Stolen time Shahram Khosravi The most remarkable reason for deportation I have seen is from 1914, when a Russian Jew was deported from Sweden after six years. A short sentence in the police report, explaining why he should be deported, reads: ‘He was a bad shoemaker.’ It was not enough to be a labourer; one had to be a good labourer. In the same year, two other Russian Jews were deported be- cause one lacked ‘a sense of rightness’ and the other one had ‘venereal diseases’. 1 The religious under- tones concerning chastity, virtue and the Protestant work ethic that were used to justify deportation of these three men are obvious. Almost a century later I witnessed how the Protestant ethic was also used to rationalise rejection of an asylum seeker. In 2007 I accompanied a young man who had been living in Sweden without a residence permit for a period of sev- eral months to a meeting with a lawyer to formulate an asylum claim. I helped with translation. The law- yer asked what he would say if the authorities asked why he had not sought asylum when he had arrived in Sweden several months earlier. The young man said he would lie and say that he just arrived. The lawyer got upset and said: ‘We in this country are Protestant, and we do not lie.’ The man was later deported. Following Carl Schmitt’s idea that ‘all signifc- ant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’, I would say that the current deportation regime has an inherently re- ligious dimension. 2 The introduction of ‘crime in- volving moral turpitude’ (CIMT) in US deportation law demonstrates very well the link between the no- tions of sin and deportation. The term CIMT is vague and lacks defniteness and clarity. Deeply rooted in re- ligion and loaded with religious overtones, CIMT is a grey zone in which the distinction between the unlaw- ful and the sinful has disappeared; subsequently, legal conceptions of crime and religious conceptions of sin become indistinguishable. Sin is thus a violation not only of divine rule but also of society’s well-being, and a non-citizen sinner is subjected to criminal law. The lack of precision means that the application of the law regarding what is ‘contrary to the rules of mor- ality’ is left to the discretion of the judges, who can deport non-citizens not only for criminal offences but also for sinful acts. 3 There is a fundamental sinfulness in being a for- eigner: the unforgivable sin of being on this side of the border with a ‘foreign’ skin colour, language, name, face or religion. Foreigners are undesired ones who never stop being seen as foreigners, no matter how long they have lived in the country, no matter how integrated they are in the society, no matter whether or not they were born in the country. A long- term, sometimes lifelong, re-entry ban for deportees discloses the fact that foreigners’ sins are imprescript- ible: never forgotten; never forgiven. Even now people are deported because they are bad crafts(wo)men, or face denial of admission at the border because of disease, or simply because of the sin of lying in a Protestant land. In 2017 Norwegian im- migration authorities started a deportation process of a whole family of twelve people, a couple who received asylum in Norway in 1990, their children (only four and nine years old when they came to Norway) and grandchildren (born in Norway). Their Norwegian citizenship was withdrawn, and they were ordered to leave the country after 27 years. The couple are accused of having lied about their nationality when they sought asylum in 1990. The authorities claim that they are Jordanian nationals and not Palestinians. The sin of lying to the state results in collective pun- ishments of denaturalisation and deportation almost three decades after the alleged sin of lying. Expulsion of what is believed to be foreign and harmful is, in this way, part of nation building, part of a secularised state with an inherently religious nature.