Infrastructures of Expulsion: Migrant Policing and Deportation in Urban India

Amidst global expansions in policing aimed at the detection, detention, and deportation of so called “illegal” migrants, my project aims to examine the substantial human and institutional costs of policing in practice. Taking the under-explored case of India, my project addresses a central, and enduring, paradox in migration regulation: Why, despite the proliferation of increasingly stringent forms and modes of migrant policing, do state anxieties regarding the detection and deportation of “illegal” migrants continue to thrive? My project proposes that such a paradox stems from the contingent stitching together of different forms of policing – social, material, and biometric – that involve a range of formal and informal actors, spaces, and processes in unpredictable ways. Empirically situated in Delhi, the project asks: How do diverse social, material, and biometric policing forms assemble to constitute the infrastructure of migrant deportation? What is the impact(s) of such deportation infrastructures on differently racialized migrant populations, in this case African migrants and Bengali South Asian migrants? How do such deportation infrastructures cohere and contest enactments of state sovereignty?
India hosts nearly 5.2 million migrants, mostly from South Asian countries such as Bangladesh and, to a lesser extent, African countries such as Nigeria. In addition to legislation and border enforcement, the regulation of “illegal” migrants is enacted through different modes of policing: social policing such as informal vigilance and surveillance networks, material policing such as checking of birth certificates and passports, and biometric policing such as the issuing of national identity Aadhaar numbers, through which diverse subjects are sought to be rendered legible. Yet, despite such expansive policing, ambiguities continue to plague the identification, detection, and deportation of “illegal” migrants. In part, these ambiguities stem from questions of identity, with domestic Bengali migrants sharing ethnolinguistic similarity with cross-border migrants from Bangladesh. In addition, the difficulties in verifying documents that are prone to counterfeit production, such as visas issued to African migrants, the ambivalence of the Aadhaar identifier, and the everyday relations of bribes and patronage between migrants and street-level police actors demonstrate how the state’s ideological claim to expulsion is negotiated and challenged. Against this background, my project conceptualizes the dis/connections between such varied policing forms as infrastructures of expulsion; the goal is to discover how their uneven intermeshing produces both violence in the everyday life of subject populations as well as ambiguity for the state.
The project employs ethnography, participant observation, and interviews to document everyday practices of deportation policing in Delhi’s residential neighbourhoods, police stations, and detention centres and the impact this policing has on African and South Asian migrants. In this way, the project seeks to explore the interdependencies and tensions between “old” policing technologies (material documents, visas) and “new” ones (biometric identity cards) in the production of new forms of governmentality and subjectification for differentially racialized subjects, thus contributing to debates on the emerging connections between datafication, deportation and state power.