving their children there is common. By spending time with relatives and attending Koran schools, these teenagers are expected to relearn their culture, improve their Somali-language abilities, and perhaps learn Arabic in the process. Like the East African sijuis who lack knowledge of or proper reverence for their genealogical roots, the dhaqancelis are accused of lacking knowledge of their culture, religion, and language. Not only are they lost in America, as the blogger contends, but—as Nuruddin, the journalist, noted of the deported—they are lost in Somaliland. Similar to those deported by the government, the teenagers removed to Somaliland by their parents are received guardedly

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by other Somalis. Although they have been sent back to absorb their cultural and religious heritage, in this transitional state they are considered dangerous to other Somali youths. “Culture here is based on the religion,” my Somali-language teacher explained. “Anything which is strange to the culture and the religion we call dhaqanbi’is (spoiled culture).” Wearing tight-fitting clothing or holding hands with boys in public (for girls) and having long hair or shaven heads (for boys) are among the first signs that someone may be “spoiling” the culture by spreading Western habits. Moreover, someone who is spoiling the culture is often suspected of drug use and abuse, as one government-deported teenage girl complained: “They think if you’re an outsider and you come here, you’ve all done drugs. Because there’s some people here that are brought for that, and once they’ve seen one, you’re all the same.” Thus, whether deported by the state or the family, those who are returned to Somaliland are potential spoilers of the “true” culture at home. In contrast to the tacit belief that aliens who break the law are implicitly dangerous and do not deserve to remain in the host state, the presence of the dhaqancelis teenagers complicates this moral geography by reversing the notion of who pollutes whom: it is not the immigrant who is dangerous but the land of refuge. Deportation is not just a punitive move governed by the state but also a corrective one directed by self-disciplining individuals.

Intersections: Legal Fantasies, Illegal States The deportees—northerner, southerner, sijui—have been deprived of almost all access to the legal documentation that regulates movement and mobility. Having been stripped of all their papers (except for their single-journey travel documents), the deportees were left in a country that had no state, with only some having the possibility of relocation to a country where the state was unrecognized. Deeqa found herself in Somaliland waiting to receive copies from the INS/DHS of her “papers”: her driver’s license, passport, and social security card. To a certain extent, the “routine” procedure of awaiting documentation that she had experienced while living in the United States had followed her to Somaliland. Others were waiting for tax refunds that had presumably been sent to their homes soon after their departure. One continues to receive letters (in the United States) from state institutions—“They [the state government] think I’m still there: ID, driver’s license, everything’s still in order. Only the federal government knows that I’m deported”—while another receives “papers” from “Washington, D.C.,” concerning upcoming reviews: “Washington obviously don’t know anything about me being deported.” In contrast to the undocumented immigrants who are physically but not legally present in the United States (Coutin 2000), these deportees appear to maintain a lingering legal presence in the United States even after their bodies have been removed. Even so, the deportees occupy what Coutin

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calls a “space of non-existence” (2000, 28) both in the United States and in Somaliland. Six months after their deportation, in the summer of 2002, the deportees expressed outrage over their deportation and shock at the situation in which they now found themselves. Some tried to clothe their feelings of vulnerability in bravado or recriminations. Others professed to be resigned to fate or to more conspiratorial forces; Mubarak believed that Pim Fortuin, the prominent Dutch anti-immigration politician who was assassinated on May 6, 2002, had something to do with his deportation. Nevertheless, in 2002, I read optimism in the deportees’ self-presentation. In a country that was rebuilding itself after a war, there seemed to be space for people to remake themselves as well. The deportees found themselves, in fact, amidst returning Somalilanders eager to mine the country—literally and metaphorically—for new prospects. Some of the younger deportees were enthralled by Somaliland’s recent history and excited to be involved in what Tariq called “the real world” as opposed to “that whole techno-industrial world” they had left behind. Tariq often talked enthusiastically about his new camaraderie with his uncle, an ex-SNM fighter who had “really seen a lot of death.” Ibraahim spoke with equal fervor of his new interest in Somaliland’s mineral wealth: “I believe that I am here to find something. And I found it.” He had met a Somali from Denmark who claimed to be unearthing platinum, uranium, crystals, and antique jewelry and had found a dinosaur egg. One day, Ibraahim brought this fossilized “egg” to my house with the hope that I might help locate an international team of scientists, an interested museum, or a foreign buyer. Others believed that their English-language proficiency would secure them a job with one of the international or local NGOs in town; at this time, however, only Deeqa was working (for a European NGO). Meanwhile, the young men continued to depend on their families’ monthly remittances from the West while waiting for the fabled opportunity to arrive. A few individuals claimed to have initiated lawsuits against the American or Canadian government for unlawful deportation and were hopeful that they would earn an earlier return or at least substantial compensation. Farah, a 31-year-old wedding singer with two young American-citizen children still in the United States, was considering buying land and sending for his family. Abdullahi, the only person I met who, within the first six months, had accepted the fact of his permanent resettlement, was in the process of arranging his marriage with a Somalilander. Whenever I ran into him during the summer of 2002, he was busy repairing walls, installing plumbing, or buying furniture for what would be their new home. A year later, in the fall of 2003, many of these deportees appeared no longer as optimistic about their future in Somaliland. The “success” stories were not, as had once been imagined, those of discovery but those of departure. Farah, the singer, had been granted entry to Britain, where he was performing with a group of Somali musicians. His wife and

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children had moved to Canada. Mahmoud had been recruited to play basketball for a club in Qatar and had been gone for more than the three-month initial trial period, which suggested that he had been granted a longer stay. Omar had traveled to Kenya to join his mother and was rumored to have moved to London. Ali had spent three months in Djibouti and returned claiming to have worked as a translator for the U.S. Special Forces stationed there. Now he was assisting his friend (deported a few years before him) in transporting raw salt from the Somaliland coast to the capital for sale. Those who remained had been unable thus far to capitalize on Somaliland’s reconstruction venture. While numerous Somalilanders were returning from neighboring Arab states or from Europe and North America to set up businesses or to work for NGOs, the deportees had neither the capital nor the higher education to take advantage of such opportunities. Even their command of English and basic computer skills were not sufficient to make them competitive in an environment where clan ties prevailed and local connections mattered. Tariq reported despairingly that his attempts to apply for various low-level UN positions had been thwarted by nepotism. Perhaps one of the greatest obstacles, however, was his (and the others’) reluctance to work for wages that, by U.S. standards, were negligible (cf. Sontag 2003). In the eyes of these younger men, the only solution lay abroad. While Ibraahim still held onto the hope that the fossilized egg might hatch a lucrative return someday, his immediate hope was to find work in Kenya. Tariq had toyed with the idea of traveling to Djibouti to seek work with the U.S. Marine Expeditionary Force but then dismissed this wild scheme: “That would be the last thing on my mind—to play Mr. Translator to the same folks that deported me. Seriously!” A more likely prospect had been suggested by his aunt in Saudi Arabia, who could procure him a visa to work as a chauffeur. After the March 2003 bombings of foreign housing complexes in Riyadh, however, this plan was no longer appealing. By the time I returned to Somaliland in the autumn of 2003, Tariq’s job search had been transformed into a quixotic quest for wealth either through the poaching of rhinoceros horns in Kenya or by reentering the United States, from which he had been barred for 20 years. Yet, Tariq argued: If I can make a case out of it that I was illegally deported, I don’t think that they [the DHS] would want to go to court over this. That’s my two cents on that debate. But, I mean, if a Mexican that’s been deported 30 or 40 times can get in, I’m sure someone as intelligent and as agile as I am can get back in there. ’Cause, right now, to be honest with you— unless of course a miracle happens and I get some kind of US$6,000 grant from one of my relatives to go buy a visa in Hargeysa to go to London and become a refugee—there is nowhere else I would want to live. And this thing about the rhino is not just some fantasy in the back of my head, you know.

