Reintegrating deported citizens into national development: The Jamaican model

Published: 1 Jul 2016

This article was authored and submitted to the Rights in Exile Newsletter by Bernard Headley and Dragan Milovanovic. Bernard Headley is the co-founder and board chairman of the National Organisation of Deported Migrants, a post-deportation rights and reintegration NGO in Kingston, Jamaica. He is also retired from the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, as a Professor of Criminology. Dragan Milovanovic is Brommel Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Sociology and Justice Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.

Introduction

A widely held view in Caribbean nation states is that the region’s ongoing crime troubles can be tied to the activities of “deportees” returned there — after they had received significant “schooling” in crime during their sojourn up North. The belief holds firm despite findings that report, for Jamaica, no ”clear relationship” between number of deportations and rate of “serious” crime (World Bank 2007). Still, a presumptive “correlation” persists. It is one propagated in large measure by the local media but also is firmly held in circles of officialdom. The result is a difficult path for “deportees” seeking to make their way back into their home societies.

By discussing the ideational praxis of an organised group of highly motivated men and women in Jamaica — all deported from the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), and Canada — this article draws attention to the constructive roles that the stigmatised and socially unemployable, with “intercessors,” can play in crafting new ways for rehabilitating broken lives, while advancing the bigger project of national development.

Overview of deportations to Jamaica

Few topics in Caribbean criminal justice and “security” are as contentious as the matter of criminal deportations. On the one hand, as the international community, including the Caribbean nation states, recognises, “It is the right of every nation to decide who can enter and stay in its territory, and under what conditions” (World Bank 2007: 81). If foreign nationals offend or otherwise violate the laws of a host nation, they do put in jeopardy all rights they may have had to remain as guests in that country.

Deportation of Jamaican nationals from the North has been part of a larger phenomenon of involuntary return of migrants from destinations where there have been heightened levels of criminalisation of foreign nationals. The relative magnitude of the forced return of Jamaicans from the US, UK, and to lesser extent Canada—for a combined total of upwards of 2,000 persons deported per year since the late 1990s—is partly a consequence of the large numbers of Jamaican nationals having decided over the years to live in those countries (White 1995, Palmer 1999).

The scale of deportations from the US took a dramatic upward turn after 1996, following Congressional passage of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (Welch 2002), signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The Act amended the definition of “aggravated felony” by lowering the bar for criminal offences. As a result, the number of “criminal deportees” from the US to the Caribbean more than doubled each year after 1996, with Jamaicans being the second highest group of foreign nationals (after nationals from the Dominican Republic) to be deported from that country (Thomas-Hope 2014).

Accessing data from the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) and the National Intelligence Bureau (NIB), an investigative arm (with special responsibility for “deportees”) of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, Thomas-Hope (2014) does indeed report that the numbers of persons arriving in Jamaica as “deportees” by country of last residence came mostly from the US and the UK. Taking the period 2000 to 2013, 49 percent of the total number of persons had been returned from the US; and 30 percent from the UK. The remaining numbers were of persons deported from Canada (7 percent), and from a combination of other countries (14 percent), mostly from other Caribbean countries.

Offenses committed by deported persons

In 2014 the Jamaican police force’s NIB selected a sample of 1,000 persons deported from all countries between 2005 and 2012 to ascertain the extent of their re-offending. Of the 1,000, forty had been charged with a criminal offence. This meant that a relatively small but still worrying 4.0 percent of the population of “criminal” or “convicted deportees” had committed a new crime in Jamaica. The offences for which the forty had been charged were mostly drug-related. Other offences, which amounted to one to four incidents per offender, were assault, robbery, and illegal possession of a firearm. Still, the overall numbers indicated no significant upward trend in re-offending.

The constructed theme in the deportation narrative, then — that “deportees” returned to the Caribbean because of their crimes abroad generally will re-offend in their homeland — is not convincingly borne out for Jamaica; only a small number from a selected sample had, notwithstanding the serious nature of some of their offences. We contend that reducing even further the incidents and the risks for re-offending will require ongoing support of the transformative — and ultimately re-integrative — type discussed later in this article.

