Banishment

Abstract

Banishment concludes the keyword discussion by arguing that we can understand the exclusionary practices of welfare states as a politics of destitution, which ultimately leads to the banishment of unwanted individuals. It argues that banishment can be helpful as a conceptual lens through which to understand the purposeful strategies that render individuals deportable, whether citizens or non-citizens.

Introduction

In light of the ongoing multiplication of borders and bordering practices (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013), there is growing scholarly interest in how we might understand connections between the different practices of displacement that operate both inside and outside the nation-state. Such practices include the deprivation and deportation of irregularised populations (De Genova and Peutz, 2010), the eviction and expulsion of European citizens (e.g., mobile Roma) due to their poverty and racialised status, the generalised criminalisation of homelessness and poverty that targets citizens and non-citizens alike (Herring, 2021), the use of exclusionary local-level instruments such as site-specific begging bans that restrict marginalised people's access to urban spaces (Pailli and Simoni, 2016), as well as the socio-political marginalisation of those dependent on welfare (Fletcher and Flint, 2018), especially faced by those without citizenship.

Several theoretical concepts have been put forward to denote the socio-political, spatial, economic, and legal differentiation that drive certain populations, such as the ‘poor’ and/or migrants, out of state responsibility and state territory, including displaceability (Yiftachel, 2020), evictability (Van Baar, 2017), expulsions (Sassen, 2014), practices of illegalisation and deportability (De Genova and Roy, 2020), and racial banishment (Roy, 2019). These concepts already hint towards intersectional discrimination (Crenshaw, 2017; Hooks, 1982), namely between migration status and various other aspects, such as class (or poverty and welfare dependency) race, and gender. Exclusion and marginalisation reflect the restrictive political goals of many European states concerning migration and welfare. To achieve such goals, states resort to a plethora of actions, including expanding state policies of socio-spatial and mobility control beyond indirect strategies of deterrence (e.g., by reducing access to space and resources) and turn increasingly towards ways to remove unwanted subjects through containment, detention, expulsion and ‘self-deportation’ (Park, 2019) without formally deporting those targeted.

Given these political shifts and discourses, we wish to turn our gaze towards the concept of banishment and explore its potential for a deepened analysis of the above-mentioned strategies and their potential effects and consequences, in the hope of enabling resistance and promoting imaginations of a future not defined by capitalist, patriarchal, and racist exploitation (Sheehy and Nayak, 2020). We aim to tie in works that discuss banishment related to poverty and social marginalisation with works that discuss banishment in the context of crime and migration control beyond the realm of asylum governance to better understand the role of forced displacement within the nexus of social, urban, and migration policy.

Genealogies of banishment

Banishment has its roots in old Latin, German, and French (banir), defined as being ‘proclaimed as an outlaw’ (Online Etymology Dictionary 2017). Historically, banishment has often been an administrative punishment, and thus devoid of formal charges or opportunities to defend oneself in court (see Badat, 2013). In Roman and medieval Europe, it maintained a class component, allowing the wealthy convicted of serious crimes to choose whether to be killed or exiled (and thus able to travel, do business, and have the prospect of potentially returning, see Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939). In contrast, early modern (16th and seventeenth century) poor laws used banishment as a means of control directed specifically towards ‘the poor’ who were generally required to stay within their ‘home’ parish or city. Banishment served as a measure to forcefully return those who strayed and thus cement parish responsibility for ‘their own poor’ and not only ‘protect’ better-off parishes against an influx of paupers (Beier and Ocobock, 2014). Individuals ‘labelled’ as ‘gypsies’ or with other racialised terms were particularly affected by exclusion in the context of poor laws (Lucassen et al., 1998). An increasing differentiation between groups defined as deviant in the modern period allowed for their identification and stigmatisation (e.g., the subjects of mental asylums, see Foucault, 1995). This early example of categorisation of ‘unwanted groups’, over which political negotiations took place, established power hierarchies within and between governments that attempted to reduce the perceived burden or threat of such groups.