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Indeed, the rhino “fantasy,” much like Ibraahim’s dinosaur egg “discovery,” was genuine to the extent that becoming wealthy from eggs or horns seemed about as plausible as winning the visa lottery. The main difference between the one fantasy and the other was that the means to success, which used to be located in Somaliland itself, was now increasingly in foreign lands. The difficulty of outside travel is amplified in a country that cannot issue internationally recognized passports to its citizens. Currently, Somaliland citizens travel abroad under other nationalities or are limited to the use of Somali passports, which, purchased on the black market for US$20, are rarely accepted by any state outside the region. Entry visas to Britain could be purchased for US$6,000, however, and it was only after this initial investment that Somali identity itself gained any value. It is not unusual for African or Arab immigrants to have entered Heathrow by declaring themselves to be “Somali” refugees, having destroyed their travel documents and personal identification en route. Tariq was hoping to leave Somaliland in this manner. Yet, at the same time, he was surrounded by family members with similar aspirations. In the first year of their deportation, many had been certain that the “illegality” of this particular incident (e.g., being dropped into a war zone, unable to inform their families before departure, and without access to lawyers) would become their saving grace. But without U.S. representation in Somaliland and with little means to appeal their cases from there, deportees would have had to resort to unlawful ways of leaving Somaliland and entering the United States, where they would immediately have sought legal assistance. The irony of the situation was clear. When I asked Tariq if he would mind signing the Human Rights Board consent form for research subjects, he laughed about “that legalistic country” that would “kidnap you right after you come home from work after putting in eight hours for an industrial slave master and, at the same time, not accord you all your due rights [as] guaranteed in the constitution.” But rather than disparage the law, Tariq explained that the current regime had simply “put Lady Justice, with her scales, upside down.” For them, he supposed, “it’s a way of safeguarding American national security, but to us,” he added, “it’s totally railroading the true legal justice system of the U.S.” Poignantly, the deportees’ belief in “the true legal justice system” borders on the deeply patriotic; once branded as “aliens” and “criminals,” however, they have little chance of a future in the United States without breaking the law. Only two of the five deportees I met on my second visit had reconciled themselves to the idea of remaining in Somaliland. Nasser, who a year earlier had been distressed by his new surroundings and consumed with financial worry, said that he now felt “adjusted to the city.” Although he remained unemployed and relied on the US$50 per month sent by his mother in England, Nasser was proud of his progress: “I help people now. [Last year] I was getting help, now I help people. . . . I realized I had to accept my reality.” Every

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morning, Nasser walked to a local government office to dispute a family land case. In the afternoons, he chewed chat at home—mostly alone but sometimes with Abdullahi and Ibraahim, who lived nearby. Asked how he regarded his deportation now, Nasser said, “I don’t think about America any more. I’m doing good now. But I just want some answers for my nine years. Can you help me with that, Nat? Why did they do that to me, those nine years?” Abdullahi, the only deportee I met who had been determined to stay in Somaliland following his deportation, was the most “settled” of the deportees I reencountered in 2003. Although he remained preoccupied with his financial stability and was anxious about his prospects in the “new” Somaliland, he was also proud of his ability to shape his immediate environment according to his “American” sensibility. He had been able to use his U.S. credit cards to purchase amenities in the UAE as well as to pay for shipments from the United States: a VCR, stereos, his clothing, and a collection of American films (legitimate copies, he pointed out, not the pirated ones that dominate the local markets). It seemed important to him that he demonstrate not only his relative well-being and initiative but also his choice in the matter of his resettlement. While he had not chosen to leave the United States, he could at least choose not to return. Even though he claimed that he could enter the United States through Mexico or move to England using a friend’s passport, he had decided against a life of continued immigration: “As soon as I landed in Mogadishu, I decided I wasn’t going to move any more. I’d come back to my roots.” He still had to work, however, at reclaiming his forced return as a success story. During a tour of his house, he was eager to show me that he had succeeded in his adoption of Western consumer tastes and in his ability to acquire these commodities even from within Somaliland. Entering the bedroom, where his wife was napping with their newborn son, Abdullahi pointed to the bed, closet, dresser, and nightstand, saying, “See, this is just like a bedroom in the States.” Next he showed me the dining table in—what few Somali families have—a formal dining room and the kitchen that he will outfit “like an American kitchen” and the bathroom that will have running water, a washing machine, and a Western-style toilet. Additionally, he is planning on building a garage to house his car. Aware that his Somali wife, who had never emigrated, had been living in Mogadishu at the height of the war, I told Abdullahi that she must be very happy. “Well, we are still getting used to each other,” he replied, standing amidst the clutter of foreign goods that represented both his achievements and his hope for a future sense of security and belonging. Still, Abdullahi remained quite bitter about his deportation from the United States after having lived there for 18 years. He continued to think that his deportation, ten years after his original sentence, was aimed at punishing him not so much for his earlier misdemeanors as for the fact that “they didn’t like a man who was smart” and who had challenged his unlimited detention. Abdullahi—with his “American”

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house in Hargeysa and his “American” sense of entitlement— recounted just how good it felt to stand up in front of the judge and before the law. “But you said the U.S. had thrown out all the laws!” I reminded him. “Yes, but not if you take them on,” he responded. Common to the deportees’ narratives was a strong desire for legal recognition that was paralleled by the desire for state recognition expressed by the populace and by the administration of the country in which they now reside. Although every account began with the “one mistake” that had brought them into initial conflict with the law, it was in the law that they ultimately had placed and continued to place their hopes. Describing the INS administration as a bureaucracy that neglected or even feared the law—for example, in denying the deportees access to legal counsel and conducting the deportation under the veil of secrecy (but also in the guise of legality)—the deportees characterized themselves as having mastered the law and therefore continually invoked “it” as an ally in their struggle. The “state” too became an object of desire (Aretxaga 2003) when it was the very failure of government—both in the United States and in Somalia—that the deportees lamented. Ironically, this same desire was performed by Somali parents who deported their own children ahead of the state, either in mimicry or in anticipation.

Conclusion: The Globalization Squeeze Like the stronger states it emulates, the unrecognized but de facto state of Somaliland performs its sovereignty—and thus legitimacy—through its exclusions. In October 2003 three European humanitarian workers were murdered in cities near Hargeysa. Immediately, the government condemned the murders and the public staged demonstrations for peace in Hargeysa’s main square, directly beneath the mounted warplane that had been commanded by Siyaad Barre to level Hargeysa in 1989. While suspicion was cast equally on local groups, national parties, and foreign governments, the Somaliland government and its detractors agreed on at least one thing: the murders had been aimed directly at the reputation of Somaliland and at the security of its current government. Newspaper headlines warned of a “Satanic alliance between ‘al-Itihad’ and the forces hostile to the independence of Somaliland” or announced, “Terrorism Is Here!” Meanwhile, the government instituted a twofold response to foreigners. Armed police patrolled the downtown, the areas surrounding the up-scale hotels, and the neighborhoods where the NGO compounds were located. At the same time, the government ordered the removal of up to 77,000 “illegal” foreigners within a 45-day period, appealing to the citizens of Somaliland for their assistance (The Republic, November 1, 2003). Although framed as a response to global terrorism, the actual danger as depicted by the Somali National Intelligence Agency lay in the “bad effect” that these types of foreigners (undocumented Ethiopians, Djiboutians, and southern Somalis) exerted upon the social body. Moreover, these “burdensome” foreigners