Refugee and asylum seekers’ cases

Every so often — usually no more than one in every twenty subject-to-deportation cases, in both the UK and the US — a Jamaican national will petition for refugee or asylum status on the grounds of pre-supposed human rights mistreatment or fear for life, if removed to Jamaica. Only a tiny handful — less than three percent — of such petitions receive credible hearing; and less than one percent of those end up being successful. That’s because the immigration courts in both countries (Canada as well) — even on appeals — are not convinced that Jamaica is, broadly speaking, a rights-violating country, despite glimpses of its more than occasional lapses into displays of homophobia.

Fearing inevitable deportation — either because of immigration or criminal offences — small numbers of Jamaican nationals have therefore, over the years, contested their removal on grounds that it is precisely their status as a “deportee” in Jamaica that would put them at risk. Instructive are highlights from two disparate cases — one from the US, the other from the UK — which we have been close to. The cases end up making the same central point, but arrive there via different routes.

A forty-eight-year-old woman subjected to deportation, after serving time for the murder of her husband, petitioned for asylum in the US in 2014, on grounds that she was fearful of being removed to Jamaica. She had received a reduced prison sentence, to begin with, because of the mitigating circumstance of her prolonged “mental anguish.”

The woman contended in her lengthy court affidavit (granted privileged reading) that, if removed, “I’m certain that I will be tortured because of my severe mental illness. I do not have family or friends on the island to support me. I will also be homeless. Jamaican police are notorious for killing and abusing the homeless, deportees, and the mentally ill. If returned to Jamaica, I will be targeted by the police because of my American accent… I will be vulnerable to abuse and torture,” she continued.

An immigration judge in the state of Virginia believed her and granted her petition. She continues to reside in the US as a legal permanent resident.

Lawyers in the UK in 2015-16, making the asylum-petition case on behalf of a thirty-two-year-old Jamaican man facing deportation, for series of petty crimes, argued in affidavit (in privileged communication) that their client “has not been back to Jamaica since he was 15 years old.” “He has friends,” the affidavit continues, ”who have been deported to Jamaica and are asking for money from him as they perceive that he has money. These acquaintances are in Jamaica and would be able to identify him very easily and therefore make him known in his community because of his success overseas. His financial status at the moment is precarious as he is still at the start of his musical career… We are pursuing a protection claim on his behalf; that once he is returned to Jamaica he will be recognised as a person that has considerable money and therefore become a victim of extortion. We have had accounts given by family members stating that this has happened to a family member, and when he ceased paying he was murdered.”

The British Home Office has denied the petition. The man and his lawyers are, however, at time of writing, appealing the denial through the courts.

Deported migrants rather than “deportees”

We focus for the remainder of this article on the theoretical understandings that have guided the formation and praxis of the National Organisation of Deported Migrants (NODM), a registered “deportee”-owned Non-government Organization (NGO), formed in a country that, according to the World Bank (ibid.), the deportation problem is “most problematic.” We view the group’s aims and objectives as affirming rights to resettlement and reintegration into receiving “home” countries as stipulated in a Boston College “Convention on the Rights of Forcibly Expelled Persons.”

A 2009-10 European Union (EU)-funded, and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)-monitored, teach-in and action research project heeded the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s (1986) counsel to hear first, directly from the “objects” of your planned project or programme, what they want to be called. And, further, how they want to be treated and understood. Team leaders probed for these in a series of workshops and seminars with 100 men and women who had been deported within the previous thirty-six months from the US, the UK, and Canada. The sessions were held on the Mona (Jamaica) Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI). Participants had all had been deported for a criminal conviction or convictions, or for having pled guilty (gullibly, they said) to one or more criminal charges. We wanted foremost to know how they felt about being called “deportees.”

The overwhelming sentiment was flat-out resistance, with participants calling for their assembled groupings to engage in Walter Rodney’s (1971) “groundings” and “reasonings” on what to call themselves, a discourse exercise that would entail more than anything else a process involving stereotype negation. Team leaders reminded participants of Woody Guthrie’s use of the term “deportee” to coin poignant lyrics in his timeless song dedicated to the memory of twenty-eight migrant farm workers who died in 1948 in the hills overlooking Coalinga, at Los Gatos Canyon, in California. The passengers died when the chartered airline that was executing their deportation from America, back to their native Mexico, crashed and burned, killing all on board. The evocative, meaningful line in Guthrie’s song, participants said, was: “All they will call you is deportee.”

