Enforcing deportations in Germany: contours of a neoliberal workfare citizenship regime

Critical Migration Studies and Border Studies conceptualize deportation as ‘a technology of citizenship’. Drawing on two ethnographic research projects focusing on the German return and deportation regime, the paper argues that even though deportation is the ultimate act of membership definition – relying, as it does, on hard law and the establishing of a dichotomy between citizens and non-citizens (as deportable others) – such boundaries are not static. Findings demonstrate, rather, that the latter are fluid in terms of the ways in which the deportable subject is constructed. We show how, in the German context, the modes and criteria involved here increasingly emerge from the interplay of a ‘migration control–social policy/workfare state–criminalization nexus’. This aligns with the contemporary discourse around the removal of the ‘criminal offender’, demonstrating how deportation has been rebranded as an act of national security and social safety, how it plays out in practice and, especially, how it interrelates with the politics of ‘welfare-state bordering’. That is, the tendency to moralize citizenship as something that must be earned.