BANISHED TO THE HOMELAND

This has been a long journey. We spent almost seven years interviewing, observing, investigating, testifying, interpreting, and analyzing the lifeworlds of deportees at multiple locations in two countries, working until we were able to draw conclusions. When we started the project in 2002, we thought that the entire process would take two to three years, but with little to no funding (we wrote several grant proposals to both public and private agencies, but no financial support was ever forthcoming despite encouraging reviews) and the enduring complexity of the issues, we felt that we could not end our data collection until we interviewed the returning deportees in Manhattan.

We sincerely hope that the life-course narratives along with our various ethnographic reports from the field, as framed in a critical sociological and criminological analysis, have been sufficient to raise awareness of the destructive and inhumane criminal justice and immigration processes being conducted in the names of the citizens and taxpayers of the United States and beyond. It has been sixty-one years since that momentous occasion in New York City when the Declaration of Human Rights was signed by every member state in the wake of the horrendous casualties and crimes against humanity perpetrated before and during World War Two.

Still we are treated to daily reminders of the abuse of those rights supposedly enshrined in our respective constitutions and nation state laws. The photographic scenes of perverse indignity perpetrated at Abu Ghraib by a government and its agents in the name of defeating tyranny and the plethora of images broadcast around the world in the wake of Hurricane Katrina demonstrate how unequal, unjust, and punishing life has become for many in the United States—not as the exception but as the rule. We issue our report in an epoch when torture and extreme mistreatment have become sanctioned by laws. We witness a studied indifference in the total contravention of the spirit and substance of the Declaration of Human Rights countenanced by war exceptionalism in the pursuit of terrorists or by the everyday structured rituals of racism, classism, and sexism that make our discriminatory practices so banal. We locate our study therefore within this more generalized knowledge of the flagrant and celebrated abuses of the human condition and suggest that the voices heard in the previous pages be placed in that context. We write reflexively at a time when we have tended repeatedly to forget who we are as democratic citizens, as members of a world family completely interdependent on one another, and as purveyors of hope and enterprise often stirred ironically by those immortal words at the foot of the Statue of Liberty¹:

At the beginning of the book we asked the following questions: What happened to the immigrant’s dream such that it became a nightmare? What happened to the hope and ambition of these subjects? How was it channeled into such “deviant” pathways that they received the heavy societal sanctions that not only tore them away from their families within the United States but also from the United States itself, condemning them to exile in their homeland? Certainly there are numerous sociological and criminological theories that purport to explain these processes of deviance through reference to opportunity structures, drift, innovative subcultures, and even criminal seduction. All of these theories have been applied in various degrees in our analyses.

In addition, there are immigration theories, particularly those pertaining to the concept of segmented assimilation, that speak of the mix of social and cultural capital as the immigrant enters a downward cycle of social mobility, acculturating him or herself to the subterranean worlds of the street and the resistant identities of the “underclass.” In this reading of the wayward immigrant, the imaginary landscape is replete with gangs, drugs, and the usual assemblages of subcultures, informal economic webs, and social practices that typify the proletariats and subproletariats of the globalized inner city. There are many such narratives in our data that testify to the explanatory power of such theories, but these are all only part of the picture. Our data demonstrate and demand a fuller, more culturally contextual and fluid analysis that points to the savage mix of history and politics in the era of capitalist late modernity and in particular to the peculiarly punitive turn society has taken in its chosen modes of government and population control.²

Thus we settled on the theoretical notion of social bulimia as developed over the last decade in the work of criminologist Jock Young. In the form of the deportee we see the massive contradictions of dependency and colonialism, of a seductive capitalism and the needs and imaginations of emigrants and immigrants, and the interests of elite-dominated security states whose leading parties continue to fashion crime and immigration controls on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society. It is out of this torrid confluence of social forces and public policies that the deportee emerges, pushed and pulled through low-tier schools and immigrant neighborhoods, put to work in lowstatus occupations or finding niches in legal and illegal “off the books” occupations, and finally consumed by criminal justice institutions now umbilically tied to border controls that virtually seal their fate in an era of anti-rehabilitation.