More distressing than the Los Gatos victims remaining nameless, ran the contention, was that “they,” others — the state, the media, popular culture — would assume powers to name and define you. And that, precisely, participants claimed, was what popular local dancehall artiste Buju Banton did in his 1990s recording, “Deportee.” In the song, Banton portrayed persons forcibly sent back to Jamaica (particularly from America) as “wretches,” blasting them for having gotten the opportunity to migrate, to go to “foreign,” only to screw up and then return as burdens on the society, adding to its already huge “scuffler class” (Maunder 1960).

Of course, in reality, the situation is not this simple. Credible arguments have pointed to criminal-legal systems of the major deporting countries that deliberately target for criminalisation, prison, and deportation people of colour (see, e.g., Welch 2006; Headley, Gordon and McIntosh 2005; Alexander 2012; Kanstroom 2012; Golash-Boza; Brotherton and Barrios 2011; Russell and Milovanovic 2001). (It so happens that, since June 2011, Buju Banton has been incarcerated on a narcotics conviction in the American state of Florida. Should he survive the terms of his ten-year sentence, he will be deported home to Jamaica.)

Though hurting from being banished from their overseas family and community, workshop participants said being burdens to Jamaica was not at all what they were about. If they were unable to return legally to families in the UK, US or Canada, the next best thing would be to seek ways to get involved, and stay involved, doing constructive things at “yard” (meaning in Jamaica) — which was precisely the reason, they said, why they chose to enrol in the workshops. Out there, though, away from the safe sanctuary of the University campus, participants said their efforts to get involved were being hampered by the label “deportee,” with its ominous preconceptions of “no good, dutty (dirty) criminal.” The characterisation was holding them back—and preventing them — from meaningful participation in the society. The label, therefore, had to be either negated or re-imbued with new meaning; the nature of which would give proper historical-sociological representation of whom — and importantly why — they were.

Participants saw themselves as “deported migrants” (the preferred term used in the international development literature), not “deportees.” Citizens who had migrated — migrants — were whom they inarguably were, having in the first instance been forced to leave their home country, often taken away as young children by a parent or other relative, because of the hopelessness that came with the country’s underdevelopment and “persistent poverty,” to use George Beckford’s (1972) apt terminology. But their criminal conviction in a foreign land, and criminalised deportation, oughtn’t to be their defining characteristic; rather it would serve to rally around self-redeeming values.

Being able to access through discourse powers to rename and redefine themselves gave participants their own terms of reference for “dealing” with — or as Article 19(3) of the proposed Boston College Convention (ibid.) puts it, “coming to terms with” — their expulsion. Change of name signals hope, renewal, and, at the end of the day, redemption. Abram of Old Testament mythology became Abraham with his anointing, thenceforth committing himself to what was ultimately and most deeply valuable; and Saul of Tarsus, onetime fearsome persecutor of the first Christians, became Paul the apostle, after his Damascus Road conversion.

Elevated to yet another level, the unfolding of this re-imagined, re-interpretive process — leading ultimately to new conceptions of self — is consistent with sociologist Erving Goffman’s (1974) “frame analysis.” Goffman used the term to denote “schemata of interpretation,” which, within a “new frame,” enables individuals “to locate, perceive, identify, and label [or re-label] occurrences within their life space and the world at large” (Snow, Rochford, Worden and Benford 1986: 464). This “new frame” Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X (the former Malcolm Little) famously referred to, in a related context, as “new bridges” in the minds of “our people”which function to reorganize experience and to guide new action, “whether individual or collective” (Snow et al., ibid.).

Foucault’s (1999) essay on “technologies of the self” takes the analysis one step further. He shows how historically situated political economies discipline societal members into viewing themselves in particular ways. Against this background, Goffman’s (ibid.) work on “interactional rituals” posits that having done a bad thing frequently initiates counter-narrative strategies for explaining the irregular event. Maruna (2006: 166) thus warns that, “Cultures with few models of redemption may be cultures with more doomed deviants.” He fittingly describes along these lines, in his study of post-released inmates, the importance of self-narratives for transformative practices. Self-narratives are ways of maintaining a coherent sense of identity, of self.

