Ripples Across the Pacific: Cycles of risk and exclusion following criminal deportation to Samoa

Viewed from a government perspective, the practice of deporting convicted non-citizens can be characterised as the exporting of risk. However, ethnographic research is increasingly identifying the risks of stigmatisation, discrimination and victimisation faced by deportees themselves, following return to their countries of citizenship. In this chapter, Weber and Powell use interviews conducted with deportees, law enforcement officials, and community organisations in Samoa, supplemented by UNESCO research on criminal deportation in the Pacific, to identify cycles of criminalisation and exclusion arising from criminal deportation from Australia, New Zealand, and the USA. They trace the initial construction of convicted non-citizens as unacceptable risks to community safety, and discuss the mechanisms by which these constructions are maintained and sometimes modified, transferred or magnified in the aftermath of forced returns.