The deportee therefore becomes much as Bauman (2004) had foreseen: the epitome of the “wasted life” in the contemporary post-Fordist United States and increasingly in other developed capitalist democratic societies in Europe (see later in this chapter). On the one hand driven out and marginalized by the unequal trading relations and histories of colonial and imperial plunder, and on the other lured by the old wants of the industrialized economy and the new wants of the post-industrial middle classes, many were brought to the United States by parents fleeing from dictatorship and/or attracted to the endless promises of the American Dream that are so profoundly a part of the Latin American and Caribbean consciousness. What they encountered was different than what they had imagined. Those who came early as children were often pleasantly surprised; after adjusting to the language and customs of their new homeland, they did their best to settle, to learn the customs and norms of their new transnational habitus, and to live up to the aspirations of their parents. As they remembered their trips to Macy’s, the sparkling lights of Christmas, the plentiful pantries, and the free milk in elementary school, our participants recounted those times when New York City did indeed seem to be a land of opportunity welcoming those tired and huddled families from the barrios of Santo Domingo. Those who came to the United States later in life were not so lucky—their families were unable to guide them and give them the ethnic capital and grounding that immigration scholars currently emphasize for purposes of integration. For these latter immigrants, the story was destined to be rather more disappointing. They went straight into the business of surviving in a postindustrial world where the influence of the illicit drug trade was becoming increasingly integrated into the general political economy of the nation. The drug culture had always been part of the fabric of New York City’s social life, whether in the days of prohibition and the speakeasies of Harlem and the Lower East Side in the 1920s, to the heroin that flooded the city during the Vietnam war, to the cocaine that became a normal part of nightclub life in the 1970s and early 1980s, to the crack epidemic that seemed to leave such a visible trail of physical devastation during the late 1980s and 1990s.

The trajectory of these first-generation participants, these rather typical contemporary immigrants, took a turn for the worse, not simply because of what they did or did not do, but because the laws in the United States changed, turning the racialized communities from which they came—their spaces, networks, survival mechanisms, and statuses—into increasingly criminalizable units of control and expulsion. In this we see the bulimic paradox, the inclusion/exclusion dialectic, as immigrants were recast as incontrovertible villains with no salvageable histories, no sufficient offerings of penance and remorse, no acceptable commitments to self-reform, and no possibilities of family or community restoration. As we wrote in an earlier field note, with the stroke of a judge’s pen, the immigrant becomes an ex-resident of the United States, forever banished from what was for many—though not all—their presumed homeland. In this social fact, the intensity of the bulimic act—as the agent of the state backed by the full force of the United States Congress—determines not only the subject’s fate but also that of his or her family and loved ones for decades to come. The vindictiveness of this practice, this ritual of extreme judicial control, cannot be underestimated; no other sociocultural act more graphically displays the contempt with which the United States holds the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights.³

Of course, it could have ended differently. Immigrants could have been deported to a country that may have welcomed them, like the sons and daughters of the nation that they are, albeit somewhat blemished ones. Instead they become the Other of the Other, carrying the stigma of the past with the meanings and identities of the present. They represent both the bitter reminder of the flipside of the American Dream and the threat of the criminal, that peculiarly remorseless “American” stereotype that the U.S. corporate media and its political enablers have been infamously projecting for the past three decades. Who wants to live with the former and who wants to hear of the latter? Who needs reminders of the inescapable nature of their Dominican misery? Who wants yet another confirmation that those transnational spaces are not what they once were and that the balance of class forces in the wake of neoliberal political, economic, and criminal justice doctrines and in the midst of the world’s crisis-ridden financialization have ensured that their capacity to labor has become obsolete?

