Deportation of asylum seekers has become a controversial issue in public discourse—not least due to anti-deportation protests across Europe. At the same time, governing elites have no incentive to politicize the issue due to the high costs concentrated on identifiable individuals that can raise feelings of sympathy and solidarity. This, however, is exactly what anti-deportation protest and advocacy groups aim to do in order to mobilize the general public. Unlike immigration and asylum, which are both clearly top-down politicized, it is the nature of the deportation issue itself making it predestined for bottom-up politicization. Different from governing parties, pro- and anti-immigrant opposition parties can be expected to engage in the politicization of the issue as a means to mobilize their core constituencies. The paper explores these hypotheses in a comparative analysis of the politicization of the deportation issue in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany.