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were considered to be infecting the moral community with the same vices as the Somali deportees returning from the United States: HIV/AIDS, drugs, and spoiled culture (in the newspaper article, “black magic”). And so the government of Somaliland predictably did what any other state might do when faced with a “terrorist” threat: expel the unwanted. After receiving a tour of Abdullahi’s American-style home, I asked him what he thought about the expulsion of 77,000 foreigners from Somaliland. “Well, if they are causing problems, get rid of them, throw them into the sea,” he answered, laughing. His answer surprised me. “Isn’t that basically what happened to you, though?” I asked. A: No, because the problems we caused were a lot earlier; this [deportation] was later. I was working, paying taxes, putting in my share for the cost of a MIG or a fighter plane. What’re they gonna come and bother me for? There were other people causing problems; deport them. We weren’t causing any problems then. They could have also done it differently. They could have approached me and said, “Abdullahi, we know you’re no terrorist, you don’t have connections to al-Qaeda, why don’t you infiltrate for us and you can stay?” P: Would you have done that? A: Well, I don’t know. If someone threatens the security of my country I am living in, they threaten me.

Ironically, it was perhaps this event (even more than the Americanization of his house) that allowed Abdullahi to feel that he had returned to his roots. Home is a place that one cannot be deported from—although today’s “exceptional” detentions and renditions challenge this tacit understanding. Given the sensitive nature of today’s removals, it is striking that these deportees were willing to share their stories with me. They all spoke with me, I believe, because, in contrast to deportees to other nations, they had little or no fear of any state surveillance upon their arrival. Moreover, through recounting their deportation they were “being political” (Isin 2002) even as they were speaking about being excluded from the political space of the U.S. or Canadian nation-state. These deportees had been arrested originally for conducting themselves immorally in the public space of the virtuous citizenry: shoplifting, fighting, selling drugs, being drunk in public. Engin Isin’s work on citizenship demonstrates that “when social groups succeed in inculcating their own virtues as dominant, citizenship is constituted as an expression and embodiment of those virtues against others who lack them” (2002, 275). Thus, I should not have been surprised by my American middle-class friends’ immediate response—“Oh, then they deserve it!”—when I told them why these particular Somalis had been deported. Their justification of the deportation was identical to that of some high-ranking government officials in Somaliland, embarrassed to acknowledge that their “citizens” had broken U.S. law. I imagine that when these Somalis were incarcerated or when they had served their sentences

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but remained languishing in administrative detention in the beds freed by “local inmates” they might have “experience[d] their power inferiority as a sign of human inferiority” (p. 36). However, the moment they recognized themselves as a “group”—arbitrarily rounded up and placed handcuffed on a flight to Mogadishu with an imprisoned layover in Djibouti—these deportees became political in their critique: “Becoming political is that moment when the naturalness of the dominant virtues is called into question and their arbitrariness revealed [and it is] that moment when one constitutes oneself as a being capable of judgment about just and unjust, takes responsibility for that judgment, and associates oneself with or against others in fulfilling that responsibility” (pp. 275–76). The deportees were therefore the first to draw my attention to the paradox of being deported to one’s nominal place of origin after years or even a lifetime of living abroad, after political and social boundaries have been redrawn, after ethnicity and nationality have come undone, and after the crimes they had committed in the West had been punished—although their causes (e.g., drug addiction and poverty) remained untreated. It was by accident that I met Tariq in Hargeysa in 2002 and therefore was able to locate and speak to the 11 deportees who had made their way north to Somaliland from Mogadishu. However, it was not accidental that 31 persons were deported to Somalia in February 2002. If it had not been these particular individuals, it would have been others just like them—other “aliens” deported so that the rest would remain virtuous/ly. Why an anthropology of removal? First, this anthropology will make its small contribution to the endless but vital interrogation of the “natural” order of things. As the “state of exception” becomes increasingly the normal state of affairs (Agamben 2005), concealed detentions and expulsions will continue to render individuals invisible. Anthropologists are well placed for locating deportees, witnessing their ordeal, and finally, translating their narratives for an audience of citizens who may not view these punishments as arbitrary. This translation—the ethnography—shows not only how removed subjects become caught up in manifold discursive and disciplinary webs within the host state but also how they continue to live out their removal abroad. Second, an anthropology of removal—as opposed to the study of citizenship and its exclusions or transnationalism and its flows—requires a focus not only on the reversal of movements and rights but especially on the transfer of peoples by state/corporate, local/global actors. The “re-move” suggests a second move, or a third or a tenth, emphasizing that displacements occur multiply, successively, and in various contexts. The four contexts discussed in this article—the legal domain, the financial domain, the embodied experience, and the chronotopic experience—represent just a few of the areas that require further exploration. How fixed, really, is the distinction between who can and who cannot be deported? How does deportation disrupt the very citizen-alien divide that it is meant to reify? How do removals shape the political and social community that remains? How is depor-

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tation an expression of the (in)commensurability of exchange? How is removal gendered and racialized? Does deportation “make up” new subjectivities? Are they transnational? Translocal? Abject? How is it that a population embraces the discourse of legality, barricades itself against the illegal Other, and at the same time remains undisturbed by its own governmental transgressions? Most significant, the anthropology of removal is, in the end, an anthropology of “our” own current crises and of the desire for law at all costs. I spent much of Ramadan 2003 breaking fast in Hargeysa with Abdullahi’s sister, Ayaan, and the rest of the members of her unusual household, all of them deportees. Ayaan was living in Somaliland for the first time; she had joined her husband, who had been deported recently from the UAE, where, as cousins, they had both grown up. Since they had an extra room in their house, they had allowed Ibraahim’s sister, who had been deported from Canada in the past six months, to live with them, and consequently Ibraahim stayed there as well. Each of the four wanted to leave Hargeysa, Ayaan most of all, and they often spent their evenings together bemoaning their situation in a kitchen-mix of English, Arabic, and rudimentary Somali. Contemplating this fragile family of deportees, I thought about the Somali neologism for “globalization”: xeroedegayn. Coined from the terms used to describe a corral for keeping adult livestock, xero, and a corral for keeping their offspring, edeg, xeroedegayn depicts a world in which the larger herds pour out into the smaller pen and the defenseless are squeezed elsewhere or crushed.

Acknowledgments This article is based on research conducted in Somaliland in the summer of 2002 and in autumn 2003. Research was supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council (IPFP Fellowship), the Princeton Council on Regional Studies, and the Princeton Graduate School. I am grateful to the following readers: James Boon, John Borneman, Steve Caton, Nicholas DeGenova, Carol Greenhouse, Abdullah Hammoudi, Markus Hoehne, Liz Hough, Ben Lerner, Sarah Pinto, Carolyn Rouse, Justin Stearns, William Walters, and the anonymous reviewers of this article. My greatest thanks are to my friends and interlocutors in Somaliland (their names have been changed here) and to Ahmed Esa for hosting me.