If we dig a little deeper, we find that the deportees represent further reminders of a world that might have been, of a lost opportunity to make good on one of the most progressive constitutions during the second half of the twentieth century under the tutelage of the intellectual political leader Juan Bosch. Every day that the government of the Dominican Republic refuses to put the issue of deportees on the agenda of bilateral relations with the United States and demand that Washington at least help pay for the reintegration of those they so efficiently reject is further proof of the spinelessness that defines the kleptocracy that has ruled this half of the island for much of the last one hundred years.

Finally, the participants in our study are examples of the generalized nature of the phenomenon: included/excluded subjects who have their counterparts all over the developing world, throughout the Caribbean, Central America, much of South America (particularly in Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil), and South-East Asia, and they are present in increasing numbers in the prisons of Spain, Italy, Britain, France, Portugal, Greece, Germany, and Holland (Welch and Schuster 2008; Calavita 2003; De Giorgi 2010). In both Spain and Italy, immigrants make up more than 30 percent of the inmate population. Calavita calls them a “reserve army of delinquents,” and others have likened them to a global migrant underclass whose otherness has provoked successive moral panics that rationalize extreme measures of criminalization or “hyper-incarceration” (De Giorgi 2010) while fueling political campaigns of the extreme right. We must not overlook the irony that this punishing language toward the immigrant is prevalent in countries that for decades relied on immigrants for low-cost labor for the industries of Northern Europe and the United States, countries whose citizens were themselves the victims of exclusionary laws and discrimination.

The topic of resistance is an important part of our conclusion because the criminological literature pays little attention to that which cannot be explained by the kinds of social conditioning variables that Bauman refers to above. The result is that the bulk of criminological narratives is based largely on economistic and mathematical principles, with nary a human being in sight (Young 2007). Although the literature regarding the sociology of immigration is more varied, it still favors the use of large secondary data sets to measure the demographic flows of immigrants and the great waves of ethnic cohorts as they pass through the social, educational, and occupational sieves of U.S. society. When the concept of resistance is applied, however, it is usually used to explain the downward mobility of immigrants in theories of segmented assimilation, where it is viewed mainly as an oppositional disposition⁴ to mainstream socialization, particularly the rejection of middle-class “white” norms in public school settings.⁵

We found this form of resistance in our participants as they joined street gangs, did not have particularly successful educational or work careers, entered the criminal justice system, and struggled with the norms of the Dominican Republic (which might be seen more as a case of culture conflict); however, this is only one side of the dialectic. The resistance we are wont to emphasize is that⁶ which privileges the agency of individuals as they seek meaning in everyday life and contest power relations in highly colonized contexts, an approach that is rare among immigration treatments that offer relatively few long-term, in situ, ethnographic investigations (see Smith [2005] and Gregory [2007] as two of the exceptions) that might provoke such analyses.

We observed resistance in our participants at multiple levels, and this resistance has an existential air about it as deportees search for ways to sustain themselves socially, physically, mentally, and economically in a society that is profoundly absurd, irrational, hypocritical, liquid, and anxious. How else can one describe laws that introduce new penalties (i.e., deportation) for a person who has already served a criminal sentence more than twenty years ago? How does the act of fragmenting hundreds of thousands of “American” families through enforced exile serve the purposes of increasing domestic social order? How does one find the social and psychological resources to live below the radar in the United States while greasing the wheels of both formal and informal economies and ensuring the lifestyles of the middle classes? How does it feel to be blamed for crimes in a country where the elite seem to have no moral or legal boundaries (see Brotherton et al. forthcoming)?

