Behind Jamaican Deportations
Behind Britain's deportations to Jamaica lies a long history of exploitation and subjugation, which has its roots in colonialism but which has continued long into the post-colonial era.
In Jamaica, ‘ordinary people’ will invoke slavery when discussing the state of the roads, the price of goods and the lack of jobs. People in Jamaica know that today’s insecurities can be explained only via slavery and colonialism. People in Jamaica also have some sense, however patchy, that their country is in debt because of loans made by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), reliance on imports and a lack of political and economic clout globally. They recognise that tourism primarily benefits foreign-owned hotel chains and cruise ship companies, and they certainly know that there are more opportunities in North America and Europe – which is why nearly everyone ‘wants to go foreign’. Whether on radio talk shows or in everyday conversations in route taxis, there is an understanding that slavery, poverty, debt, crime, tourism, violence and emigration are intimately connected, and that these connections explain the ‘sufferation’ of Jamaican citizens today.
As Jovan Scott Lewis explains: ‘sufferation is a descriptive public discourse used in Jamaican society to denote a condition of being existentially and economically stuck’. ‘Sufferation’ is ‘not understood as discrete occurrences of financial insufficiency … [but] as a state, a condition, and a position in which one economically struggles’ – one of ‘comprehensive and inescapable precariousness’. Importantly, the concept of ‘sufferation’ is central to how many Jamaicans understand the continuities between their present condition and histories of slavery and colonialism. The discourse of ‘sufferation’ implies a particular kind of historical imagination, in which colonialism and slavery come to dominate the imaginaries of ordinary Jamaicans.
It is hardly surprising that Jamaicans retain this historical imagination in relation to slavery. Jamaica was the largest British colony in the West Indies, with a disproportionate share of sugar plantations, and its economy was the most productive, diverse and complex in the British Caribbean (more than half of the estimated two million enslaved Africans brought to the British West Indies by 1807 were taken to, or through, Jamaica). Indeed, Jamaica’s physical and social geography – its ecology, its population and its infrastructure – have been formed by and through slavery. The island’s only ruins, and indeed some of its main tourist attractions, are old plantation houses. The University of West Indies Mona campus, where I lived when I was in Kingston, was once the site of two large sugar estates, and most mornings I would walk past the ruins of the eighteenth-century aqueduct that carried water from the Hope River to those sugar estates. These ruins provide a reminder that Jamaica, like other colonial economies, was structured to produce mainly agricultural products for export to the metropole – specifically sugar, although later bananas and bauxite.
After Independence
Writing in the 1970s, George Beckford suggested that Jamaica could still then be described as a plantation economy because economic conditions and constraints remained structured by the plantation. Beckford noted that countries like Jamaica had been participating in world commerce for over 400 years and yet still they were characterised by profound underdevelopment. Even with formal independence, the Jamaican economy has been heavily dependent on exporting a narrow range of commodities – and tourism is a kind of export here too – while the country imports manufactured goods, machinery, food and oil. Derek Walcott observes that ‘absentee “power structures” [still] control the archipelago’s economy’, and as former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley put it: ‘Today’s world is the direct consequence and logical outcome of the economic arrangements and structures created by colonialism and imperialism’. Of course, with emancipation (1834) and much later with independence (1962), the conditions of rule and of the conditions of possibility changed dramatically for Jamaicans. However, Jamaica’s structural location, its place in the global economy, largely did not.
Since the early 1970s, Jamaica has had a very low rate of economic growth. The response from multilateral organisations like the IMF, whose policies are determined in the interests of powerful states and corporations, has been to impose liberalisation policies that open up the economy to foreign exchange, and to privatise public assets, while also enforcing aggressive austerity policies (as in most postcolonies, the openness of the economy can be contrasted with the ‘closed-ness’ of borders). Unsurprisingly, these measures have increased economic and social inequality, leading to the decimation of small-scale agriculture, thus precluding Jamaica’s ability to grow food for the island’s population. This has increased the dependence on imports, especially of food, which is prohibitively expensive in Jamaica.
Moreover, austerity measures have impacted the weakest sections of the population most severely, as the government has cut investment in education, healthcare and social programmes in the last four decades, with specifically gendered impacts. As elsewhere, years of economic liberalisation and austerity have made the Jamaican economy particularly vulnerable to global economic shocks. The 2008 crash resulted in the final collapse of the major export industry in bauxite, a decline in inflows from remittances and a stagnation in earnings from tourism. Compounded by austerity and debt, these conditions have intensified the pressures on poor Jamaicans.
