Governing through expulsion

In a matter of months, the landscape of Ecuadorian migration has been upended. The Darién Gap, the treacherous jungle crossing once crowded with thousands of Ecuadorians risking everything to reach the United States, now sits eerily quiet. In early 2025, Ecuadorians have nearly vanished from that route. This is not merely a question of policy; it is a window into a deeper reality: a political economy of migration where mobility and immobility are governed by structures of disposability.

At the centre of this shift is the renewed U.S. deportation regime. Since Trump's return to office, more than 100,000 people have been deported in just ten weeks. Over 2,000 Ecuadorians have been forcibly returned, many without hearings, detained in private facilities and flown home under armed guard. This is framed as enforcement. But it is more than that. This is governance through expulsion.

Ecuadorians today are not "deciding" to stay or return. They are being absorbed into a system that renders them disposable. For many, the journey ends not at the border but on a deportation flight, disoriented and handcuffed, arriving with a plastic bag of belongings at Guayaquil airport. They are not returning to opportunity but to the same political and economic structures that expelled them in the first place.

This is not just the arithmetic of migration: it is the logic of a global regime of accumulation that produces and manages surplus populations. A critical political economy perspective shows that migration is not merely a response to hardship but a structural outcome of systems that render certain lives expendable. Scholars like W. Arthur Lewis, Celso Furtado, Saskia Sassen, and Tania Murray Li have helped us see how labour becomes mobile, governable, and disposable through long-standing patterns of dependency, dispossession, and coercive governance. Migration, in this light, is not episodic; it is systemic. And deportation is not a policy failure. It is a tool. It sorts, removes, and disciplines those made surplus by design.

Ecuador's role in this architecture is telling. It is a country with no monetary sovereignty, dependent on remittances and extractive exports, and increasingly governed through austerity. It has become a country of out-migration and a receiving point of hemispheric return. Venezuelans, Haitians, and others caught in overlapping crises have passed through or been stranded within Ecuador's borders. The state is now expected to absorb not just returnees but the violence of the very system that expelled them.

The routes, too, have changed. Some Ecuadorians now fly to El Salvador to bypass Darién. Others remain in limbo in Mexican shelters. A growing number of people apply for asylum in Spain. But more and more are returning, voluntarily or not. The International Organization for Migration reports a record spike in Ecuadorians requesting return assistance. What we are witnessing is not just reverse migration but a form of forced and adverse absorption without secure jobs, rights, and the infrastructure to sustain life with dignity.

What happens when a country structurally expels and receives its people at the same time? When labour is needed abroad but not protected, and when its return is not welcomed but absorbed into informal survival? These are not just stories of individuals. They are symptoms of a system that displaces populations through extraction, governs them through border securitisation, and returns them through policy instruments wrapped in humanitarian language.

The question, then, is not only why Ecuadorians are returning but what kind of world is making this return inevitable.

Deportation, in this context, is not an exception. It is the expression of a regime that governs through expulsion. It transforms mobile populations into expendable labour. It creates economies of displacement, where biometric data, detention, and transportation become profitable sectors. And it displaces responsibility from the global North to already precarious states.

We must start asking different questions. Not just how to make migration safer, but how to dismantle the conditions that make displacement the only option. And until that expulsion system is named and confronted, migration will remain both a necessity and a sentence.

Read more: W. Arthur Lewis (1954), "Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour" – a foundational theory on surplus labour; Celso Furtado (1966), Economic Development of Latin America – a classic in structural dependency analysis; Saskia Sassen (2014), Expulsions – on the systemic nature of dispossession in global capitalism; and Tania Murray Li (2010), "To Make Live or Let Die?" – on how populations are rendered surplus under neoliberal restructuring.