Therefore, we found resistance in the form that Gregory (2007) witnessed in the occupation of public spaces and in the many instances and processes of sociocultural and economic innovation. The examples are numerous and varied. It is there as Luis1 set up his chess school in the middle of a shopping street in Santo Domingo as a way to encourage the productive use of time, to stimulate the intellect, and to provide a site for social interaction between deportees and non-deportees. It is in the struggle of Luis2, who finally finished his law degree at the Autonomous University after starting it more than fifteen years before while he was incarcerated in the United States for seven years while visiting on holiday. On a daily basis Luis2 now provides legal counsel to the residents of his blighted neighborhood, representing those who find themselves in the nation’s prison hellholes under the auspices of preventive detention, and he works to build bridges among deportees to counter their cultural isolation and social stigma. It is in the work of René and his advocacy group, which aims to provide a political voice for not only the deportees but for all those who suffer from social exclusion in a society that openly discriminates against the fifth of its population with Haitian blood. It is present in Guido as he continues alone with his farm despite the departure of his family, who are unable to tolerate the privations of Dominican rural life and the absence of opportunity. It exists in the returnees to New York City who navigate their way back across U.S. borders to reunite with their families, to reinsert themselves into the U.S. political economy at the lowest ends of the occupational hierarchy, and who risk a minimum of three years imprisonment just for being there.

These are just some instances of the resistance that runs through narrative after narrative of liminal deportees and returnees who have spent their entire lives struggling against, living with, and accommodating dependency in its manifold forms. Each trip in a “yola” across the Mona Passage to Puerto Rico, or on planes with fake passports through Miami, or on buses, boats, and freight trucks from Santo Domingo through Central America and into Manhattan, is a form of resistance against the fatalism and the certainty of subsistence living that is the lot of so many Dominicans, especially those who do not have access to remesas. It is a resistance of not giving up, of refusing to lose the dream, of doing one’s utmost to maintain and retain personal appearance and dignity despite it all, of fulfilling one’s family obligations, such as keeping the kids clothed, encouraging them to study, and helping them to “make it” in an unforgiving world, without lacing one’s messages with the stuff of conspiracy while living in the shadows.⁷ This resistance emanates from the other side of the assimilation imaginary, the side that is overwhelmed by the American inclusionary rhetoric that always works in tandem with the needs of the political economy (Calavita 1992); it is an historical process artfully summed up by Ngai (2004:5): “The telos of immigrant settlement, assimilation, and citizenship has been an enduring narrative of American history, but it has not always been the reality of migrants’ desires or their experiences and interactions with American society and state. The myth of ’immigrant America’ derives its power in large part from the labor that it performs for American exceptionalism.”

Resistance, then, cannot be easily measured, as is the predilection of most social science. It does not fit into a convenient equation that can be mathematically manipulated to reveal almost anything the author wants, however absurd and inconsequential the formulation. This is why so few social scientific studies fail to predict social disturbances, uprisings, economic crises, and even revolutionary movements, and why most middle-class academics only come into action post facto to give the sequence of events a patina of social scientific predictability. If there is one thing our study has shown, it is that the “truths” of our participants’ lives are complex and often contradictory as they at times blame each other for their plight, wax nostalgic about their treatment in the United States, or hope against hope that, if only “the American people knew what we are going through,” they would find their moral compass once again and end this injustice that “surely must be unconstitutional.”

So what should be done? Perhaps it is more fitting to ask what could be done, given the balance of forces in both societies at the moment. When one looks at the United States and the confused state of immigration controls and policies, it is hard to be optimistic. There is tremendous fear and apprehension on the part of the dominant white population as they see their economic futures in jeopardy, and few political voices with any clarity and power are able to explain and take positions against those institutions and polices that have largely created this crisis. In this climate of high anxiety and ontological insecurity (Young 2007), in which the middle classes in particular exhibit a heightened “fear of falling” (Enhrenreich 1990), it is the immigrant, particularly of the undocumented variety, who are identified as the scapegoat. The racist and xenophobic policies emanating from Arizona are just another example of a long history of “blaming the victim” and tagging the immigrant with every social and economic ill that has befallen the United States throughout much of the country’s history (Ngai 2004; Zinn 2005).⁸ This fear and anxiety are particularly acute in states such as Arizona, with its militarized borders, history of highly racialized politics, and vast new subdivided housing estates (or what Garreau [1992] calls “edge cities”)⁹ that have been severely affected by the collapse in housing values due to the recent capitalist financial crisis.

