This presentation was given as part of the seminar - ‘On the Move - Global Migrations, Challenges and Responses’ which took place in Oslo, Norway on October 26 2016. You can watch a recording of plenary sessions from the conference here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKuY3_ua-Qs The seminar was organized by the International Social Science Council (ISSC), CROP (Comparative Research Programme on Poverty) and Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, and generously sponsored by Research Council Norway, with support from the Norwegian UNESCO Committee. Each speaker is responsible for the ideas contained in his/her PowerPoint, which are not necessarily those of the organizing partners or sponsors.

1. Navigating US Deportation Regime:
Reflections on Agency and
Criminalization in the Experience of
Ecuadorian Indigenous Migrants.
Gioconda Herrera
FLACSO Ecuador
October 2016

2. Ecuadorian Migration to the USA:
2000-2016
50 years of masculine migration. Recent changes:
• From transnational connections to the “restrictive
turn”.
• From circular and temporal movments to
inmobility
• From men to women and children migration
• From undocumented to “illegal” and deportable.
• From deportability to deportation

3. Context
Great Recession (2008):
• Financial crisis ; Unemployment in construction sector and
other migrant labor niches such as textiles (outsourcing).
Restrictive migration policies:
• Securitization of the border (since 1996) – detention and
removals.
• Law reinforcement – detention and deportations.
Impacts on the social organization of migration:
• More violence at the Border
• Self policing and self control in everyday life.

4. Deportation policies in the US: from the
construction of illegality to the construction of
criminality
• Massive deportation: more resources, more
budget ,more detentions and more facilities
(detention centers).
• Selective deportation: “criminals” are deported
not “illegals”.
• Racial and gender construction: Latino and black
men (90% of deportees).
• Changes in Law increases categories of
irregularity. Minor infractions become criminal
offenses.

5. Literature on Deportation
• Golash Boza: neoliberalism, capitalism and
massive deportation.
• De Génova: Legislation, bureaucracies and
procedures create more vulnerable workers.
Deportability is disciplining workers.
• Boehms: impacts on everyday life (family
separations, loss of status, stress)
• Brotherton and Barrios: stigma in countries of
origin. New displacements.
Agency and vulnerability of deportation

6. The Construction of Deportability
How does illegality emerge in the social organization of migration?
The journey to the North: four to five countries . More contact with
transnational crime and detentions. Becoming “Illegal” and making
themselves invisible (Mexicans).
Settlements: new neighborhoods, scattered in the city. Weak family
networks.
Labor: permanent mobility (roofing, domestic work, nails)
Precarity and temporary jobs, movement from one place to another.

7. From Deportability to Deportation
Construction of criminality. Itineraries of detentions
from the beginning of migration
• Detentions at the Border
• Detentions while driving
• Fake driving license, alcohol consumption, street
violence.
• Accumulation of minor infractions
• Incarceration
• Deportation

8. Strategies
• Invisibility and self control : no driving, stay at
home, constant mobility.
• Legal paths: gender differences
• New York: more liberal context. Ecuadorian are
perceived as hard working and family men.
• Deportation against domestic violence and lack of
remmittances
• Minors (teenagers) sent back home for
disciplining purposes.

9. Conclusions
• Forced transnationalism
• New forms of transnational families that
intersect with issues of citizenship and gender.
Mixed families.
• Double vulnerability complementing each
other: labor and legal.
• Social construction of deportability and
deportees.