In this light, Jamaica’s lack of sovereignty is painfully obvious. Public debt stood at 116% of GDP in 2017. In 2014, Jamaica paid $138 million more to the IMF than it received in loans. Interest payments on these debts continue to soar, and in its 2012–2013 budget, Jamaica allocated 55% of its total expenditure to pay foreign and domestic debts. The government currently spends more than twice as much on debt repayments as on education and health combined. In 2015, Jamaica was running the most austere budget in the world, with a primary surplus of 7.5% (around double that of Greece in the same year). This programme of austerity has seen the maternal mortality rate double between 1990 and 2010, and the percentage of children finishing primary school fall from 97% to 73% over the same period. The price of basic goods, as well as electricity, has skyrocketed since the early 2000s, and youth unemployment hovers at around 25%. Jamaica’s economy is now therefore completely dependent on remittances and tourism.
The Meaning of Citizenship
For the late Barry Hindess, whose writing on citizenship has profoundly shaped my own thinking, it is useful to view citizenship not only in terms of internalist relations between a given state and its citizens, but also as ‘a marker of identification, advising state and nonstate agencies of the particular state to which an individual belongs’. Hindess notes that citizenship operates at the international level by allocating each individual to a state. The individual is then the responsibility of that state, and not the responsibility of other states. In this light, deportation is simply the realisation of citizenship: when individuals are deported they are ‘returned home’, legally and spatially re- assigned to the state that they belong to. Deportation might be an extraordinarily violent and naked form of state power, but, as William Walters notes, ‘it is actually quite fundamental and immanent to the modern regime of citizenship’.
This way of describing citizenship is especially relevant for Jamaican nationals, who lack many of the rights ordinarily seen as fundamental to liberal citizenship, and yet whose Jamaican-ness is experienced precisely as ‘a marker of identification’ at the international level, a legal-political status which symbolises global marginality and restricted mobility. Especially for ‘deportees’, Jamaican citizenship is not primarily about rights and responsibilities in relation to the Jamaican state, but represents a way of being positioned, managed and fixed globally. Indeed, citizenship as a legal regime is necessarily international: the men in this book were not only defined as aliens and non- citizens in the UK, they also had to be verified and produced as citizens of Jamaica. Both alienage in the UK and formal legal belonging in Jamaica were necessary to realise deportation, and thus citizenship is a ‘supranational regime of government’, an international regime, and a legal status which operates at the global scale.
These observations are important when citizenship is so often celebrated as an ideal of political engagement and subjectivity. Celebratory accounts of citizenship obscure its global function as a ‘supranational regime of government’, one which determines who belongs where, and in effect immobilising the global poor in conditions of scarcity (while also mobilising them in particular ways, as illegalised or temporary labour). The experiences of ‘deportees’ highlight that citizenship is not some guarantee of homey belonging and political membership, but rather a global regime for the fixing of unequal populations.
If citizenship is in fact the global regime for the management of unequal populations, then it works to reproduce and perpetuate racialised global disparities forged through slavery and colonialism. The inequalities between nation-states and their populations are not incidental: they reflect histories of colonialism and its constitutive processes of domination, dispossession and uneven development. What is specifically postcolonial about today’s global racial order, however, is that the racialised global poor are governed not as colonial subjects but as citizens of independent nation-states. They are governed through citizenship and incorporated into the global as citizens. In this context, discourses on sovereignty prove ideologically pivotal, obscuring historical continuities through references to the apparent independence of formerly colonised nation-states.
Sovereignty refers to the idea that each state has ultimate authority over a particular territory and population, and that this authority is recognised by other states in the international system. However, in practice, assertions of sovereignty are highly abstract, and the formal sovereignty of nation-states tells us little about the historical, political and economic relations that organise international relations. Indeed, it is precisely by acknowledging Jamaica’s sovereignty, even while economically dominating the country, that countries like the UK and the USA have managed to claim that violence and poverty in Jamaica are somehow effects of Jamaican ‘national policy’ and the ‘national economy’. This nationalisation of Jamaica’s problems also constructs the Jamaican citizenry as the sole responsibility of the Jamaican state, which then makes deportation not only possible but wholly legitimate. But what does sovereignty actually mean in a country weighed down by the unrepaired histories of slavery and empire, and destabilised by the ongoing economic violence of structural adjustment, enforced austerity and debt?
