Deporting 'Black Britons': portraits of deportation to Jamaica

This thesis explores the life stories of four men who were deported from the UK to Jamaica following interaction with the criminal justice system. All four men, having moved as children, spent roughly half of their lives in the UK. For each of the men, deportation was lived as exile from home – from parents, partners, children and friends – and the thesis provides portraits of their lives in the UK and in Jamaica. In particular, it examines processes of criminalisation, illegalisation and racialisation as they interact to construct deportable subjects. This thesis asks what these life stories can tell us about the relationship between immigration control and racism. Fieldwork was conducted in Jamaica with deported persons, and in the UK with friends and family members. As such, this is an ethnography of absences and disjunctures. In the ethnographic portraits, themes of illegality, culture, gender, police racism, citizenship, and the legal construction of family life emerge, and reading the portraits together provides a rich account of racism in multi-status Britain. Ultimately, the thesis argues that immigration controls reconfigure race in the present. Moving from the UK to Jamaica, the thesis argues that borders produce racial meanings at local, national and global scales, because racial hierarchy is intimately connected to citizenship regimes and the differential mobilities they organise. Examining the racial work that borders do provides a historically specific account of race and racism, and one which centres the state. The thesis argues that even the most local of encounters, played out in particular lives, in specific times and places, are connected to the ordering of space, mobility and population through border regimes. It also argues that when challenging citizenship and border regimes, it is essential that we find new ways to theorise kinship. Based on detailed ethnographic portraits, this thesis provides a wide-ranging intervention into studies of race, migration and citizenship.