In his Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives (2006), Maruna identifies two distinct narratives. In the “condemnation script,” the negatively labelled person sees her/himself as an object, a pawn in the overall scheme of things, resigned to experience and to succumb to dire situations and their effects. However, in the “redemption script,” the person, the self-narrator, sees her/himself as essentially good, but fell on overwhelming bad times and did an out-of-character act. The “real me,” in contrast, always insists on positive expression. The self-narrator can always then conjure up previous memories where crime wasn’t central; that an instance of succumbing to an overwhelming problem of living took place; and that a good me was momentarily and uncharacteristically subdued, but is now present.

Maruna writes that “redeeming one’s self” is about persistency given to narratives of a good me, of an active me who finds a purpose and meaning in life, and has the potential to transcend the “dictates of oppressive momentary encounters.” This is a form of “re-biographing,” seen for example in Alcoholics Anonymous programmes. Referencing Henry and Milovanovic (1996), Maruna (ibid.: 140) sees transformative values in re-biographing, narrative therapies, and replacement discourses.

So rather than the current banishment of alternative narratives, which if indeed taken seriously may tax the otherwise self-defined, upright ethical citizen, alternative narratives of struggles and overcoming experienced by many deported migrants can become transformative. A community that in turn is willing to sensitively listen to the plight of stigmatised and disenfranchised populations is a community willing to evolve collectively, progressively, creatively, and transformatively, as it opens itself to compassionate understanding of complicated issues and problems inherent to living in complex environments. Only in this way are we able to create transformative-integrative forms of justice that not only acknowledge struggles in living, but also mechanisms for acknowledgment of wrongdoing, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, and reintegration (Milovanovic 2011).

Deported migrants’ organisation: Goals and strategies

An important outgrowth of the UWI workshops and reasonings was the National Organisation of Deported Migrants (NODM). Importantly, participants declared that a central reason for keeping the term “deported” in the name of their organisation was, indeed, because of the dreadful place that deportations have come to occupy in lest-we-forget recent European history — namely Stalin’s deportation of Crimean Tatars and the kulaks onto collectivist farms, and the Nazi’s mass removals and herding of Jews into death camps. One way to prevent atrocities like these ever happening again, the NODM founders reasoned, is through conscious remembering of — even embracing — the term “deported.”

Membership in the NODM is available to any Jamaican who had ever been expelled, deported, or otherwise forcibly removed from any foreign country and returned home to Jamaica; this regardless of the reason for the removal/deportation, or whether the individual seeking membership had served a prison sentence.

At the helm of the NODM’s leadership structure are the organisation’s three principal founders — all ex-offenders, each having completed fifteen to twenty years’ imprisonment in the United States before being deported. They are Glenford Powell (recently deceased), president; Oswald Dawkins, general secretary; and Dwight Jones, treasurer. The three speak of themselves as “reformed,” as “not ever going [or wanting to go] back there”; each possessing political-ideological fervency honed through years of engagement in Afro-centric Caribbean movement politics inside New York’s prison system. They each bring back to Jamaica, and ask that the society recognises, the richness of their combined experiences: the experience of “those who have fallen, picked themselves up, and found their way back toward success and intellectual inquiry,” as put by James W. Kilgore, in his fight to save his job as a professor at the University of Illinois-Urbana (The Chronicle of Higher Education 2014). Kilgore served six years in prison for his role in the radical fringe group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), accused in the 1970s of carrying out, in California, kidnappings and other terrorist activities.

It’s important to note that, while the NODM does not have, nor does it administer, tests for indications of being “reformed,” applicants for membership are made aware of the transformative mission and objectives of the organisation: that it places emphasis on members’ awakened sensibilities and readiness to step into, and fill, exemplary roles in the society.

