Deporting Diaspora's Future? Forced Transnationalism and Generational Conflicts in the Haitian Community of Montreal

INTRODUCTION Several years ago while carrying out research in rural Haiti about the life perspectives of local youth (1), I observed for the first time that the deportation of delinquent young Haitians by the US-American or Canadian governments constituted a significant part of the public debate. In the Haitian villages these deporte, furnished with the stigma of expulsion, were both admired and scorned as they were associated with issues of familial neglect, urban violence and organised crime. These recent phenomena were thought to come to Haiti from the outside and would eventually precipitate its ruin. In Haiti these deportees were the prototype of the failed migrant, people, who passed up the chance of successful emigration--the dream of many Haitians--and who, after their return to Haiti, lived the lives of restless bandits. Some years later, during anthropological fieldwork among Haitian migrants in the Canadian city of Montreal, I came across the same issue. (2) In regular intervals the Haitian community (3) lived fervid debates about the practice of the Canadian government to deport delinquent Haitians back to Haiti. The following analysis will centre on this association of threatened or real deportation with the younger generations. While according to US-American and Canadian law, no immigrant under the age of 21 may be transported back to his or her home country, many of those migrants who get into trouble with the law are young, and are perceived as the youthful offspring of the migrant community. A particular theme in the local debate on this issue was that the government at times failed to differentiate between those young Haitians, who had only come in Canada a few months or years ago, and those, who had arrived in Canada as small children, who had spent their formative years in the country and who simply had failed to apply for Canadian citizenship. When discussing deportation, the migrant community not only dealt with the futures and destinies of its own offspring, but also discussed questions of nationhood, citizenship and migrant's belonging in a transnational environment. The expulsion of delinquent non-citizens back to their respective countries of origin by the target countries of international migration routes constitutes worldwide a growing and complex phenomenon. In many cases those who are expelled once emigrated together with their parents and spent their childhood and adolescence in the multicultural environment of western cities. Be it the USA, Canada, France, Germany or elsewhere, it is no secret that segmented integration (Waters 1999) can result in structural discrimination and in limited chances for upward mobility; youth-specific crimes, such as drug abuse, thefts or robberies, but also gang rivalries and violence, occur frequently in this social context. And many of these adolescents do not realise that their status of 'permanent residency' is conditional and that conflicts with the law can result in the loss of residency status and eventually deportation--to a country that they hardly know, if at all. However, the initiating and driving force behind the deportation wave are not necessarily, as in the case to be presented here, the state authorities of the host countries reacting to youth delinquency. Frequently parents themselves send their children back. When a family recognises that one of its members regularly gets in conflict with the law, often they decide--in agreement with the youth concerned or not--on a 'voluntary' return, in order to forestall eventual official measures and maintain freedom of travel rights. From a longer stay in the home country and the involving inculcation with traditional norms and values they also hope to realise a change in behaviour. While the criminalisation of immigrants and refugees has been an important trend in the last several decades, research has shown that the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath have resulted in a considerable increase in reliance on deportation by many western states; anti-terror-measures resulted in a more restrictive reformulation of laws as well as the extension of laws for national security (Mitchell 2004, Pratt 2005). …

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