TRIBUNE

Stay in your country or leave: who decides where home is?

Antoine Nguidjol

Deported to a country that is not one’s own, sent back to one left long ago, a foreigner on one’s own continent, or faced with a journey home that has become too expensive: territory, nationality and belonging do not always point to the same place.

The United States is currently deporting some foreign nationals to third countries. African states are agreeing to receive them.

A Cuban, an Afghan or a Venezuelan may therefore leave the United States on an aircraft that does not take them back to their own country, but instead carries them to Africa. Eswatini and South Sudan have received deportees. Other agreements have extended the arrangement. Burundi has just announced that it will accept people with no prior connection to its territory.

Until now, nationality provided the most immediate answer to the question of ‘home’. It gave home a location: the country of which one was a national was the country to which one could be returned.

Deportation to a third country breaks that correspondence. An agreement between two governments can now determine the destination of a person with no previous personal history linking them to the territory that will receive them.

The question is now unavoidable: is nationality still enough to tell us where we are at home?