‘I Have Completely Exhausted Myself During This Journey’: Female Citizens’ Experiential Migrantisation in the Face of Their Foreign Spouse’s Deportability

This article examines how a foreign partner’s deportability influences Finnish women. The concept of ‘experiential migrantisation’ offers particular utility for this analysis in that it elucidates the negative impacts of immigration regimes that these citizens had believed to be applicable only to migrants. Thus, the paper contributes to advancing deportee-focused studies of deportability by examining how deportability and deportations affect citizens – in this case, Finnish female partners, alongside their children. Enquiry proceeding from 12 in-depth interviews and informal observations with eight Finnish women, whose spouses had first sought asylum and then residence permits based on a family tie, lays bare how these citizen women experienced and lived out the threat of their foreign spouse’s deportation. In my analysis of experiential migrantisation, I group the experiences of my participants into three broader themes: adopting new roles and questioning one’s citizenship, experiencing discrimination and racism, and feeling a lack of temporal or spatial control. The work highlights that, though one must be critically minded when considering experiential migrantisation, it offers a valuable tool for investigating the deep effects of a partner’s deportability on spouses and their children.