Comments Leo R. Chavez Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-5100, U.S.A. ([email protected].) 29 IX 05 Peutz’s call for an anthropology of removal is timely, and her case study of Somalis who have been deported provides com-

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pelling evidence for her argument. For those familiar with Mexican immigration, the forced removal of Mexicans from the United States has had an equally devastating impact on people’s lives. In the 1930s Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children were routinely rounded up and unwillingly repatriated to Mexico. For many this was more than just a return “home.” They were often greeted with suspicion as traitors to the patria or homeland. They had to rebuild lives, often without the social networks that linked workers and employers in the local labor market. U.S.-born-and-raised children suddenly found themselves in a society and culture they knew mostly from their parents’ reminiscences. These emotionally and economically debilitating experiences of people forcefully removed from the society they have chosen continue among Mexicans, Somalis, and many others. As Peutz makes clear, the global flows of workers, refugees, family members, and others that characterize our contemporary world are matched by reverse flows of the discarded, depleted, unwanted, undesired, and feared. Peutz’s argument is that while those deported or removed are rendered invisible in important ways, they are still people with their own stories and their own identities; their lives are not completely defined by the state’s designation of them as “deportees.” Her poignant examples of individuals struggling to reconstruct their lives and their identities reminds us that legal processes, although important, are not the only factors influencing identity construction. The problem is that the simple dichotomies imposed by juridical definitions of goodimmigrant/enemy-alien or good-legal-immigrant/illegal-alien make invisible the nuances of lives lived, which often reflect a constant recasting of identities and resistance to the constraints intended by such dichotomies. These tensions underlie the emergent subjectivities indicated by the seemingly surprising comments of Peutz’s informants concerning their future intentions, sense of entitlement, and even opinions on the expulsion of foreigners from Somaliland. Although anthropology has found it difficult to focus on the stories of deportees and others forcefully removed from one state to another, popular culture has explored these stories. For example, the film Mississippi Masala tells the story of an East Indian family expelled from Uganda and its struggle to live in the United States. The father’s refusal to give up his dream of returning, exonerated, to Uganda creates tension between him and his wife and daughter. Paul Espinosa’s docudrama The Lemon Grove Incident examines an attempt in 1930 to put children of Mexican immigrants into a separate school in Lemon Grove, California, and brings together many of those who as children attended the school. One man speaks about the personal distress he experienced when his family was deported for resisting the segregation order. Although he was born in Mexico, he had five brothers and sisters who were born in the United States and therefore citizens. The emotional toll was still visible over 50 years later when, during the filming of the docudrama, he sat with his old classmates and talked about what had happened:

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They took advantage [of our family] because we were supported by the government because my father had died. According to them [the government], it was for that reason we were sent back. And I had five brothers and sisters born here. You spend half of your life here in the States, and they throw you back to a country you have not lived in very much, then you don’t know which country you have to belong to first.

Mexican corridas (ballads) throughout the twentieth century described the immigrant experience, including the experiences of forced returnees. Mexican songs with titles such as “Los Deportados” (The Deported) and “Los Norten˜os” (The Northerners) in the 1920s and early 1930s often ridiculed and chastised Mexicans forcefully removed from the United States through deportation and repatriation: “The Northerners have arrived/From the border/All come bragging about/How rich they are.” The counterview of the Norten˜os was also articulated in the songs of popular culture such as “Defensa de los Norten˜os” (Defense of the Northerners): “I entreat my fellow workers/Not to return all a-bragging/ Friends, I am not a show-off/Because I am a farmworker” (Herrera-Sobek 1979). Peutz’s call for an anthropology of removal is timely and will bring various strands of scholarly interest together. The challenge will be for anthropology to develop a methodology for research among deportees, who often scatter in many directions. If Peutz’s research is any indication, the discipline is up to the challenge.

Greg Collins Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 17 X 05 Peutz’s paper on Somali deportees provides a compelling contrast to the existing literature on global population movements and transnationalism. She succeeds in showing how, for particular individuals, globalization’s supposed freedoms and mobility are ultimately reversed by an increasing xenophobia linked to September 11, 2001, and the subsequent “war on terror.” Those made to return to Somalia are stripped of the privilege, prestige, and opportunity, whether realized or imagined, of living in the West. They are also, Peutz argues, forced to narrow their identities, abandon images of self based on race and religion, and engage subnational distinctions based on clan and subclan. Although the issues of displacement and identity raised are certain to find widespread application, I have chosen to focus on a few thorny issues that are specific to the Somali case. Peutz’s description of the Somali clan system is necessarily shallow, given her agenda, and as a result it fails to capture the complexity of Somalia’s segmented, hierarchical social structure and the flexibility of identity within it. The importance of clan and subclan affiliation for navigating Somalia’s

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social, political, and economic environment cannot be overstated, but clan identity is not immutable. Various levels of identity within and beyond the clan hierarchy are routinely invoked to claim commonality and construct difference as in the following Somali proverb: “Me and Somalia against the world/Me and my clan against Somalia/Me and my family against my clan/Me and my brother against my family/Me against my brother.” Given the centrality of identity and, in particular, deportee confrontation with clan identity to Peutz’s argument, it is surprising that she has not fully engaged these complexities. Doing so would situate shifts in migrant/deportee identity as instances of the broader flexibility of the Somali clan system. The collapse of the Somali state in 1991 and the failure of internationally backed efforts to reestablish a central government emerge from between the lines as critical parts of the story. Peutz captures the most obvious ramifications for deportees; suspicion and targeted deportation abroad and the inability to contest deportation once returned to Somalia. However, the impact of enduring state failure on the way Somalis have experienced globalization is not limited to deportees. With one in eight Somali nationals living outside Somalia and an estimated $1 billion remitted annually by those living abroad, the country and its economy are deeply connected to the global economy (UNDP 2004). Yet, without internationally recognized state representation, Somalis remain powerless to protect their interests, rights, and claims in the international arena. Given that most Somalis rely directly or indirectly on remittances, the U.S.-led shutdown of Somalia’s leading money-transfer company (al-Barakat) because of its alleged links to al-Qaeda provides a powerful example. The resulting disruption of remittances threatened the Somali economy with collapse and high1ighted the vulnerability of all Somalis in the current geopolitical climate. Similarly, lack of government representation has prevented livestock traders from resolving Saudi Arabia’s current ban on the importation of Somali livestock. It has also left those reliant on cross-border trade vulnerable to the vagaries of border closures by neighboring governments. These episodes underscore what globalization at the turn of the century has meant for Somalis as citizens of a failed state—increasing external control over their lives, livelihoods, capital, and connectedness to those outside the country. Consequently, the very immobility and opacity that Peutz associates with deportees are conditions shared by all Somalis. Her choice to focus on a single case signals her intent to capture the interaction between being Somali and being a deportee, but her broader agenda on deportation and the exclusion of nondeportees from the study may attribute too much to removal and not enough to being Somali. Peutz does well to capture how regional variation in internal governance shapes the opportunities, however qualified, for deportees to rebuild their lives. In light of recent political events, her depiction of Mogadishu as a city “emerging from war” appears overly optimistic. However, this only

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strengthens her contrast between deportees struggling to find their place in the fragmented sociopolitical context of Somalia’s capital and those whose clan affiliation has allo wed them to find refuge in the relative stability of Hargeysa (Somaliland). A finer-grained analysis could be a chieved by including deportees in Puntland, where the degree of internal governance and stability falls somewhere between these extremes. These case-specific suggestions for refinements notwithstanding, Peutz’s paper is certain to influence future work on displacement and identity in an era increasingly characterized by the paradoxes of neoliberal globalization. Furthermore, all of us working in Somalia can be grateful that she has placed this captivating case center stage in that discussion.