Then and Now
In fact, Jamaican sovereignty is a void sovereignty – a term I borrow from Merav Amir in her discussion of Israeli statecraft in the West Bank. Amir argues that it is through the fabrication of a Palestinian sovereignty (via the Palestinian Authority) that the Israeli government is able to deny its responsibility for the welfare of the Palestinian population under occupation. The Israeli state is therefore able to double down on security-oriented forms of domination, because the responsibility to care for the occupied Palestinian population has been outsourced to the nominally sovereign Palestinian Authority. This fabrication of a void sovereignty – i.e. attributing to the Palestinian Authority wholly illusory forms of political authority and defining the Palestinian population as ‘its responsibility’ – is central to the justification for military occupation.
While Jamaica is not Palestine (although Palestine often functions as a laboratory for emergent forms of coercive state power), this fabrication of sovereignty, a void sovereignty, does seem to capture the meanings of sovereignty in many formerly colonised states – whether in Africa, Asia or the Americas. Countries like Jamaica are unable to provide their citizens with the basic means of life, and this is largely an effect of their subjection to political and economic domination from without, and yet because these states are independent, they are blamed for any shortfall. As with the Palestinian Authority, the Jamaican state is afforded only illusory forms of political and economic power, and yet through the ideology of sovereignty the ‘sufferation’ of the Jamaican population is described as an effect of Jamaica’s ‘national economy’ and ‘national policies’. In this light, sovereignty is not only void, it is also a kind of ruse, an ideological trick through which powerlessness and subjection are recast in terms democracy, citizenship and freedom.
Liberal claims surrounding citizenship and sovereignty work to obscure the ongoing relevance of racism and colonialism in structuring global disparities. One way to rethink these relationships would be to demonstrate that citizenship, in a postcolonial world, does remarkably similar kinds of work to that performed by race under empire: producing fixed legal and social distinctions between cultural/ethnic/national groups; defining who can move and how; and justifying uneven development, differentiated incorporation into markets and stark inequalities between populations. Race and citizenship are both systems of population management – both work to define where people belong, and both underwrite legal and coercive forms of state power which fix people in social and literal space. Recognising the connection between racial and citizenship regimes helps us develop a more satisfactory account of what has changed and what has remained the same after the end of formal colonial rule, and by thinking about citizenship in this way we might be able to improve our understanding of what race and racism are and how they function.
In this regard, we should note that racial differences and hierarchies have always been centrally constituted by relations of mobility, and both colonial states and contemporary liberal states have been centrally concerned with the ordering of mobility. As Robert Young argues, ‘colonialism operated through a forced symbiosis between territorialisation as, quite literally, plantation, and the demands for labour which involved the commodification of bodies and their exchange through international trade’. As Ann Stoler argues, the colony was ‘a principle of managed mobilities, mobilising and immobilising populations according to a set of changing rules and hierarchies that orders social kinds: those eligible for recruitment, for resettlement, for disposal, for aid, or for coerced labour and those who are forcibly confined’. Today, liberal states describe their immigration policies in terms of ‘managed migration’, as they seek to fill gaps in labour markets while excluding and illegalising the vast majority of the global poor. Indeed, the combined logics of territorialisation and selective mobilisation characterise contemporary immigration regimes, and the ordering of mobility remains constitutive of racial difference.
This way of conceptualising race and racism – historically, spatially and globally – requires moving beyond definitions of racism as intolerance, discrimination and prejudice. To understand the contemporary racial ordering of the world, it is important to view racism in terms of the reproduction of structural and material colonial-racial inequalities in the present. This is where critical theorisations of citizenship and sovereignty become especially urgent, because nationality is the key legal mechanism through which racialised global disparities are obscured and legitimated.
Immigration controls might rely on the disavowal of ‘race’, but they inevitably organise the world in its image. To bring continuities between then and now into view, we need to think about racism not only in terms of ideologies of biological and cultural superiority, but to recognise that race and racism are fundamentally constituted by the spatial and legal ordering of global populations, markets and mobilities.