In this era, then, it is difficult to conceive the degree to which there will be a sufficient political constituency to tip the balance back toward a more “rational” and humane center, to return the United States to at least a criminal justice/immigration system that gives judges the power to grant administrative relief and allows families to stay intact, or to put into perspective the so-called “threats to society” by those charged with the ever increasing category of “aggravated felony” (the recent establishment of a deportation panel review by New York Governor Patterson is a notable exception).¹⁰ This is especially so when the federal government and various states are desperate to cut their incarceration costs by expelling the non-citizen as quickly as possible and Republican shock jocks in the monopolized media are desperately seeking a constant stream of alien symbols to keep the imagination of that not-so-silent majority exercised. In addition, in this age of the Kafkaesque security state, with its massive law enforcement bureaucracies and integrated enforcement agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, it is hard to see where the political will exists to dismantle the current constructs in the furtherance of democracy without a massive shift of public opinion and social protest.¹¹

In effect, the social control logics—the specialized knowledge, practices, rituals, and disciplines of the security state that are part and parcel of the globalized political economy of punishment—are there for all to see and have become entirely normative in both popular and social scientific discourse. Each day that due process is trampled with regard to deportable felons, that lawyers are not provided, that immigrants are kept uninformed of their rights (what is left of them) with many failing to understand the consequences of their pleas and the consequent removal procedure, brings us closer to authoritarian rule. The constant incursion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in prisons across the United States—in particular in the nation’s largest human warehouse on the East River in New York City, Rikers Island—is a civil rights issue. Calling for reform and drastic changes to the immigration and deportation laws is not about “them”; rather, it is about “us.” To this end we should support those groups that are at the cutting edge of the advocacy and protest movement in the area of human and immigration rights (listed in Appendix D).

With respect to the government of the Dominican Republic (and other receiving nations), there is much that can be done to mitigate the situation. The issue of deportation must not be passively accepted as a fait accompli by those nations. It could be part of a joint effort to force it onto the agenda of international relations between the United States and the variously affected countries. More specifically, the Dominican government can take a much more proactive approach and advocate for their returning citizens in the United States, ensuring that they are treated properly. They should work with local organizations to visit U.S. prisons on a regular basis to check on conditions and provide more professional services and meaningful long-term assistance on their arrival in the Dominican Republic. Instead of viewing deportees as a burden and allowing—or even fueling—the stigma that surrounds their identities and pasts to go unchecked, the government could engage in a public educational campaign to explain to the Dominican public the history of the U.S. immigration laws and the impossible web of legal and social controls that are ensnaring more and more of their compatriots. Finally, the Dominican government could remove all formal legal and social barriers to the integration of deportees by stopping the practice of informing employers of their deported status, allowing deportees to run for political office, and recognizing that deportees have talents and skills that could be used for the more general development of Dominican human capital in a world of increasing economic competition.

There is so much more that we would like to see accomplished on this subject. We wish we could have heard more from the families and associates of the deportees, both in the United States and in the Dominican Republic. It would have been valuable to look at the experience of deportees in different areas of the Dominican Republic and to have carried out more grounded ethnographic research in these comparative regions. In future research, there is a great need to hear more extensively about the experience of female deportees and how their treatment might differ from their male counterparts in the Dominican Republic. Finally we would very much like to engage in a multisite study to compare the experiences of Dominican deportees to those of other recipient nations. To conduct these kinds of long-term, collaborative, and highly intensive research projects, investigators need the interest and support of funding agencies. Funding of this nature has been difficult for us to acquire; nonetheless, with or without such aid we will continue to work with such parties in the respective recipient countries and in the United States, be they social scientists, lawyers, or advocacy groups, to collect what data we can and to provide relevant critical sociological and criminological analyses. Without exaggeration, we feel this area of global (in)justice goes to the heart of a question that is increasingly being asked by young and old alike in developed and developing countries: Whither has democracy gone in the new millennium? We hope that our small study on behalf of the voiceless will make a contribution to this debate and prompt more concern from those who have the ability to make the difference.