Liz Fekete Institute of Race Relations, 2-6 Leeke St., Kings Cross Rd., London WCIX 9HS, UK ([email protected]). 21 X 05 Peutz has anticipated the need for an anthropology of removal, and for this she should be praised. Anthropologists are, as she notes, well positioned to document the experiences of those removed from Europe and the United States under immigration and asylum laws or as a form of double punishment (whereby the individual is punished twice for the same crime). In many respects, her research on “criminal aliens” removed from the United States to Somalia is an exemplary study along precisely the lines she advocates. There is an implication in Peutz’s text that it is not enough for anthropologists merely to visit deportees in their country of removal and write up their interview-based research. There need to be, at the very least, two sites of study. We need to capture both the experience of deportees in countries such as Somalia and the cost to the human rights culture of deporting countries such as the United States. Peutz’s forthright call to her colleagues to embark on such committed research will be welcomed by seriously overstretched organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Me´decins Sans Frontie`res, which are already working within this framework and could certainly do with the support of academic research. In fact, the approaches of the committed anthropologist and the human rights defender have much in common. Both are concerned with processes that dehumanize individuals and turn them into commodities that can be removed, never mind the human cost. Peutz is alive to the language of dehumanization, although, in my view, her analysis would benefit from a broader understanding of racism—which has relied at various times in history on the denigration and reification of peoples prior to their segregation and expulsion. Another shared view is that deportation targets, mandatory detention, and the increase in administrative detention create a separate parallel criminal-justice system for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers beyond the ordinary rule of law.

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The Somalians that Peutz interviewed for this study are articulate on this subject. However, she adds her own dimension, asserting that modern deportation systems harden the distinction between citizen and noncitizen and result in the systematic devaluation of the alien. From the perspective of someone who has researched the human cost of the removal of asylum seekers from Europe, I fully appreciate the role that anthropologists could play in tracking down those removed and documenting their experiences. But we need to speak not just to those who have been removed but to all those affected by removals. We need also to document the experiences of those who cannot speak because they have been killed precisely because they have been removed. The fact that Peutz’s middle-class friends care not a jot that a few “criminal” Somalians have been deported speaks volumes about the dehumanization that the removal process engenders. Many of these Somalians left wives behind in the United States and children who will grow up without a father. I would like to have heard these dependents’ voices. Many of Peutz’s observations about the inability of Westernized Somalians to fit into Somali culture, particularly its ethnic or clan divisions, struck a chord in this respect. Abdinnassir Abdulatif, a Somali forcibly returned under the Dutch deportation programme, was murdered in June 2004 after being kidnapped on the streets of Mogadishu. Mohamed Yahya, who was from an ethnic minority known to have suffered persecution from specific clans, was also murdered several days after his deportation from Denmark.

Andre Gingrich and Gudrun Kroner Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Vienna A-1010, Austria ([email protected]). 21 X 05 Peutz’s paper discusses a very important topic. While removal and deportation are phenomena of growing significance, public awareness of them remains minimal and research particularly difficult. Presenting a sound research paper under these challenging conditions and thereby drawing anthropologists’ attention to the topic are key elements of her contribution, as are its mostly well-researched ethnographic cases, its fine analyses of shifting identities in different contexts, and the clear analytical connections it makes with domestic U.S. and global processes. Through this paper Peutz opens up new areas of research for others. Recognition of all this does not, however, exclude critical questions and scepticism on several points. First, it is somewhat disappointing that some key questions about procedures and contexts of the research are not addressed at all. As Jacobsen and Landau (2003) have argued, this is precisely what is lacking in many anthropological studies of this kind. Readers can therefore only guess that most of these interviews were conducted in English and therefore are left to wonder how the deportee interview partners were

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contacted by a U.S. citizen, how this may have affected any possible bias, and the extent to which the anthropologist may have been asked for assistance in return for these interviews. In short, a more explicit dialogical representation of these interviews and a clearer assessment of who was willing to become involved as an interview partner and why (without, of course, endangering the researcher’s partners in these dialogues) might have made this fascinating account somewhat more accessible for other anthropologists. Second, this methodological point is connected to a somewhat heavy-handed treatment of “native views.” On the one hand, anthropology represents more than simply the repetition of “native views” (for example, views that in Somalia genealogy, clans, or tribes matter more than anything else) and views, offered without comment, about “East Africans” and “East Africans or Muslims.” If we do not explain and contextualize such notions (something that anthropologists are usually good at), we may fall into the very trap of essentialization that Peutz hopes to avoid. At the same time, Peutz seems to play down “native views” where they may represent uncomfortable attitudes in her interview partners, for example, in the case of parents who “deport” their own children from the United States to Somaliland. Interpreting such cases primarily as voluntary anticipation of deportation by the state is at least a very one-sided way of squeezing a more complicated ethnography into a single argument. Instead, these examples seem to be less related to questions of state-instigated deportation than to the general situation of Somali migrants and refugees in North America and Europe, where increasing numbers of Somali parents are concerned about their children’s ethical and moral orientation and the possible loss of religious and cultural values. This is why many Somali parents in Europe and North America who can afford it send their children to safe Somali cities or to Cairo, hoping that they will receive a better cultural and religious education there (Al-Sharmani 2004; Kroner n.d.). This potential misinterpretation of migrant problems as deportation stories anticipates our final point: To establish and promote the “anthropological study of removal/deportation” is not identical with an “anthropology of removal.” An anthropological study of removal is committed to an interdisciplinary field to which it contributes by anthropological means. An anthropology of removal, by contrast, would represent an allegedly distinct subfield of anthropology established in relative isolation from other topics that cannot and should not be treated separately. In fact, any labour migrant or asylum seeker may suddenly find herself/himself in a situation in which removal and deportation become a dominant threat. As Peutz’s case studies show, neither biographies nor systemic processes allow the separation of the topics of migration and refugees from those of deportation and removal. The urgent necessity to integrate the two not only is empirically founded but also highlights anthropology’s inclusive and comprehensive approach to research. Taken together, they call for a clear veto of the invention of another “anthropology of

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X.” There are already too many of them. By contrast, what Peutz is presenting here through the analysis of a very important topic is a clear concept and some sound methodological considerations. This is already much better than what most “anthropologies of X” have to offer.

Peter Nyers Department of Political Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L85 4M4 ([email protected]). 26 X 05 Forced migration is often discussed with reference to large and impersonal structures; it is typically understood as a response to “objective” structural forces such as war, persecution, environmental catastrophes, disparities in the global economy, and the security concerns of states. What distinguishes Peutz’s article is that it emphasizes the subjective dimension of forced migration. This is a daunting task, because deportees are people whose life experiences are inherently difficult to account for. They are usually rendered invisible, considered superfluous and dangerous to the nation-state. Peutz presents us with a series of narratives by deportees that recovers much of the subjective experience of deportation. This allows her to cast off some of the burden of structure and develop a subtle appreciation of how the process of removal is experienced in its legal, economic, and spatial-temporal forms. In other words, emphasizing the subjective dimension of deportation allows a critical analysis of the process of subjectification—the ways in which migrantsas-subjects are made and unmade (Mezzadra 2004). My comments are primarily concerned with the political dimensions of the deportee’s subjectivity. In particular, I am intrigued by the questions Peutz’s analysis raises about the status of a key political concept: citizenship. Citizenship is a marker of belonging and the possession of agency. Deportees, of course, are for the most part noncitizens. They are the rejected, the abject, defined by their lack of political voice or presence. They are criminalized, held in abeyance, and ultimately jettisoned from the body politic. Nonetheless, the deportees Peutz interviewed speak of a constant struggle for recognition, visibility, and presence in the public sphere. They express “outrage” and demonstrate a “strong desire for legal recognition.” By emphasizing the subjective element of deportation, Peutz is able to raise the topic of the ways in which deportees think of themselves as political subjects. While the Somalian deportees she spoke with were unsuccessful in preventing their removal, communities under deportation orders are emerging as key figures in the fight against their removal. Demands for regularization of status, an end to immigration detention, sanctuary cities, and so on, are being heard in cities across the Western states (Nyers 2003). What is significant about these demands is that they speak to the emergence of deportees as political actors, thereby disrupting our received understandings of political subjectivity centred on the citizen.

