Life and Death After America: Deportee Transnationalism Among Cambodian American Refugees

Based on over 25 and a half months of multi-sited transnational ethnographic fieldwork between California and Cambodia, “Life and Death After America: Deportee Transnationalism Among Cambodian American Refugees” traces the deportation process for Cambodian American refugees who were granted lawful permanent residency (LPR) status in the United States. To date, 757 Cambodian American refugees with LPR status have been deported to Cambodia, and approximately 2,000 more face final removal. These “deportable refugees” (Zelnick 2018) were either born in refugee camps, or left Cambodia as infants due to the terror of the Pol Pot regime, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and under whom the Khmer Rouge killed approximately two million Cambodians, and displaced millions more. Cambodian American refugees lose their LPR status upon conviction of various crimes, and are deported after completing their sentences in US prisons, due to a confluence of laws passed in 1996 by President Clinton, Cambodia’s Law on Nationality (Kingdom of Cambodia 1996) that created the conditions for forced citizenship through jus sanguinis (citizenship by blood), as well as a Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Cambodia (United States Government and Royal Government of Cambodia 2000) that necessitates the deportation of each country’s nationals. Drawing together the fields of the legal anthropology, transnational migration and deportation, critical refugee studies, and Asian American studies, I challenge extant binaries of migrant il/legality and refugee “deservingness” while simultaneously destabilizing ideas about diasporic belonging, US militarism, and the homeland. To do this, I frame my dissertation around “deportee transnationalism” to critically analyze deportee and deportable refugee lifeworlds. Deportee transnationalism encompasses the processes by which deportation creates ongoing transnational circuits between the United States and Cambodia, generates diasporic imaginaries, and reproduces state violence. Thus, contrary to conventional understandings of deportation, it is not a finite and final event, but is constituted by a set of multiple and unfolding processes, including belonging, return, removal, and documentation. By examining these processes, I demonstrate that deportee transnationalism reflects new understandings of the operations of US imperialism, state violence, and refugee resettlement, while simultaneously calling into question ideas about home, ethnicity, and kinship. Ultimately, I argue that deportee transnationalism reveals the sociopolitical and legal complexities surrounding declining liberal humanitarianism’s acceptance of refugees, alongside the expansion of the US deportation regime