Stolen Time

Stolen time Shahram Khosravi The most remarkable reason for deportation I have only of divine rule but also of society’s well-being, seen is from 1914, when a Russian Jew was deported and a non-citizen sinner is subjected to criminal law. from Sweden after six years. A short sentence in the The lack of precision means that the application of police report, explaining why he should be deported, the law regarding what is ‘contrary to the rules of mor- reads: ‘He was a bad shoemaker.’ It was not enough ality’ is left to the discretion of the judges, who can to be a labourer; one had to be a good labourer. In the deport non-citizens not only for criminal offences but same year, two other Russian Jews were deported be- also for sinful acts.3 cause one lacked ‘a sense of rightness’ and the other 1 one had ‘venereal diseases’. There is a fundamental sinfulness in being a for- The religious under- eigner: the unforgivable sin of being on this side tones concerning chastity, virtue and the Protestant of the border with a ‘foreign’ skin colour, language, work ethic that were used to justify deportation of name, face or religion. Foreigners are undesired ones these three men are obvious. Almost a century later who never stop being seen as foreigners, no matter I witnessed how the Protestant ethic was also used how long they have lived in the country, no matter to rationalise rejection of an asylum seeker. In 2007 how integrated they are in the society, no matter I accompanied a young man who had been living in whether or not they were born in the country. A long- Sweden without a residence permit for a period of sev- term, sometimes lifelong, re-entry ban for deportees eral months to a meeting with a lawyer to formulate discloses the fact that foreigners’ sins are imprescript- an asylum claim. I helped with translation. The law- ible: never forgotten; never forgiven. yer asked what he would say if the authorities asked Even now people are deported because they are why he had not sought asylum when he had arrived in bad crafts(wo)men, or face denial of admission at the Sweden several months earlier. The young man said border because of disease, or simply because of the sin he would lie and say that he just arrived. The lawyer of lying in a Protestant land. In 2017 Norwegian im- got upset and said: ‘We in this country are Protestant, migration authorities started a deportation process of and we do not lie.’ The man was later deported. a whole family of twelve people, a couple who received Following Carl Schmitt’s idea that ‘all signific- asylum in Norway in 1990, their children (only four ant concepts of the modern theory of the state are and nine years old when they came to Norway) and secularised theological concepts’, I would say that grandchildren (born in Norway). Their Norwegian the current deportation regime has an inherently re- citizenship was withdrawn, and they were ordered ligious dimension. 2 The introduction of ‘crime in- to leave the country after 27 years. The couple are volving moral turpitude’ (CIMT) in US deportation accused of having lied about their nationality when law demonstrates very well the link between the no- they sought asylum in 1990. The authorities claim tions of sin and deportation. The term CIMT is vague that they are Jordanian nationals and not Palestinians. and lacks definiteness and clarity. Deeply rooted in re- The sin of lying to the state results in collective pun- ligion and loaded with religious overtones, CIMT is a ishments of denaturalisation and deportation almost grey zone in which the distinction between the unlaw- three decades after the alleged sin of lying. Expulsion ful and the sinful has disappeared; subsequently, legal of what is believed to be foreign and harmful is, in conceptions of crime and religious conceptions of sin this way, part of nation building, part of a secularised become indistinguishable. Sin is thus a violation not state with an inherently religious nature. Deportation is also part of the border regime that the country that one escapes from and the country in aims to keep people in their places within the class which one seeks refuge. Deportation has been added hierarchy. As Nicholas De Genova argues, the condi- to neoliberal policies of social abandonment, which tion of deportability renders migrant workers a dis- expose vulnerable groups to multiple expulsions from tinctly disposable commodity and creates a flexible communities, the labour market, the housing market, and docile labour force. Deportation as a way of con- the spheres of security, the health care system, the trolling the mobility of workers is crucial for maintain- education system and state protection. ing the wage gap between citizens and non-citizens and also between the global North and the global South. There is a direct link between outsourcing to countries with low wages and the restrictions placed upon the mobility of the people of those countries. Recently a number of US academics have been exploring the relationship between mass deportation and outsourcing and offshoring. Mass deportation provides a flexible and culturally suitable labour force that is bilingual and has the ‘right’ cultural capital for transnational corporations; for example, in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador. Deportation preserves and reproduces social inequalities and global injustices. Deportation aims to maintain the unequal access to resources, and upholds unequal distribution of wealth. For instance, keeping Afghans in Iran ‘deportable’ has been a strategy to allocate them to