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The political philosopher Jacques Rancie`re (1999) has argued that politics occurs when those who have “no part” interrupt the prevailing social order. In a similar way, deportees would seem not to count when it comes to political activity, their place in society being limited to “non-places” such as the detention center and the deportation flight. However, it is precisely at these sites that some of the most dynamic and challenging forms of political activity are occurring. For the excluded, articulating a grievance as an equal—as a speaking political being—is a radical political moment. Despite the considerable risks and dangers, communities of deportees are challenging the monopoly of the state over the distinction between citizens and noncitizens in extremely provocative ways, and in so doing they are transforming our understandings of citizenship as a political identity. Understanding the ways in which deportees are stigmatized and marginalized is a crucial task, but it is not the only task. What distinguishes Peutz’s article is her insistence that cataloguing the calamities suffered by deportees is insufficient to the task of understanding their place in global imaginaries about the political. Beyond the removal of bodies from territorial space, it is important to understand how people are being displaced from the subjectivities that allow them to assert themselves as human beings—as political beings—with all the rights, agency, and dignity that implies. By taking the subjective aspect of deportation seriously we can become better attuned to the way migrants participate in their own political subjectification (Mezzadra 2004). Peutz’s study is important in promoting such a research agenda.

Lorna A. Rhodes Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 23 X 05 Despite the confusion of the Somali deportees, the opacity of the deportation process, and their perhaps justifiable paranoia, Peutz’s exploration of their situation comes across as a fundamentally hopeful endeavor. By skillfully delineating the political and emotional landscape of removal, Peutz offers the quintessential work of ethnography itself, as well as inspiration and useful theoretical underpinnings for more ethnography, by others, in this and similar landscapes. The implicit hope is that revealing the invisible can accomplish something beyond itself. As in much other work of this kind, including my own, what this something is—what, exactly, we can hope for—remains sketchy, and the reasons for this lie beyond but also shadow Peutz’s account. By tracing the trajectory of those who are made invisible through the unseen network of transfers, incarcerations, and ejections that creates them as deportees, Peutz points to certain areas that she cannot reach. One of these is the vast institutional machinery—consisting of local jails, prisons, detention centers, INS and FBI surveillance and interrogation, transport, and more—that lies behind

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the Somali’s collective journey and appears fragmentarily in Peutz’s account. Following others writing about the prison industrial complex, Peutz points out that removal combines governmental practices with big business in an overlapping of public and private. Deportees are able to report the concrete details of whatever piece of this picture they themselves have been inserted into, but the totality of this “magic” of disappearance remains obscure. One thing we know from other accounts, however, is that the militarized criminal justice system in the United States is increasingly of a piece with international detention. Mark Dow quotes the head of Wackenhut, one of the large corporations building private prisons both in the United States and elsewhere, who in 2001 said that “as a result of the terrorist attacks . . . we can expect federal agencies to have urgent needs to increase current offender capacity” (2004, 10). “Offender capacity” suggests not only the dream of profit but the assumption that the “offense” is always already a quality of the prisoner. And this assumption, in turn, feeds the expansion and secrecy of the system (since there is no need to be public about those who are guilty by definition). Peutz can get at the system only indirectly; Dow’s work demonstrates that gaining access to these institutional spaces of exclusion, though certainly very difficult, is not impossible. Although ideally an anthropology of removal will gradually overcome this difficulty, in practice our efforts will likely remain partial and incomplete. Further, we have scarcely begun to think about the practical, political, and ethical implications of our need (increasingly) to penetrate areas closed to us. The other difficult-to-reach aspect of removal is suggested by the story of the American brought on in Amsterdam to pilot the plane transporting the Somalis. Peutz writes that the deportees were reassured by “the mere involvement of the American” and expressed “a residual attachment to the notion that a government will comply with the ‘rule of law.’ ” Carried into an extrajudicial, trans-statal limbo, the Somalis nevertheless place their hopes in the law as it appears to hover just beyond their grasp. Peutz contrasts the deportees’ lack of legal recourse with the situation of citizen-prisoners, who—no matter how brutal or arbitrary their incarceration—do have legal rights. This sets up the noncitizen detainee as the constitutive outside of the citizen and recourse to the law as the defining capacity within which the citizen cannot be reduced to “bare life” (Agamben 1998). But perhaps, in order to make this point (which is an important one), the contrast is being drawn a bit too sharply. The small group of Somalis described by Peutz represents a huge population we could describe as “deportable.” Lawrence Cohen (2004) writes about “operability” as a way in which biological availability mediates relationships with the state. In this case, “imprisonability” readily shades into the availability of bodies for transport. As Peutz points out, deportability calls into question the romance of transnational citizenship, but it also raises the question whether any “body” might be moved to the other side of the line, the side on which “rights” evaporate in the long reaches of confinement. Many imprisoned as citizens of the United States find that their at-

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tachment to the law is as “residual” as that of the Somalis on the plane, despite a putative capacity to bring suit. An anthropology of removal invites us, then, to recognize that the anthropology of the present opens onto multiple areas in which the “machinery” behind the narratives we collect is invisible to us and to consider whether the terms in which we understand this machinery of disappearance—as a violation of rights under the law, for example—are adequate to the task before us.

Gu¨nther Schlee Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, P.O. Box 110351, 06017 Halle/Saale, Germany ([email protected]). 31 X 05 This paper is about the production of illegality and deportability. There is always an element of artificiality when real people with their complex histories are made to fit legal categories, and this artificiality becomes accentuated with the lack of relevant knowledge on the part of those who take legal decisions about the subjects of those decisions. Lack of knowledge can also acquire the character of systematic ignorance. It is sometimes better for a decision maker’s peace of mind not to know too much about the consequences of his or her decisions. Simplifications and even fictions are also helpful in this process. In the case of Somali refugees, these fictions extend to the “states” to which the “criminal aliens” are to be deported. As a European who has done research on Somali in Africa and in Europe and who has been married to a Somali for 25 years but has never lived in the United States, I have nothing to add about U.S. rules and practices. The only (possibly) useful comments I can make are from my European/African perspective and should be interpreted as mere additions, not as criticisms. Any paper can be expanded in all sorts of ways, and what follows are just some possible extensions or ramifications of the topic. The production of illegality does not start when refugees or asylum seekers come into conflict with the law in Europe or the United States. It starts in Africa. Refugees need a paper identity. At one stage the birth certificate of a parent may be needed, and it is then that people may find out that it is much easier to claim a person with a birth certificate as a parent than to get such a certificate for a real (but absent or undocumented) parent. Somali refugees who manage to come to Europe have often experienced terrible hardship and danger, and anyone unfamiliar with asylum law and regulations would say that they had good moral claims to refugee status and a residence permit. But experience shows that the real stories are often not close enough to the standardized casuistic of the decision makers and that certain types of stories— coming from this or that minority clan—are safer. Thus the production of fake identities and biographies goes on. Digging deeply enough into Somali personal identities and claims to