Tackling criminalised banishment

It is, however, the process of building their own counter-narratives that is a source of deep frustration to the deported migrant population in Jamaica and elsewhere, particularly for those with a prison record. As Emily Tucker (2014: 9), staff attorney for immigrant rights at the Centre for Popular Democracy, wrote: “When the Obama administration talks about deporting people with convictions, they are talking about people who have already served their sentences for those convictions.” If you are a British, American or Canadian citizen who commits an offence, you pay the penalty issued by the country’s criminal-legal system, and then you are free to go back and rebuild your life in your community.  “If, however, you are a citizen of another country who commits that same offence, and pays that same penalty, you are subjected to the double punishment of permanent exile” from your home, family, and community.

The NODM seeks, nonetheless, to directly tackle the challenge of criminalised banishment. Its charter emphasises the broader, national rights of all Jamaicans who may have lived abroad but have returned to their island home. These essentially citizenship rights are to be enjoyed equally by the voluntarily returned—i.e., those who returned as professionals or retirees—as well as the forcibly returned. In part, because of the seated-at-the-official-table participation of the NODM, the principle of “inclusion” is evolving policy inside key social planning departments of the Jamaican government. In a 2013 draft document on managing migration, the government’s Planning Institute sets forth the following: “Migrants, both voluntary and involuntary, are recognised by the government as an important source of skills and direct investment to the country” (Government of Jamaica 2013: 12).

Two years later, the Institute went further: it requested of the Africa Caribbean Pacific migration office of the European Union “technical assistance for the ‘Development of a Plan of Action’ in support of involuntary returned migrants,” adding, “The objective of the technical assistance being sought is to develop a coordinated plan of action to provide readmission and reintegration support for involuntary returned migrants, to facilitate their successful transition and resettlement and strengthen their potential contribution to national development” (Government of Jamaica 2015: 2).

Revealed in the above statements is that, stirred by the advocacy of NGOs like the NODM, the Jamaican government is evolving in a progressive, even transformative, direction as it opens itself to compassionate understanding of a complicated issue. Contrary to earlier stances, which saw in deported persons “nothing but trouble” (still the reigning view in most of the region), the official Jamaican position is — or it appears to be — to consider the richness of the overcoming, regenerative scripts/narratives of the nation’s deported as conceivably a reservoir of untapped skill sets and avenues for investments that could benefit the country.

The NODM applies to donor agencies for small grants to assist with immediate resettling of the just returned. Volunteers go across town in the capital city of Kingston once every month to a police receiving depot. There they welcome home the eighty or so deported migrants President Obama sends back to Jamaica on federal charter flights, alias “Air CON.” The organisation further assists the new returnees in finding shelter and acquiring essential government identification documents, like birth certificates and tax registration numbers—all key measures of reintegration stated in the Boston College Convention (ibid.), which in Article 16(1&2) calls for “All forcibly expelled persons [to] be issued identification documents that enable them to enjoy their rights in the receiving state”; and that, “Forcibly expelled persons who are citizens of the receiving country shall be issued the same identification documents as other citizens in the country.”

But more important, the NODM also seeks out sources to help fulfil a larger vision of developing and owning small self-help enterprises—notably in agriculture, service, and inner-city rehabbing. The enterprises combine visions of Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey (the latter a deported migrant and subsequently a revered national Jamaican hero) with Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus’ notion of “social business” (Yunus 2010). The central idea being: to develop industries with capacities to absorb in sustainable income generation significant numbers of the thousands of deported migrants spread across the island.

With Great Britain — again

Thus far, the NODM has had only limited success at meeting its social business objectives.  However, mutual opportunism has brought the organisation into a strange-bedfellows contractual relationship with the Home Office of the British government. Cynics accuse that the relationship recalls the ugly “alliance” entered into in the eighteenth century between the British slavocracy and Jamaica’s warrior Maroon forebears.

Here is the background to what in effect is a British Home Office-NODM “Memorandum of Understanding.” As has been the situation in America, in the UK (Britain in particular) and other EU nations the politics of “defensive nationalism” has been fused with the politics of illegality, crime, and terrorism, the manifestation of which has strong racial and anti-immigrant overtones. “Jamaicans are the third largest foreign contingent in British jails,” wrote member of the British Parliament Dianne Abbott (who has ancestral roots in Jamaica) in April 2014. Foreigners in British prisons “cost the British taxpayer nearly £400 million a year,” she went on, and because of the high cost, “public pressure to see foreign prisoners returned to their country of origin is mounting.”

