Deportation Stigma and Re-migration

“In contrast, for Afghani migrants in neighboring Iran or Pakistan who live under a constant threat of deportation, removal has become an accepted “occupational hazard” (Schuster & Majidi 2015, p. 646).”

“…in immigrant-producing societies want to maintain their fantasies that migration is a pathway to progress, then they are more likely to stigmatise deportees as failures than to attribute deportation to conditions in the country from which deportees were removed (Schuster and Majidi 2014).”

“Deportation forced much of the circulatory nature of Ali’s journey, as well as the journeys of other participants.(20) Furthermore, the recent deterioration in the situation of Afghans in Iran and Pakistan appears to have also triggered a particular kind of circularity migration pattern.”

“This was in large part due to the imagined embarrassment of returning empty-handed and the lack of prospects in their country of citizenship (see, e.g., Schuster & Majidi, 2015).”

“But, similar to other deportees (Drotbohm 2011; Peutz 2006; see also Drotbohm 2014; Schuster and Majidi 2014), deportation has the potential to expose them to the stigma associated with the unsuccessful migrant, as ‘home’ is also the place where their status as migrant workers is acknowledged,…”

“Like many others in the same situation (see also Schuster and Majidi 2013, 2015; Refugee Support Network 2016), he left Afghanistan again in search of a ‘better future’.”

“While deported migrants are often perceived as criminals and immoral and failed individuals (Zilberg 2004; Drotbohm 2011a; Schuster and Majidi 2014), the mistrust of persons related to deportees shows that the deportation-related stigma is not limited to the deported individual; it can ‘infect’…”

“Life in Nigeria after the deportation was not easy for Precious, who like many deported migrants faced the stigma of failure and contamination in her country of origin (Schuster and Majidi 2015).”

“Despite the lack of airport execution squads, migrants often return to situations worse than those that made them decide to leave, and some to violence (Whyte and Hirslund 2013; Scalettaris and Gubert 2019; Schuster and Majidi 2015).”

“Deportation can instead be the beginning of new plans to migrate be it in Asia, Africa, the Americas or Europe (Galvin 2015; Schuster and Majidi 2015; Majidi and Schuster 2019).”

“Research has long documented the stigma that returnees face when they fail to generate substantial resources for their families (Schuster & Majidi, 2015); however, the politicised ‘returnee’ label appears to have its silver linings.”

“In line with earlier studies on deportees (Brotherton and Barrios, 2009; Macías-Rojas, 2016; Schuster and Majidi, 2015) our research stresses the importance of penal subjectivities in unravelling the ‘crimmigration knot’.”

“Ethnographies of migrants’ removal show how shock, shame, anxiety and mental pressure are widespread among deportees and returnees (Drotbohm and Hasselberg 2015; Khosravi 2018; Schuster and Majidi 2015).”

“…different ways in which returnees depict themselves and the agency and political struggle involved in their self-narrations (see Fine and Walters 2022; Galvin 2015; Lecadet 2018; Sinatti 2019), including the ways they some-times hide their deportation status (Alpes 2012; Schuster and Majidi 2015).”

“Few other studies, including Kaytaz (2016) conducted on Afghan migrants in Iran and Turkey, show that deportation has caused circular migration, and the migrants were able to re-enter once deported (Schmeidl 2016; Schuster and Majidi 2015; Van Hear, Bakewell, and Long 2012).”

“Researchers have found that deportees experience stigmatization either because of the perception that their migration was a failure or due to the assumption that they must have done something wrong in order to be deported (Brotherton and Barrios 2011; Schuster and Majidi 2015).”

“Feelings of underachievement, shame and failure abound in the testimonies of returnees across multiple geographical settings (Hagan et al., 2019; Oeppen, 2013; Schuster & Majidi, 2015; Vathi & King, 2017).”

“As similarly described in deportation studies, former adventurers can convert their suffering into a new status defined by courage and fearlessness (Schuster and Majidi 2015, 643) and thereby recover and/or reinvent their masculinities.”

“The stigma associated with homecoming is well documented and known (e.g., Alpes, 2017; Schuster & Majidi, 2015).”

“…such as legal reforms producing deportability, arrests, detention, attempts to motivate returns, negotiations with receiving countries, political discourse and contestation, as well as the social and physical life (or death) awaiting after expulsion (cf. Schuster and Majidi 2015; Majidi 2017).”

“The forced temporariness of the migration experience creates several challenges in return, which has been well documented in the literature (Golash-Boza 2014; Schuster and Majidi 2015; Khosravi 2021).”

“What these examples also demonstrate is how young people make sense of and respond to such precarity with their own counter tactics (Allsopp and Chase 2014; Schuster and Majidi 2014).”

“…i.e. a failure to return with capital to invest in the home community and to repay debts, and a failure to enable other family members to migrate, as well as the suspicion that, having been deported, an individual must have committed criminal acts (Schuster and Majidi, 2015, pp. 640 – 641).”

“…2011); how immigration law produces “illegalities” and “deportability” (De Genova, 2002; De Genova and Peutz, 2010); the geopolitics and infrastructures underpinning deportation (Cassarino, 2014; Collyer, 2012); and what happens after deportation (cf. Schuster and Majidi 2015; Khosravi 2018).”