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asylum would reveal much “fraud,” but this “fraud” has been produced in a dialogue with the authorities and in response to incentives and disincentives provided by them. In the case of deportation, people may then, of course, be deported to where their paper-selves have come from, to places (“a state”) where they have never been in their real lives. Mogadishu, with all its disruption, is an excellent place to claim to have come from when asking for asylum but certainly not a good place to be sent back to. The moving case histories provided by Peutz tell us how easy it is to get into detention and to be deported if one is a Somali refugee in the United States and convey the implicit message that the rights of these refugees need to be strengthened and their status made more secure. In addition to underlining this thought, I would like to encourage my Somali friends to turn that perspective around. There are pockets of relative stability in southern Somalia and statelike entities in the north-east (Puntland) and north-west (Somaliland). Many members of the European and North American Somali diaspora send remittances there and claim to know people who exert influence there. What is the status of foreigners in these entities? Somali migrations between Western countries are—quite understandably—guided by considerations of security of status. People with health problems may still prefer a place like Germany, praised for the access to its health system that it provides refugees, and welfare payments may also play a role, but migration trends seem to be to places where it is easy to get a secure residence permit and preferably full citizenship as soon as possible and to find (even low-paid service-sector) employment, irrespective of the aforementioned considerations. Somali rank Western states according to how fast they expect to get their passports. Five years is good, less would be better. When I had the privilege of participating, as an “expert,” in the internationally sponsored Somalia peace process in Kenya in 2002 and 2003, all sorts of policy papers and a draft constitution were discussed, but regulations on naturalization were at first forgotten. When the question was raised under what conditions a non-Somali should be able to become a Somali, some proposed eight years of continuous residence while others advocated a minimum of ten. Under the present conditions I would not like to be a U.S. asylum seeker in any part of Somalia or, for that matter, any kind of non-Somali immigrant there. This is not meant as an excuse for giving Somali refugees a rough deal in the United States. It is just meant to encourage Somalis to reflect a bit on issues of equality and the universality of human rights.

Reply I am grateful to the commentators for their insightful responses, especially their contributions here to what will likely

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become a broader discussion on removal and deportation. I will respond to their specific revisions of my article before addressing some shared evaluations. Chavez provides poignant examples of how forced removals have been explored through popular culture. His is a useful method for unearthing these regularly obscured exclusions— what Rhodes calls “revealing the invisible.” Moreover, by voicing the experiences of those left behind, popular culture offers a critical lens with which to realize at least in part the twosited research that Fekete emphasizes. It is helpful that Chavez’s comments bring the deportation experience “home” to the perhaps more familiar context (to the general U.S. reader) of Mexican immigration and removal. Comparative work on the deportation of people of various nationalities and legal categories should elucidate how such discrepant removals reflect and affect the deporting society. Collins stresses that the constraints faced by the returned deportees are in fact “conditions shared by all Somalis” coping with state failure. While this is an important generalization, it would be inaccurate to characterize the indeterminate state of paperless, outcast refugees and asylum seekers as analogous to the “vulnerability” of the jet-set Hargeysa entrepreneurs who profit from multiple citizenships and the lack of market regulation. I also hesitate to agree with Collins’s conjecture that the “immobility” I describe may have been “attribute[d] too much to removal and not enough to being Somali,” because the jarring experience of having been forcibly removed to a precarious state is not specific to this Somali example (Sontag 2003; Zilberg 2004). Still, it is worth recalling that the alienation experienced by these Somali deportees was indeed amplified by the fact that they found themselves in the same boat as many others in Somaliland, deported or not. This realization ran counter at times to their own experience of their deportation as an “exceptional” event—as did the U.S. (and Somaliland) state insistence on its having being “regular.” I do point out how these deportees struggled to find employment or procure documents in an unrecognized country where many are unemployed and lack internationally valid passports. One example that I omitted because of space limitations is that of people having to resort to using false identities to seek medical treatment that is unavailable in Somalia/Somaliland. Throughout my 2003 visit, Tariq’s family repeatedly attempted to send his grandmother abroad for kidney dialysis until finally she was caught using her deceased friend’s passport and denied boarding. Meanwhile, Tariq’s desperate bid for an illegally purchased visa was eclipsed by his family members’ more pressing needs. What Collins’s remarks underscore is the necessity for further studies on how the subjective dimension of forced removal varies according to the particular contexts in which deportees find themselves. Fekete says that anthropologists and human rights defenders would benefit from shared research concerning removals. She wishes that I had been more attentive to racism and its role in objectifying peoples even prior to their expulsion. I do indicate that the deportees were attuned to this racial

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discrimination and that this certainly determined their “imprisonability” (Rhodes). Again, space limitations did not permit me to include the deportees’ narratives of their integration/ghettoization in the West, including some youthful initiations into gang and drug-dealing cultures. Still, I agree that a more focused examination of deportation and race is essential and believe that this will be a central aspect of any research that takes place in the deporting countries (but not to exclude the receiving countries). Additionally, Fekete calls upon us to broaden our perspective to include “those who cannot speak,” as she does by recording the circumstances of the deaths of two Somali deportees, “obituaries” unlikely to appear in the papers of their deporting countries. I would add that the deportees I met did speak of those who cannot speak. Abdullahi recalled the fate of Amir Ageeb, a Sudanese asylum seeker who died during his deportation of what appears to have been asphyxiation. “Memories” like these held particular resonance for those who witnessed the in-flight tranquilizations. Then there was the claim that two of the deportees might have faced considerable danger in Mogadishu because of their clan affiliation. What happened to these men? With Collins, Gingrich and Kroner argue that my “deportation stories” (their words) are actually “migrant problems” common to the broader Somali population as well as to other refugees. Specifically, they believe that the example of Somali parents’ removing their children to Somaliland is related less to deportation than to their unsteady situation abroad. Yes, Somali parents send their children to “safe” cities primarily out of concern for their religious and cultural upbringing. McGowan (1999), whom I quote, has examined this phenomenon. Nevertheless, the Somalilanders with whom I discussed these parental interventions consistently referred to them as deportation stories, and it was they who grouped these returned teenage migrants together with state-removed “criminals” and “illegal aliens.” Deportees were characterized less by the reasons for their removal than by the common experience of having been forced to (re)discover their place in their alleged but unfamiliar homeland. What this demonstrates is that deportation is in fact not only a “migrant problem” but also a citizenship- and state-defining procedure that shapes even nonmigrant communities and national cultures (of tolerance, security, and law) in both deporting and receiving states. Gingrich and Kroner stress that we cannot separate migration and refuge from deportation and removal. Nor should we, however, treat deportation as just the unfortunate consequence of a failed migration or as a subtopic of migration studies. As debasing as a deportation can be for all those affected by it, there is something more here at stake, including the (re)formulation of state sovereignty and of the law’s exceptions and the (re)making of political subjectivities—both of “citizens” and of those rendered “deportable.” Nyers emphasizes the significance of these reformulations by pointing to the emergence of deportees, surprisingly, as political actors even as they are removed from the public sphere. His own important work on antideportation activism