As part of their colonial expansion, European states used banishment to ship unwanted populations to their colonies (e.g., the prison population from the United Kingdom to Australia) with the idea of elevating living standards ‘at home’ (Beckett and Herbert, 2010). Today's attempts to close off the European Union from migrants arriving, e.g., in boats are a continuation of those colonial practices and follow a similar rhetoric: keeping those unwanted out. Such efforts equally share links with older state-sponsored projects of emigration targeting the poor, as well as attempts to reduce the arrival of potentially ‘needy’ non-citizens. In the early 1900s, it was not uncommon for Swedish or Swiss municipalities to pay for itinerant families or poor farmers to emigrate abroad so that they would not be a ‘burden’ on the local community (Ericsson, 2015; Leimgruber et al., 2013). Tendayi Achiume (2019) examines how the consolidation of European nation-states was intrinsically linked with their colonial projects, which involved the migration of – what would nowadays be called – European economic migrants to improve their own economic wellbeing and that of their colonial states through practices of extraction, dispossession, and the exclusion of indigenous populations. Today, previously colonised subjects are ‘illegalised’ by European states and their racialised border regimes (Lemberg-Pedersen et al., 2022) as well as subjected to practices of ‘banishment’ within European states. Exile, banishment, poor policy, the transportation of convicts and political exiles, expulsion, deportation, and migration share a common genealogy linked to the state's power to govern unwanted (non-)citizens (Bleichmar, 1999; Gray, 2011; Kingston, 2005). Evolving from these historical developments, today we see banishment as ‘predicated on the formation of geographies of privilege and disadvantage that cut across the divides of our modernity – East-West, North-South […] proliferating geographies of disadvantage (for citizens, firms, districts) internal to a country’ (Sassen, 2018: 231).

While historically rooted in notions of exile and deportation, the term banishment is nowadays linked to denationalisation (Gibney, 2019; Mantu, 2015) and colonial violence (Shahid and Turner, 2022). In these contexts, banishment is a formal punishment that involves the loss of citizenship or rights (Macklin, 2014) and the consequent loss of privileges associated with membership, leading to expulsion (Gibney, 2019: 279). Legal banishment through denationalisation is a statistically marginal phenomenon in the European context, although it is increasing as a result of the global war on terror (Macklin, 2018; Mantu, 2018). Crucially, denationalisation is a powerfully symbolic form of punishment that speaks to the state's ability to exclude individuals from the community of citizens by depriving them of status and rights (see keyword ‘Citizenship’). Once transformed into foreigners, these individuals become expellable and are routinely deprived of their right to re-enter the country. Most of those subjected to such measures are Muslim men and many are officially categorized as having “migration background”, reflecting a gendered and racialized logic of suspicion (Choudhury, 2017; see keyword ‘Suspicion and Surveillance’). This extreme form of punishment can be read as a banishment practice based on intersectional discrimination and a (racialised) neoliberalism with far-reaching legal, political, social, and spatial effects that transform the deprived citizen into an extremely vulnerable individual resembling ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998).

Urban and social policy research proposes a broader understanding of banishment as comprising different exclusionary and punitive techniques that ‘are sometimes used to limit the mobility and rights of those whose principal “offence” consists of being poor, homeless, and/or of color’ (Beckett and Herbert, 2010: 34). The infamous Danish ghetto laws, designed to enforce ‘social mixing’ through the demolition and redevelopment of stigmatised neighbourhoods and the targeted evictions of low-income and racialised households, are a case in point, as is the proliferation and widespread use of various forms of local-level begging bans (ruled against in Lăcătuş v. Switzerland [2021] European Court of Human Rights, case no. 14065/15) and other exclusion orders affecting street-homeless people and other marginalised urban dwellers, often of Roma decent. Such forms of displacement are justified by advancing negative images that problematise the visibility of certain categories of people in public spaces and elsewhere (Piñeiro et al., 2022). They rely on the exclusion of the socially marginal from urban spaces in the name of ‘order’ and ‘civility’ (Herbert and Beckett, 2017) as well as on the practices of urban segregation (Crane et al., 2020) and gentrification (Roy, 2017). As Ananya Roy (2017) argues, banishment – and specifically racial banishment – is foundational to impoverishment in that it rests upon and entrenches historically rooted dispossession.

We wish to bring these diverse understandings of banishment together. Rather than delivering a final definition of banishment, we aim to explore its ability to trace how socio-political and legal attempts to restrict the mobility of vulnerable populations – specifically non-citizens (outside of asylum law) – contain them and render them removable from various spaces, including state territories. First, in contrast to exclusion and marginalisation, which can have many faces but also come about indirectly, we argue that the concept of banishment better captures certain policies and practices of socio-spatial control used as a purposeful governing strategy to push people around and out or to incentivise movement away from a state's territory. This extends beyond criminal punishment, relying on administrative and police power. Second, we argue that such purposeful banishment often includes many ‘in-between’ steps towards irregularisation, finally rendering people deportable (De Genova, 2002). Using the notion of banishment, we can identify and explore the incremental mechanisms that create an unsupportable environment. Finally, the concept allows us and readers to discuss governance mechanisms and practices concerning different categories of members in society, more specifically the ‘poor’ and ‘migrants’ (see Anderson, 2013), hence exposing an intersection of class, race, gender, ethnicity, and religious identity, that together with an unstable legal residence status, leave individuals in precarious socio-political and legal positions.