On this, and on the widely held notion of “immigrant threat,” Prime Minister David Cameron left little room for doubt. “I’m very clear about who the boss is,” he declared in a speech, in October 2014: “about who I answer to” on the matter. The British people “want this issue [of Britain housing foreign criminals] fixed, and they are not being unreasonable about it, and I will fix it,” Cameron said (The Guardian 2014). That the UK electorate, in the general election of May 2015, massively returned Cameron and his Tory party to power indicates support for continuing the hard British line on immigration — harder yet for immigrant offenders.

Indeed it has specifically been Great Britain — along with the US — that has been evicting targeted numbers of Caribbean and other nationals of colour who went up North as visitors, students, and permanent resident workers, and then depositing them at their home countries’ ports. The physical actions employed in affecting these “removals” have often been horrific. Instances of persons being snatched from communities and families, and then hurriedly processed for removal, are regularly reported for the two countries. We highlight here two egregious British examples. They are noteworthy because it is the bad-publicity fallout from these cases that framed the backdrop for the “alliance” that the British authorities entered into with the NODM.

In 1993, a specialist squad of Scotland Yard deportation police, SO13, arrived at the Crouch End, London, home of 40-year-old Joy Gardner, where Gardner lived with her mother and 5-year-old son. The police came to arrest and deport Gardner and her son to Jamaica, because she had “over-stayed” her visitor’s visa. Her son was born in Britain and was therefore a UK citizen. The son being a dependent minor of an out-of-status custodial parent meant, however, that he, too, would be “removed.” Unwilling to leave, Gardner was handcuffed, “wrapped up like a parcel in over 13 feet of tape and placed in a body belt with her ankles and thighs strapped together.” Joy Gardner died from being bound and gagged during her deportation.

Jimmy Mubenga, a 46-year-old man, died on October 10, 2010, on a British Airways flightbound for Angola, the country of his birth. He was being deported following his involvement in a pub fight — his first and only offence. Mubenga died a terrifying death at the hands three UK government-contracted G4S guards, an arrangement that had served to absolve the government of responsibility for the safety of persons being deported. Mubenga died belted in his aircraft seat, his hands cuffed behind his back, his face between his knees. Passengers would say in an Old Bailey courtroom, in the 2014 manslaughter jury trial of the three guards, that they heard Mubenga cry out, “I can’t breathe,” as he was being pinned in his seat.  But, after six weeks of testimony, in December 2014 a jury cleared the guards of the charge of having killed Jimmy Mubenga, who left behind a wife and five UK-born citizen children.

The British Home Office would conclude that, what could no longer be kept as normal deportation practice, certainly not under the glare of media, were these god-awful incidents: a Joy Gardner screaming “bloody murder” while putting up resistance against being removed from her family; a Jimmy Mubenga suffering a horrible death at the hired hands of the state while being transported to his homeland; or of the unhappy Jamaican man in 2011, likewise in the company of G4S guards, cutting his throat in front of passengers on a parked plane at Gatwick Airport, because he too did not want to be deported. But removals and deportations had to continue.

Representatives of the British Home Office, from their High Commission office in Kingston, hearing, they said, about the “good work” of the NODM, approached the organisation’s leaders in early 2012, and walked them through, point by point, rationale for what was, on the face of it, a befuddling proposition. This is how it went:

  1. Jamaicans in Britain whom we need to deport have a tendency to put up fierce resistance to their removal, as did Joy Gardner.
  2. Part of that resistance, which every now and then requires our agents to apply harsh restraint measures, comes from the Jamaicans’ fear and uncertainty about what to expect in Jamaica.
  3. The voluntary, admittedly light, incentive, known as Facilitated Return Scheme, in which we offer a few pounds to assist willing returnees at resettling in their home country, the Jamaicans are just not jumping at. Small but more-than-we-are-happy-with numbers of them prefer to wage legal battles appealing our removal decisions. Such battles we usually end up winning, anyway.
  4. We believe that if the NODM can provide a welcoming, “Come-on-down” message to fellow miscreants held in our prisons and detention centres, their resistance to coming home to Jamaica will decrease.
  5. We’ll enter into a grant funding arrangement with your organisation, paying salaries and, among other supportive things, provide telecommunications and other state-of-the-art cyber technology for your office; these will enable detainees held in our Huntercombe prison and Yarl’s Wood removal centre to speak one-on-one with your people—actual home “yardies”—in Jamaica.
  6. Additional funds we’ll provide will allow you to purchase a brand-new, BHC-maintained vehicle—a Toyota minibus—for you to pick up, at Jamaica’s two international airports, and then transport to wherever in the island (ideally to family), the deportees London regularly sends down.
  7. If you help us at effecting safe but certain removals, we’ll help you.