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reveals how undocumented noncitizens are challenging our understandings about the practices of citizenship. It also documents what we might call the “state-side” aspect of deportation practices: the reactions of communities to their targeted exclusion and their interactions with the state as they contest it. Particularly useful to any further work on forced removals will be Nyers’s concept of “abject cosmopolitanism”: a political agency asserted by “today’s global ‘cast-offs’ ” (Nyers 2003, 1075). It is Nyers’s work that offers the framework for what Rhodes calls “a hopeful endeavor,” although he shows also that there are limits to this “impossible activism” (2003, 1080). Rhodes recasts the anthropology of removal as a method for getting at “invisible” or “difficult-to-reach” aspects and spaces. She reminds us that “any ‘body’ might be moved to the other side of the line,” the side where “rights” and persons disappear. Accordingly, Rhodes finds that I draw the distinction between the deportees’ exclusion from legal recourse and the citizen-prisoners’ purported legal rights too sharply, and I agree. Softening this contrast would, however, only underscore the necessity for a sustained anthropological focus on removals that would engage with the hidden subjects and the similarly invisible “ ‘machinery’ behind the narratives.” Schlee reminds us that the production of illegality starts even before refugees or asylum seekers leave “home” and regardless of whether they break the law abroad. The example of Tariq’s grandmother’s attempting to use a false passport in an emergency situation illustrates this point. Schlee adds the important observation that this “fraud” is produced in dialogue with the very authorities that act to uncover it. Some are then deported from Europe or North America for having been deemed “illegal” (whether because of prearrival fraud or postarrival actions) only to return to what might be called a “market of fraud” necessitated by the more constrictive aspects of neoliberal globalization. Finally, Schlee raises the question of the status of aliens in refugee-producing states. The removal of 77,000 “illegal” foreigners from Somaliland in a 45-day period is a telling example. I know a Ugandan self-declared “refugee” who feared that he would be forced into this sweep. And what is to be said about the Ugandans or Ethiopians seeking refuge or opportunity in the still turbulent spaces of the former Somalia—that there is always another layer of invisibility? In addition to these valuable refinements, the commentators introduce two larger issues. First, some challenge my treatment of the specific contexts of this Somali case study. Second, almost all of them raise questions, implicitly if not explicitly, concerning methodology. Not surprisingly, the significance of clan (and subclan) affiliation for Somalis is a divisive issue in Somali studies. Collins argues that its importance for “navigating Somalia’s social, political, and economic environment cannot be overstated.” Gingrich and Kronor dismiss my “[simple] repetition of ’native views’ (for example, views that in Somalia genealogy, clans, or tribes matter more than anything else”).

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(My “views, offered without comment, about ‘East Africans’” were meant only as shorthand for the Somali term sijui, which I did explain.) These contrasting positions exemplify the two poles of a larger debate in Somali studies that emerged with the dissolution of what had been considered a homogeneous nation: to what extent the society and social conflict are determined by segmentary kinship and clan affiliation and to what extent race, class, and even foreign determinants play a role. Addressing this debate was outside the scope of this article (but see Lewis 1998; Helander 1998; Ahmed 1995; Besteman 1996, 1998; and Cassanelli 2003 [1996]). Nor did I manage, as Collins points out, to “capture the complexity of Somalia’s segmented, hierarchical social structure.” In part, this is because my main goal was to propose an approach that would be relevant to various modes of removal in a global context. Additionally, I had aimed to portray the “native views” (if by this Gingrich and Kronor mean those of my informants) for the reasons mentioned: because the subjective experience of deportation is exactly what is missing from most academic accounts, deportees being made inaccessible and thus effectively silenced. Consequently, I refer to clan as my informants spoke about clan: as a structure that incorporated them but also as a “new” identity that some were still hesitant to embrace. Clan affiliation was what had brought the deportees I interviewed to the relative safety of Somaliland and to the specific Hargeysa neighborhoods in which they resided, but it was also something that eluded them, a system that they were learning to navigate (and recognize the flexibilities of), sometimes with glee and sometimes with skepticism or frustration. As for my methodology, Gingrich and Kronor are justified in pointing to this critical omission on my part. I mentioned that I met Tariq through a Somali journalist, a chance encounter. Tariq knew where to locate two men with whom he had been deported. Through each of them I was able to contact another, and this process continued until I had interviewed the 11 deportees who had traveled north to Somaliland, as well as 2 of their acquaintances who had been deported separately (from North America) and 2 who had been deported from neighboring Arab states. Additionally, I interviewed 5 youths who had been “deported” by their parents (whom I met by chance or through their deported friends). At the same time, I was meeting, interviewing, and spending time with other Somalis who had returned voluntarily to Somaliland from North America or Europe, alone or with their families. All interviews were conducted in English, a language that each of the interviewees was fluent or at least quite proficient in, except for the interviews with the deportees from Arab states, which were conducted in Arabic. I had no research assistants or translators, and, except for the one occasion that I indicated in the text (when Tariq was present during Nasser’s interview, an interview that was later repeated), all interviews were conducted in private, either in the deportee’s home, in my guesthouse, or in an empty office.

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These open-ended and tape-recorded interviews (names were erased) lasted between one and three hours. I did not pay the deportees for these first interviews (in 2002) because I did not want the promise of quick cash to influence their decision to speak with me. I believe that all met with me willingly and without any expectation of a direct “return.” If there had been a U.S. embassy in Somaliland (or Somalia), some would surely have asked me to write letters or to speak to embassy staff on their behalf. Instead, it was clear that there was little that I could do except make their case public in the United States and treat them as “compatriots” while in Somaliland. (I brought one deportee with me to expatriate parties, normally off-limits to “Somalis,” where he valued asserting his “American” identity even though the other foreigners present were clearly skeptical of his “right” to be included.) I tried to return the favor of their trust in small ways—by helping some create job re´sume´s, by giving some chat money on later occasions, and by “hanging-out.” Most interviews were followed by social interactions. When I returned in 2003, I did pay the deportees I could still locate for follow-up interviews, as now I was reimbursing them for their “time.” I stated that I had met this “group” of deportees accidentally. I might have been able to meet others remaining in Mogadishu through my Somaliland contacts, but I did not hazard traveling there, even though, at the time, people were characterizing Mogadishu as a city “emerging from war.” I do not know if I would have met any deportees in Puntland; I never heard of anyone from this group’s moving to Puntland, and I would have been unlikely to meet deported individuals there except through another chance encounter. This difficulty of locating deportees and of conducting research in some of the locales to which they are returned is one of my primary reasons for calling on my colleagues to explore this topic further where possible. In fact, I tried to conduct similar research in Yemen a year later, and it was much more complicated. Both the deportees I encountered and the ministries I approached were fearful of the political and social repercussions of their disclosure. A state official expressed his concern that the United States might retaliate against Yemen if my research were to cast Yemenis as critics of U.S. government policies. One man, deported after a year of imprisonment for having been (erroneously) considered a 9/11 suspect, told a mutual acquaintance that he was “not ready” to talk. The few deportees who did agree to speak with me (again, through chance meetings) were full of unrealistic expectations regarding my ability to influence U.S. embassy staff regarding their readmission to the United States. While I had tried to explain my role and limitations clearly, these interviews were tinged with disappointment, and I decided to stop my research in this context. These challenges notwithstanding—or, indeed, because of these very challenges—I believe that an “anthropology of removal” is called for. While any study of deportation must engage with the issues central to migration and refugee stud-

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ies, an anthropological focus on removals brings together a different set of experiences, including renditions and indefinite detentions, emergent forms of political identity, and emergent categories of abjection (e.g., enemy aliens and combatants), as well as other forms of social abandonment (Biehl 2005). Moreover, while the experience of forced migration and forced removal may be analogous and thus often lived through twice (by the same person), the disparate forces behind these two phenomena require separate analytical lenses. Refugees and migrants are controlled and “protected” populations; while they lack a political voice, they remain relatively visible within the public sphere. Removed persons are unaided and unprotected—a superfluous remainder that some would rather erase than have to account for. —Nathalie Peutz

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