Chapter 2 explores Jason’s story, a man who moved to the UK when he was 15 years old, and then spent nearly 15 years homeless on the streets of London before being deported to Jamaica. Jason was unable to regularise his status, and he could not access benefits because he had ‘no recourse to public funds’, and thus his story reminds us that deportation begins long before anyone gets on a plane. As the chapter shows, ‘illegal immigrants’ like Jason are invoked to justify austerity, but they also face the most extreme consequences of ‘neoliberal statecraft’ (i.e. abandonment and coercion). The chapter describes Jason’s experiences of illegality, destitution and racist violence, arguing that race, class and immigration status were mutually constitutive in his life.