Moreover, banishment allows us to discuss continuity, contagion, and interlinkages between practices belonging to different policy fields that coalesce and ban those who are considered a burden or a threat. By making visible the common denominators of cutbacks and austerity politics on the one hand and the deportation regime on the other, we support theoretical and practical alliances between migrants and non-migrants, and new forms of activism (see Sheehy and Nayak, 2020).

Social policies at the intersection with migration law

States can enact banishment through political ignorance, indifference, and inaction (Davies et al., 2017; Herzfeld, 1992), rendering individuals socially and economically destitute in the hope that they will be forced to leave and vanish from public sight or presenting them as public threats in a way that mobilises further exclusionary policies (Khosravi, 2009). Banishment is often implemented by a mix of state and non-state actors (e.g., through state-given mandates) that become partners in an all-encompassing regime of social control that stretches the public-private divide (Piñeiro et al., 2022; Super, 2020). Compared to ‘exclusion’, which refers to a broad variety of practices that prevent access to territory, rights, and participation (Achermann, 2013), banishment enables a concentrated focus on the violent and punitive function of displacement and dispossession linked to its historical genealogy (Walters, 2002). To govern ‘undesired’ populations in the past and present, states rely on social, legal, spatial, and temporal forms of banishment, ultimately aiming to remove or contain individuals, making banishment a purposeful act.

While citizenship deprivation and the formal resolution of ties between individuals and society are reserved for the ‘most’ delinquent among citizens (Mantu, 2018; Walters, 2002), poor migrants face equally devastating forms of banishment (Piñeiro et al., 2022). In Western states, civic, economic, and social rights are increasingly stratified along residence and migration status (Ataç and Rosenberger, 2018; Morris, 2003). For migrants, the ‘category’ they are assigned is crucial (Sainsbury, 2012), since only those who have the ‘right status’ according to migration or other linked authorities are, for example, entitled to social benefits. Diverse literature has pointed to discrimination against women in this context (Yuval-Davis et al., 2005; see keyword ‘Social Solidarity and Deservingness’). ‘Illegal’ migrants and rejected asylum seekers are among the most precarious categories of people that states try to govern through a plethora of intersecting laws. In several countries, the interplay between different legal areas has escalated since 2015 in particular and has taken on aggressive expressions. Examples from Sweden include a state-border police raid of a summer camp organised by the Church and attended by irregularised families (Lind, 2019), and the provision of residential addresses of 200 undocumented families by social services at the request of the state-border police (Lundberg et al., 2018). Moreover, the Swedish regulations applicable in the field of social law exclude increasing numbers of migrants from financial assistance (Lundberg and Kjellbom, 2021). In the case of irregularised migrants, this goes further and includes emergency aid as well. This can be taken as an example of banishment through destitution (cf. Nordling and Persdotter, 2021). Other Swedish examples of banishment encompass municipalities refusing to accommodate newly arrived migrants (Jansson-Keshavarz and Nordling, 2022).

However, legal status is not the only marker of difference that triggers restrictive practices. The regulation of free movement within the European Union (EU) and the case of ‘poor’ and ‘unwanted’ EU citizens highlights how social status – or ‘poverty’ – functions as a selection mechanism to sort out those who are entitled to move within the EU. While EU citizens enjoy broad rights on paper, research shows that their engagement with the welfare state renders them visible to both migration and welfare authorities: the former retrospectively assess their right to reside, while the latter screen their eligibility for support. Where poor EU migrants are entitled to support, the receipt of welfare claims can nonetheless lead to expulsion since migration authorities may interpret a welfare application as a failure to meet the criteria of ‘sufficient resources’ or ‘integration’ for maintaining residence status (Borrelli et al., 2021; Kramer and Heindlmaier, 2021). The intersection of migration and welfare policies brings forward inconsistencies and creates the conditions for a ‘schizophrenic welfare state’ (Lafleur and Mescoli, 2018). Being socio-politically entitled to support but disallowed by restrictive migration policies undoes prior integration measures since the award of welfare can lead to deportation. Furthermore, welfare provision can be an explicit instrument of banishment insofar as it can be linked to – and conditioned by – voluntary return – and hence ‘becomes a stick as well as a carrot’ (Ataç and Rosenberger, 2018: 4), such as the recently introduced transitional assistance for EU migrants in Germany.