specific regions of the country with need of a cheap labour force and also to specific occupations. Through the discriminatory policies of the Iranian authorities, the Afghan presence in the labour market is so firmly established that many Iranians use the word Afghani synonymously with ‘unskilled worker’. Depriving non-citizens’ chances to improve their socioeconomic conditions is a global trend. In July 2018 a new law in Sweden gave a second chance to 9,000 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (the majority of them Afghans) with a deportation decision allowing them to stay to attend upper secondary school. After they finish school, however, they have to leave the country, unless they have a job. That means these youngsters should forget their dreams of a higher education. Many young Afghans, who were born in the condition of undocumentedness in Iran and never had a chance for higher education, face the same barrier in Sweden. They are destined to remain ‘unskilled workers’ wherever they go. Deportability at the global level generates a removable underclass of workers in both Moreover, deportable Afghans in Iran are used to trigger divisions within the working class by engendering a circuit of paranoia among Iranian workers who believe that the real threat against their class interest is migrant workers and not the widespread un(der)employment, political oppression, institutionalised corruption, regularly unpaid salaries and financial insecurities. When Iranian workers got permission to celebrate May Day in 2015, thousands of them demanded expulsion of the Afghan labour force from the country. I cannot agree more with Günther Anders, the German Jewish philosopher, who in another deportation context put it this way: ‘to have a faithful slave, give him an under-slave.’4 Deportation is not only a spatial expulsion, but also a temporal one. Deportability is a statement of a spatial as well as a temporal dis-belonging. The deportee’s tomorrow belongs elsewhere. Expulsion is nothing less than robbing an individual of the viabilities of life. It wipes out the vision of a better future. To unfold the brutality embedded in the deportation regime, we should examine the deportee’s time. Similar to the case of human trafficking, deportation is forced and coercive. There are explicit 39 elements of exploitation in deportation. As part of the form of unpaid pensions? How much surplus value global apartheid of the right to mobility, removal of has been produced for capitalists through deportation migrants is part of a brutal neoliberal political system globally? that is also inextricably intertwined with an exploit- We live in the age of mass deportation. Almost ative economic system. Both human trafficking and three million people were deported from the United deportation lead to accumulation of wealth through States between 2009 and 2016, and several million the stealing of time. In modern societies, time is as- more are scheduled to be deported in coming years. sociated with success and money. It has become a Europe is organising the deportation of almost a hun- form of capital that, similar to money, can be inves- dred thousand people to Afghanistan alone. Agree- ted, saved or wasted. Capital grows through stealing ments with states, like Turkey, are signed; huge of time. When people are spatially removed, they are amounts of money have been paid to alleviate re- 5 automatically robbed of an amount of time. People, movals. Likewise mass deportation is growing outside particularly long-term residents, have worked, built the global North. Saudi Arabia has deported hundreds networks, paid taxes, spent time learning the local of thousands of migrants every year in recent years. language and becoming accustomed to the culture, Since 2016 more than a million Afghans have been fallen in love, and maybe had children, before being forcibly sent to Afghanistan from Iran and Pakistan. sent to countries to which they may have little con- How much time has been stolen? nection. The time people have invested to achieve In some deportation regimes the link between these goals is lost by deportation. The time people deportation by states and accumulation of wealth by have spent to accumulate social and cultural capital private actors is explicit. The Iranian and Pakistani is thwarted by deportation. authorities force Afghans to pay the cost of their own Sudden arrest and deportation means having no deportation. The travel costs across the border to chance to prepare for the journey, to sell accumulated Afghanistan for a large family, all the bribes they property, to claim wages owed or to collect one’s be- have to pay and the initial resettlement costs push de- longings. Being deportable usually means that one portees to turn to moneylenders, who demand high in- has lived an informal life, with a job that was not re- terest rates. The cost of debts results in long-term ex- gistered, with no insurance and with belongings that ploitation. In 2016 a large family were deported from were not documented. An illegalised life (time) is un- Pakistan to Afghanistan. An Afghan moneylender reclaimable, since it is not considered to have existed paid all the costs of their journey, that is, deport- at all. ation. Since their deportation, all the members of A not unusual consequence of deportation is los- the family – from the grandmother to the youngest ing money in the form of unpaid wages. The de- child, only eight years old – have been working on the portees’ worked time is stolen. Many deportees be- moneylender’s farm for free. This is an example