Between the excessive and the effective The everyday life of the Israeli deportation regime

This dissertation, a study ‘up’ of Israeli powers of immigration enforcement, offers a contribution to an evolving body of work focusing on the state’s forces of immigration management, rather than on the migrants themselves and their personal stories. It seeks to shift the focus back to the state and the formation of its forces of coercion and exclusion projected at irregularised migrants. Immigration enforcement in Israel is rooted in the state’s relatively short and unique history as well as within its colonial present and the occupation of the Palestinian Territories. In Israel, where the settler-colonial context is linked with a siege mentality and national anxieties about the loss of the state’s Jewish character, immigration enforcement becomes a powerful mechanism of state building, governance and internal expansion. This dissertation illustrates the creation of Israel’s immigration enforcement implementation surplus and the expansive translation of immigration enforcement policies into acts of deportation and exclusion. It does so on the basis of extensive fieldwork conducted among Israel’s immigration enforcement agencies as well as with various immigration-related non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
The empirical work guides the reader through state agencies such as the Israeli Population, Immigration and Border Authority, the Israeli Prison Service and the Refugee Status Determination Unit, with a focus on the translation of immigration policies into expansive enforcement in the form of deportation and exclusion. It continues by surveying the work of non-state, immigration-related organisations such as pro-immigration human rights NGOs as well as far right, anti-immigration activists, their pro-deportation legal and lobbying work and their agency in the Israeli Parliament. The conclusions arising from this dissertation expand our understanding of immigration enforcement within the broader international context, portraying migration management as a state-making mechanism, rather than linking it with a refugee ‘crisis’.