ABSTRACT
In Mimi Thi Nguyen’s theory of “the gift of freedom,” the refugee is a figure who is given a gift by the logic of liberal empire that they cannot repay: thus ensnared in a feeling of perpetual indebtedness that organizes forms of refugee patriotism – as when former refugees of the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States go on to participate in the so-called war on terrorism. What happens when this form of “given time” gives way to the dynamics of deportation – what Shahram Khosravi calls “stolen time”? How have the temporal and spatial experiences of diaspora been shaped by the state and its cooperation within a global politics that manages or blocks the right to move and the right to remain?
Informed by the work of Latin American and Chicanx border theorists and scholars, this chapter outlines the conceptual relationships between refugee and deportee as legal categories that have been used by states and international human rights law to maintain a global order on migration. The politics, practice, and conceptualization of refuge and deportation have been crucial to forming diasporas in the United States. This chapter will consider specific cases and representations – possibly including relationships between the US and Vietnamese and Iraqi diasporic contexts – that reckon with the legal, conceptual, temporal, and spatial links between refuge seeking and expulsion.