The NODM’s response to the British offer was that, “You’ve got a deal,” revealing, in a distressing sort of way, a relationship that can be called callous, even dubious, a “pact with the devil”; that it smacks of colluding with a deportation “enemy.” “There’s not much difference,” cynics have charged, between this arrangement and the treaty British slave owners signed with the resistant Maroons. The Maroons agreed, for the guarantee of their freedom, to return to the plantation runaway slaves seeking also their freedom (Campbell 1994). In like manner, the NODM leadership has been accused of signing onto a pact that would doom, by deportation, better life chances for equally dispossessed individuals, breaking up along the way UK-based, and UK-formed, Jamaican families, with young children, according to one New York Times (2012) investigation, suffering the most harm.

On this very paradox, the authors Tyler, Gill, Conlon, and Oeppen (2014) pointedly ask: What are the “consequences of co-option” within current British — and US — immigration policies?  Have neo-liberal trends towards “professionalisation of dissent diminished political opposition” to hard-line immigration practice in Britain and the “wider world”? We could further extend the critique to ask: has humanitarian activism on behalf of migrants contributed, unwittingly, to growth in numbers of supposedly “humane” detention and removals?

The question is reasonable. But the situation might best be understood this way. In the dialectics of struggle, even well-intended reformers may, and do, inadvertently reconstitute dominant institutions. Nonetheless, genuine reform always insists on remaining reflective and self-cognisant of reconstituting dominant institutional structures and hierarchies. Alliances do indeed have the potential to lead into inadvertent pathways, to nonlinear historical occurrences. A reflexive “seizing the moment” strategy ought, though, to still be part of conscious struggle.

The deportation reality is that, on average, fifty deported Jamaicans are received into the island each month from the UK — in addition, that is, to the eighty and more being returned, also monthly, from the US and Canada. Then there is the Obama administration giving the green light to American law enforcement to “go after,” with stepped-up deportations, “criminals and gang bangers.” (A New York Times [2014] analysis of internal government records shows, however, that since Obama took office in 2009, two-thirds of the nearly two million deportation cases involve people who had committed only minor infractions, including traffic violations, or they had no criminal record at all.) Together, these facts indicate inevitability to Jamaica and other weak Caribbean nation-states having ongoing, costly responsibility for receiving into their societies increasing numbers of displaced persons. These deportations undoubtedly will continue, whether the NODM works with the British government or not.

The relationship with the British has in fact given the NODM capacity (limited though it is) to fulfil several key re-integrative objectives. Funds received are used to initiate a range of steps and strategies, which together seek to convey the message that, “You can re-start life in Jamaica.” And that, pursuing risky and illegal means for making it back up North, in trying to “beat the system,” is probably not worth it.

Specifically, the funding relationship helps with effecting solutions to problems inherent to reconnecting twice uprooted persons. With modest one-year renewable grants, received directly from the offices of the British High Commission in Kingston, the NODM undertakes the following tasks:

  • Receive and welcome, at the island’s two international airports, with a firm handshake and later a hot Jamaican meal, deported migrants arriving from Britain, the US, and (less frequently) Canada.
  • Transport the arriving deported migrants (in groups or singly), in comfortable, air-conditioned Toyota bus (purchased with British funds), to family in Jamaica who are willing and able to take them in, or to a temporary shelter when no willing or able family is available.
  • Guide the recently deported through the maze of Jamaica government bureaucracy on matters of clearing through customs the modest but consequential “personal effects” they normally bring with them, and at securing documentation that re-certifies their Jamaican citizenship.
  • Give advice on and/or direct the deported to resources for earning (ideally) sustainable livelihoods.

