Situated sites of migration control: Swiss deportation practices and their relational materiality in prisons, hospitals, and airports

Abstract

Deportation is often studied in the context of research into the administration, enforcement, and control of immigration, with researchers highlighting the violent effect on deportees and studying the various actors involved in the deportation process. This contribution adds to the growing literature on deportation infrastructures by emphasizing the inseparability of deportation procedures from the specific sites in which they unfold, as well as highlighting the analytical interest and political agency of such spaces. My socio-material approach applies a rather classical understanding of infrastructure, asking what three specific deportation sites – prisons, hospitals, and airports – can tell us about deportation procedures as a technology of immigration enforcement. Using Switzerland as a case study, this paper analyses deportation procedures, including the role of human and non-human actors, paying particular attention to the situatedness and relationality of deportation infrastructures. The socio-material analysis of the architecture of the three sites under discussion ultimately exposes deportation as violent statecraft.