Reminiscent of historical policies seeking to immobilise the poor and of policies that paid the poor to ‘emigrate’ (Beckett and Herbert, 2010), impoverishment is punished with potential banishment and has legal, social and spatial consequences. Alternatives to the expulsion of unwanted EU citizens, be they petty criminals, unemployed, or destitute, have been considered in the Netherlands (Mantu et al., 2021). To deny EU citizens’ rights, the Dutch authorities must mobilise resources and ensure that the safeguards prescribed by EU law have been satisfied, which creates obligations and imposes a higher standard of assessment than in national law (see Directive 2004/38). Creating alternatives such as funding NGO-sponsored return programmes for EU citizens is probably cheaper and more effective than enforcing return and has the advantage, from the perspective of the authorities, of not clogging up the administrative or judicial systems (Mantu et al., 2021; Van Baar, 2017). Return programmes indicate a strategic and integrated approach to EU mobility that relies on the cooperation of various central and local authorities from different departments (immigration, police, public health services, etc.) with a view to deciding on the legality of the residence of the EU citizen concerned, followed by a decision to leave the Netherlands (Kramer, 2017). The Dutch government has explored the possibility of tightening the rules around social assistance to ensure that no benefits are paid out where doubts exist as to the legality of the residence, supporting our above-mentioned argument for the need to explore migration control as a tool of social policy and vice versa.

Another example of banishment can be found in the United Kingdom's Vagrancy Act of 1824 that partially still remains in force and makes it a criminal offence to sleep rough or beg in England or Wales; often targeting EU migrants via further policy amendments, e.g., in the Immigration Rules (see Morgan, 2022; also Zhao, 2021 on Switzerland). Under UK law, rough sleeping and begging are punishable offences that permit authorities to physically remove, arrest, imprison, terminate residence, and ultimately expel (see Piñeiro et al., 2022 on Swiss containment and exclusion policies), even though some of those targeted individuals enjoyed a right to reside as EU workers or self-employed. According to Matthew Evans, the United Kingdom was the first and only EU member state trying to use the abuse of law doctrine as a means of ‘social control’ and to specifically target EU nationals (Evans, 2020: 309). As a result of a policy introduced by the Home Office in 2016, EU nationals that were encountered sleeping rough were removed (voluntarily or enforced), again much resembling 16–seventeenth-century ‘poor policies’ (Herbert and Beckett, 2017), also underscoring a classed and racialised (see also Lăcătuş v. Switzerland 2021) neoliberal state logic interested in profitability. The UK High Court eventually declared the policy to be unlawful and discriminatory (Evans, 2020), yet the framing of ‘abuse’ of the right of freedom of movement was only slightly amended to a ‘misuse’ to reduce a generalised application of the policy. The UK authorities thus continue to view rough sleeping as a deliberate behaviour that is socially and economically harmful. Moreover, they consider that it damages the reputation of central London areas as tourist destinations, adversely impacting amenities, which led to an increase in public spending to manage the problems caused by rough sleepers (Evans, 2020). This example highlights how banishment practices target migrants with various legal statuses (Piñeiro et al., 2022) who become visible due to their precarious living conditions.

Banishment and intersectionality

Directing our gaze to the intersection of migration and social policies through banishment uncovers how destitution is used in areas where states have little to no legal tools to deport, opting instead to restrict access to social rights to promote return. The bordering of welfare states involves the exclusion of perceived ‘others’ and ‘outsiders’ (Barker, 2017 on Sweden and their approach to EU Roma). Swiss and French authorities routinely attempt to evict, detain, or expel the homeless or EU Roma populations (Basilien-Gainche, 2020; Zhao, 2021), understood as threats to the welfare system or public order (Vrăbiescu, 2019). In France, a law introduced to fight terrorism allowed EU Roma to be legally banned from re-entering France for three years. The so-called 2010 ‘Roma affair’ saw the French authorities systematically dismantle Roma settlements to return their inhabitants to their states of origin (physically banishing them from state territory) and was publicly criticised by various European institutions (Gehring, 2013; O’Nions, 2011). Nevertheless, banishment continues, made possible by a wide legal definition of the notion of ‘public order’ that can cover good order, public security, salubrity, and quietness as an illustration of the convergence of popular tropes about the poor, dirty, disruptive, and criminal ‘other’ into legal rules (cf. Anderson, 2019), coupled with a broad definition of being an ‘unreasonable burden’ to the welfare system (Heindlmaier, 2020). Swedish public authorities have similarly mobilised public order law and municipal ordinances to control and limit how migrant Roma access and use public spaces for securing shelter and livelihoods, thus deliberately making it difficult for impoverished EU citizens who are exercising their right to freedom of movement to remain in Sweden (Persdotter, 2019). It is through the intersection of the discrimination grounds of ethnicity, class and migration status, that racialised neoliberal state practices manifest. The ‘crime’ committed by the Roma is that they are poor and experience difficulty entering the French and Swedish labour and housing markets due to discrimination, in turn forcing them into precarious jobs and living arrangements. While in theory, EU Roma should be protected against executive abuse considering their status as EU citizens, in practice EU citizenship fails to prevent their discrimination. Banishment is therefore intersectional, exposing a bordered banishment and targeting non-citizens who are deemed an economic burden or undesirable, if too visible. Taking an intersectional lens of banishment thus exposes the fragmented displacement that targets a broad yet very specific range of non-citizens.