Core to successful reintegration

A survey conducted in the summer of 2014 by Thomas-Hope (2014) asked 300 recent and not-so-recent deported migrants what key “things” they considered essential to successful reintegration into the Jamaican society. Three core responses surfaced, listed here in order of importance to the respondents:

  1. A less hostile, more accepting society, one that stigmatizes them less
  2. A decent place to live, and
  3. Means for sustainable livelihood.

The first of these responses might arguably be a precondition for fulfilment of the other two — which is the general assessment among the deported population. The first author of this article has seen on the ground in his work, however, standout cases in which making the most of Number 3 — the rare event of a known “deportee” being entrusted with a good job, or a “deportee-owned” business that’s doing well — has led to not only success at both Numbers 1 and 2, but also to high levels of rounded reintegration in the society.

We can conclude from this that making transformative reintegration of deported and other disenfranchised persons happen in countries like Jamaica is weighted in favour of opportunities for participatory inclusion in the matter of economic development. The traditional approach to development, which, in the “development industry” (Sumner and Tribe 2008) sees professionals, researchers, and aid institutions as the main actors, leaves much of the problem of exclusion untouched. More effective is the model aspired to by the NODM: one in which “intercessors” (or “reciprocal role-takers” [Deleuze 1989]) craft, with the stigmatised and the socially unemployable, new forms of industry. This involves creating an entrepreneurship ecosystem in which cooperative for-profit social businesses work across traditional boundaries to collaboratively solve social, economic, and environmental problems — such as hunger/food insecurity, homelessness, lack of income, ignorance, pollution, all of which have “long plagued humankind in particularly small and vulnerable societies” (Yunus ibid.; also Sachs 2006).

Clearly, to move projects of social and economic development forward, a replacement discourse and new forms of worker organisation are essential. For the latter, Holland (2011) reviews several contemporary instances of self-organising groups in which, rather than privileging hierarchical, bureaucratic forms, alternatives are based more on egalitarian, inclusive, and non-hierarchical principles. The principles are based, instead, on the dynamics of alternative management styles that are egalitarian and integrative (Parker Follet 1998).

The NODM is also heeding Unger’s (2004) suggestion to create community-managed rotating capital funds, from which loans for communal enterprises can be accessed and then paid back from future profits, making the funds self-sustaining. This speaks to a new sense of community, or of “becoming communities”; that is, communities becoming more open to the other, both symbolically and experientially (see, e.g., Agamban 1993; Fraser 2000, 1997; Nancy 1991; Woolford 2009), which is a component of the social change the NODM envisions. Here communities are not construed as constituted by rigid, exclusionary boundaries, but are open, flexible, fluid, and continuously in the process of becoming. Thus conceptualised, communities can become bases for engendering and cultivating financial as well as social capital. They also become bases for networking that provide mutual support and resources (Putnam 2000).

These and other reflections on post-modern conceptions of development have gone into the reasoning, and provided the motivation, for the NODM’s current and planned ventures into small, eco-friendly commercial farming — specifically in food crops, apiculture, and rabbit rearing. One project has engaged deported migrants in ground preparation, planting, maintenance, harvesting, and selling of carrots and Irish potatoes. Yet-to-be-realized profits from ongoing endeavours will be used for “collective leverage.” That is, to accumulate rotating funds while critically building autonomy and economic empowerment for the deported population, following paths set by, for example, the Ghana-based One Village Planet-Women’s Development Initiative, and under a “freedom farms” concept in the District of Columbia (in the US) — a cooperative micro enterprise initiative that seeks to transform ex-offenders into green industry entrepreneurs.

Conclusion

In aiming to meet the specific objective of reconnecting and reintegrating a disenfranchised population, initiatives like those undertaken by the National Organisation of Deported Migrants fulfil a keenly articulated goal of President Barack Obama’s US State Department: to foster in poor nations a type of entrepreneurship that is “rooted in optimism about the world as it could be, and willingness to cut through apathy to identify challenges and implement concrete creative solutions.” The vision is entrepreneurship that is not only a powerful means to tap into a people’s “creativity, innovation, and energy to promote job creation and economic growth, but [is] also a meaningful vehicle for empowerment” (US Department of State 2014).

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