Disposable Labor, Repurposed: Outsourcing Deportees in the Call Center Industry

Abstract In this article, I draw on ethnographic research with deportees in the Dominican Republic who work in call centers that serve U.S. businesses, exploring the relationship between deportation from the United States and U.S. labor practices abroad. I argue that the globalized call center industry harnesses the labor of long‐term U.S. residents expelled from the country—people deemed unfit to live within the borders of the United States, but whose labor is desired by U.S. companies abroad—to cultivate a flexible and culturally suitable labor pool. I also show how deportees, who are stigmatized and considered unemployable in most industries, rely on the call centers for both employment and cultural connections to their long‐term home—the United States. This research contributes to anthropological understandings of criminalization and the role of displaced labor in the globalized economy. Specifically, I offer an alternative to the popular idea of “disposability” of the marginalized and argue that, under the circumstances of deportation, the labor of many deportees is more accurately characterized as “repurposed.”