Abstract

Across the liberal and social democracies of Europe, North America and Australasia, deportation or removal ¹ of rejected asylum seekers and of non-citizens who have breached immigration and/or criminal law is becoming a widespread means of population control. Academic commentators speak of the ‘deportation turn’ taken by these governments (Gibney 2008), point to the exploitation of insecure and ‘deportable’ groups by governments, employers and communities (de Genova 2002; Kittrie 2006; Coutin 2010), and characterize the impetus to exclude outsiders as a form of ‘enemy penology’ (Krasmann 2007). Increases in the use of administrative detention and deportation (Welch and Schuster 2005), sometimes accompanied by convergences between criminal and immigration law (Stumpf 2006), point to contestation over the boundaries of belonging (Anderson, Gibney and Paoletti 2011) and suggest that governments are using these exclusionary techniques to ‘govern through migration control’ (Bosworth and Guild 2008). As a technique of contemporary governance, the widespread urge to exclude problematic populations has been described by Bigo (2011) as the replacement of the ‘panopticon’, based on institutions that promote containment and visibility, with the ‘banopticon’, which aims to separate public enemies from protected populations. Techniques of banishment may include the use of detention as a form of internal containment. But in the case of non-citizens, the possibility exists to effect the ban through physical expulsion from territory.