of lieve that their employers reported them to the police how deportation and human trafficking knit together. to save the money they owed them in the form of Besides the time invested economically, what unpaid wages. Lacking the right to have a bank ac- about all the time spent on building networks, friend- count, many undocumented migrants ask others to ships, emotional relationships? For long-term resid- save their money. Undocumented people buy cars and ents, deportation means leaving their youth and child- properties registered in the names of documented hood behind, and all the memories they formed in the people and citizens. Deportation makes it difficult if places they called home. What about all the years de- not impossible to regain all these. What about taxes ported parents are separated from their children, and and social security contributions people may have their partners? The Windrush scandal is one example paid before being removed? What about unused holi- of the brutality of the theft of time: long-term resid- day? How many working hours are stolen? How much ents are denied benefits, access to healthcare, educa- money did their employers save in the form of unpaid tion or housing, and are threatened with deportation wages? How much money does the state save in the after several decades spent in the UK working, paying 40 RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.03 / December 2018 taxes and building communities. rival. He has a science degree and worked in a public Another devastating consequence of stealing hospital in Oslo; he had bought a house and had an time is keeping people in a condition of circulation. extended social network. He was forced to leave Nor- A common experience of deportees is being sent back way to seek asylum in Iceland. Earlier this year his in time, expressed as being sent ‘back to square one’. application was rejected. In 2018 he is back to the The sense of going back to square one illustrates how same square he was on 18 years earlier, and his time deportation deprives people of their time invested in has been stolen. building a life in the host country. Keeping people in As Marx showed, surplus value is generated from circulation is a way to slow down, to defer, to deny time that capitalists do not pay for, the time they steal future plans and to create disruption in the stages from labourers. The extra value added to commodities of the life cycle. A life in circulation is an indefinite comes from stolen time. Like people who have been position of not becoming in what is supposed to a ‘nor- trafficked, deportees’ time is actively stolen. Using mal life course.’ In the condition of circulation one the term stealing emphasises how deportation is part never gets the chance to finish anything. This is a of the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few by way to keep people as permanent ‘unskilled labour- dispossessing the migrants of their saved, spent and ers’ (as in the case of Afghans in Iran and Sweden), invested time. Demonstrating how deportees’ time is and removable when they are not good ones (as in the stolen repoliticises in this way the concepts of bor- case of the bad shoemaker). Unlike the Foucauldian ders and deportations that have been naturalised and surveillance and disciplinary society that operated depoliticised by the ideology of the nation state. by confinement, this regime of circulating people is more similar to a Deleuzian control society that operates by keeping people continuously on the move.6 Image: Shahram Khosravi, Idomeni railway station (2018). This is a controlled movement of people sent back and forth between undocumentedness and deport- Shahram Khosravi is Professor of Social Anthropology at ability: between countries, between laws, between Stockholm University and author of several books includ- institutions. To keep people in circulation so that ing Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran (2017). their experience is usually one of ‘not arriving’, an He is also editor of the collection After Deportation: Eth- experience of temporariness, being constantly on the nographic Perspectives (2017). move, is a control mechanism that propels them back Notes towards square one. As Clara Lecadet argues, the circulation of manpower is a means of subjugating workers. The threat of being pushed towards square one hangs not only over the heads of non-citizens but, as William Walters highlights, increasingly also over the heads of racialised citizens. Mahad Abib Mahmud was only 14 years old when he arrived in Norway as an unaccompanied asylum seeker in 2000. He received asylum and later on gained Norwegian citizenship. In 2017, after 17 years, he was stripped of his Norwegian citizenship and had to leave the country. Norwegian authorities claimed that Mahmud was originally from Djibouti and not from Somalia, as he had said on ar- 1. Tomas Hammar, Sverige åt svenskarna (Stockholm: Caslon, 1964), 343. 2. Carl Schmitt, Political Ecology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 3. Mary P. Holper, ‘Deportation for a Sin: Why Moral Turpitude Is Void for Vagueness’, Nebraska Law Review 90:3 (2013), 647–702. 4. Günther Anders, Et si je suis désespéré que voulez-vous que j’y fasse (Paris: Editions Allia, 2016), 8. 5. Lauren, Martin, ‘Deportation and the dispossession of time’, Darkmatter (2015), accessed 20 October 2018, http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2015/10/05/deportation-and-the-dispossession-oftime/ 6. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October 59 (Winter 1992), 3–7. 41