We emphasise the persistence of a (neo)colonial government of racialised persons (Achiume, 2019) which fuses pre-existing colonial discourse with contradictory images of the ‘other’ (Bhabha, 1985). Moreover, constructions of persons suitable for banishment rely inter alia on the depiction ‘of “uncivilized” gender relations of oppressive masculinity and excessive femininity’ among migrants: while the ‘Good Citizen, the non-citizen, and the Failed Citizen are male’, the ‘“wife” is necessary but subordinated to the Good Citizen’, a ‘victim of trafficking’, a potential ‘forced bride’ on the one hand but also a ‘welfare parasite’ on the other (Anderson, 2013: 7; see also keyword ‘Suspicion and Surveillance’). Thereby, racialised and gendered banishment may draw on a depiction of the male migrant as a ‘criminal’ and the female migrant as a ‘welfare fraudster’, resembling the US debate on ‘welfare queens’ (Hayden Foster, 2017) relying on ‘anchor babies’ to access official social welfare policies (see Ryan, 2004 on Irish nationality law abandoning jus soli). Migrant women are pigeonholed as racially gendered and/or vulnerable subjects, while both depictions deny agency to challenge the insubordinate position to which they are relegated.

Altogether, the examples show how (intersectional) banishment functions as a tool to make life as uncomfortable as possible, making individuals (in)visible by withdrawing support and reducing the legal difference between non-citizens when it comes to the goal of reducing migration. While states previously removed persons, there is a tendency nowadays to instead push persons into destitution (Lundberg, 2020) so that they ‘self-deport’ (Park, 2019), or are produced as an exploitable labour force (Tuckett, 2015; see keyword ‘Welfare Governance’). Even if migrants are ultimately not removed, the threat may have severe consequences for their everyday lives and self-understandings, bringing them into even more precarious situations and pushing them to ‘illegalist practices’ (Foucault, 1995; Le Courant, 2020; Lowndes and Madziva, 2016).

Conclusion

This section proposes a deeper investigation of the term banishment, which can function as a lens through which to understand the historical emergence and contemporary forms of control strategies used by states to govern ‘undesired’ populations. Such strategies include confining and expelling them or pushing them to or beyond the social, legal, and territorial margins of society. We have illustrated how states use banishing techniques, which encompass deportation or the threat thereof, incarceration, evictions, ghettoization, and social exclusion, to govern a broad range of groups. While formally governed under different laws and provided with promises of some protection, susceptibility to banishment for these groups is structured along the lines of class, race, nationality, gender, sexuality, health, and age (of which we have discussed only some). There have been repeated calls within critical studies to explore intersecting forms of oppression, such as the call to ‘de-migranticise’ migration research (Dahinden, 2016), yet there have been few cross-disciplinary efforts to do so. To fill this gap, we have brought forward how banishment, by following a logic of racialized neoliberalism, encompasses different approaches that address (and often advance) social marginality and destituion. Our focus on the purposeful exclusion of unwanted individuals is, as we see it, one important step in working against the above developments, which involves protesting as well as other resistance strategies, such as refusing to meet the coloniser's demands and disobeying in hidden ways via ‘sly civility’ (Bhabha, 1985). A look at resistance strategies that contest the increased conditionality of immigration policy along a migration-welfare nexus discloses how (migrant) activist groups contest restrictions through more systemic critiques, seeking to expose oppressive power relations within social policy and migration law, as well as racialised profit-seeking, though launching grassroots campaigns (Vickers, 2020). Broad alliances may resist productively and do not need to stay powerless (Sheehy and Nayak, 2020).