“…the often-limited success of these repatriation programmes as migration management solutions, shown in poor reintegration results and re-emigration (Schuster and Majidi, 2015), suggests that there is a need for a better understanding of the lived experiences of (return) migrants, in order to…”

“A further alarming dimension of refugee flows is that even unsuccessful asylum-seekers who have been returned involuntarily to Afghanistan are prone to leave again as soon as they can (Schuster & Majidi, 2013, 2015).”

“Several studies interpreted the influence of the mode of return by highlighting the stigma and reversal of lives (Drotbohm 2015) attached to a forced return (Drotbohm 2015; Miller 2012; Schuster and Majidi 2015).”

“…is indexed in relation to specific spatial geographies, localised mobility infrastructures, perceived state capacity and interest, sociocultural identities of class, religion, gender, caste, race and, equally crucially, the planning of future trajectories (Galvin 2015; Schuster and Majidi 2015).”

“The approach also answers the call for connecting “the different stages of the journey” (Schuster & Majidi 2015: 648) in deportation studies.”

“Third, some return migrants could not be interviewed because they refused an interview, were untraceable or had already re-emigrated (see Schuster and Majidi 2015).”

“Others have examined de-ported migrants’ efforts to return to countries from which they were removed (Roberts et al. 2017; Schuster and Majidi 2013, 2015), high-lighting how, for many migrants, deportation and return intersect with family disruption, often separating loved ones across borders or…”

“…(Dumon, 1986), securing employment, accessing social services (Ndreka, 2021), and facing stigma or discrimination can hinder the ability of return migrants to improve their economic conditions, especially for those who return due to perceived failure outside the region (schuster & Majidi, 2015).”

“Studies of returnees to Afghanistan show that family may turn their backs on the returnee, especially when their return is stigmatized as in the case of deportation (Schuster and Majidi 2015).”

“While I do not know if Meraj made the journey again, deportation is not an automatic deterrence (Drotbohm and Hasselberg 2015; Schuster and Majidi 2014).”

“In the case of migrants, their stigmas seem instead to be very entrenched and almost impossible to eliminate, the first of which is their irregular situation, which aggravates the way they are looked at (61).”

“…with global political insecurities concerning state sovereignty, whilst the securitisation of migration expanded further afield (Coutin 2015; Bleichmar 1999; Drotbohm 2014; Drotbohm and Hasselberg 2014; Galvin 2014; Hasselberg 2014; Kanstroom 2000, 2012; Schuster and Majidi 2014; Walters 2002).”

“The stigma and shame of returning home empty-handed, equated with moral and social failure, drive many migrants to endure exploitative conditions abroad rather than face the disgrace within their communities (Schuster and Majidi 2015; Scalettaris et al. 2021: 521).”

“It‑Alls’: Exploring Strategies… Somaliland experience gendered stigmas, similar in part to what has been discussed in previous research as a ‘stigma of contamination’ (Schuster & Majidi, 2015).”

“On the one hand, this allows maintaining respect for oneself as well as the broader family, not giving reason for the broader village surrounding for “punishing those who have failed” (Schuster & Majidi, 2015, p. 648).”

“…2015; Sánchez Garcia and Hamann 2017; Vargas Valle and Ortiz Rangel 2019); and third, social stigma related to assumptions of criminality and deporta-tion upon migration to Mexico following time spent in the United States (Anderson 2015; Schuster and Majidi 2015; Zúñiga and Hamann 2015, 2020).”

“…that migrants from Africa return to their countries of origin voluntarily or forcibly in diverse circumstances such as assisted voluntary return, deportation, family reunion, health issues, and investment purposes, among other reasons (Awumbila, Teye, and Yaro, 2019; Schuster and Majidi, 2020).”

“Drawing on Goffman’s [45] concept of stigma, Schuster and Majidi [46] argue that in the context of Afghan deportees, families and communities often stigmatize those who challenge the idealized image of migration destinations as lands of opportunity, “preferring to believe only those who are lazy,…”

“This dynamic illustrates what scholars of forced migration describe as ‘choiceless decisions’, where agency is reduced to negotiating the terms of a predetermined outcome (Schuster and Majidi 2015).”

“This includes deportation stigma (Drotbohm 2011; Schuster and Majidi 2013; 2015; Schultz 2021), stigma after return of retirement (Miah, Rasel, and King 2025), failure stigma for young labour migrants (Dako-Gyeke 2016), stigma regarding prostitution (Adeyinka, Lietaert, and Derluyn 2023), and…”

“Anecdotal evidence suggests that migrants face stigma when returning their communities ‘empty handed’ (Schuster and Majidi 2015).”

“The shared experience of expulsion from the U.S., coupled with the subsequent challenges of reintegration into Mexican society, forges an almost immediate sense of kinship among the returnees (Schuster & Majidi, 2015).”

“…opportunities on return, are unable to continue supporting their kin and, from previously being providers, become dependent on them (e.g. Bob-Milliar 2012; De Genova 2018; Drotbohm 2015; Khosravi 2018a; Kleist 2018; Kleist and Bob-Milliar 2013; Schuster and Majidi 2015; Sørensen 2010).”

“This is in line with findings by Schuster and Majidi (2015), which indicated that supporting each other as a group helped the stigmatised to somehow engage in a process of reversing the stigma and offsetting the negative label by talking about how they are characterised.”

“In this regard, Schuster and Majidi (2015) asserted that with every regime change, some Afghans returned, while others departed to neighboring countries.”