ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at migrant decision-making in relation to individual and collective perceptions of deportations in an emigration context, such as Anglophone Cameroon. With this focus, the chapter contributes to one of the volume’s broader questions, of how life trajectories and expectations are shaped by border policies. By focusing on forced rather than voluntary returns, the chapter broadens the volume’s view of return trajectories and highlights the importance of trust in information for migrant actors’ interpretations and choices. In view of the dominant opinion in the policy domain that high deportation rates are likely to discourage people from wanting to migrate, the chapter asks how the direct or indirect experience of a forced return influences people’s migration aspirations and expectations. Based on ethnographic material and life stories of deported migrants gathered over the span of 17 months between 2007 and 2016 in Anglophone Cameroon, the chapter relates understandings of deportation in Anglophone Cameroon to normative assumptions within migration policy in western Europe. Migrant decision-making is not put on hold by direct or indirect experiences with deportations, because local bushfalling narratives explain the potential success and failure of a migration trajectory beyond questions of legality and illegality.
