The enforcement archipelago: Detention, haunting, and asylum on islands

From offshore border enforcement to detention centers on remote islands, struggles over human smuggling, detention, asylum, and associated policies play out along the geographical margins of the nation-state. In this paper, I argue that islands are part of a broader enforcement archipelago of detention, a tactic of migration control. Island enforcement practices deter, detain, and deflect migrants from the shores of sovereign territory. Islands thus function as key sites of territorial struggle where nation-states use distance, invisibility, and sub-national jurisdictional status (Baldacchino & Milne, 2006) to operationalize Ong’s (2006) ‘graduated zones of sovereignty’. In sites that introduce ambiguity into migrants’ legal status, state and non-state actors negotiate and illuminate geopolitical arrangements that structure mobility. This research traces patterns among distant and distinct locations through examination of sovereign and biopolitical powers that haunt asylum-seekers detained on islands. Offshore detention, in turn, fuels spatial strategies employed in onshore detention practices internal to sovereign territory.     

Confined within: National territories as zones of confinement

The securitization of immigration has led to increased reliance on border enforcement, detention, and deportation to control unauthorized movements. Based on a case study of the ways that Salvadoran immigrants to the United States have experienced these tactics, this paper analyzes the spatial implications of current enforcement strategies. As movement across borders becomes more difficult for the unauthorized, national territories become zones of confinement. This carceral quality is a dimension of national territory in that undocumented and temporarily authorized migrants cannot exit their countries of residence without losing territorially-conferred rights, while if they are deported, their countries of origin become extensions of the detention centers they occupied before exit. This transformation of national spaces is accompanied by internal differentiation, as interior enforcement confines migrants to subnational spaces where they must remain to avoid detection or harassment. Securitization thus entails both extraterritoriality, that is the extension of U.S. legal regimes into foreign territories, and intraterritoriality, or the operation of different legal regimes within national territories. The paper also highlights the ways that securitization contributes to multidimensionality, such that spatial locations are rendered ambiguous, both inside and outside at the same time. Finally, the paper considers how these spatial transformations redefine citizenship and belonging.     

The Discursive Violence of Postcolonial Asylum in the Irish Republic

ABSTRACT

This paper situates postcolonial asylum as a dominant global encounter between the West and the Rest. Rather than a humanitarian gift, the paper argues that discursive violence of asylum regimes forces the materialization of identities, spaces and structural conditions that encamp and re-colonise asylum-seeking bodies. It first examines the global instrumentalization of images and bodies of Third World women in refugee representations to act as a humanitarian alibi that re-signifies the white saviour discourse. Moving to the Irish context where childbearing bodies of African women were targeted in a political campaign that ended birthright Citizenship for children of non-EU parents in 2004, it examines the performativity and affective entanglements of visual representations of ‘Third World Women’ and illustrates how NGO policies and projects force performances of black female bodies that exploit their representational and affective labour. Meanwhile, the material labour—of waiting— is appropriated from bodies detained in Direct Provision (a form of open asylum detention) by the asylum industry. The paper argues that postcolonial asylum is non-performative of the promise it makes, but a colonial continuity that serves a number of uses for white Western states and preserves a humanitarian face while detracting critical attention from the root causes of forced displacement from the South—necropolitics in the South.     

Geographies of asylum, legal knowledge and legal practices

Law and legal discourses are an integral part of social life, a central means of producing social identities and exercising social power in day to day life. Critically informed geographical perspectives on law have illustrated in a number of ways how the legal and social (and therefore the spatial) are mutually constitutive. This paper argues that perspectives from critical legal geography can offer insights into the operation of asylum and immigration law in the UK in the late 1990s. This paper argues that legal practices and relations are organised in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways in different places and institutional contexts in London. In addition law and legal practices comprise a particularly important way in which ‘community’ can be constructed simultaneously across a variety of different scales in ways that can marginalise and exclude relatively powerless groups like asylum seekers. Thus refugee identities offer a particularly clear example of how social realities are constituted by law and legal practice.     

The missing link: the need for comprehensive engagement in regions of refugee origin

Asylum policies in Britain and in the countries of its EU partners are failing to cope with the demands made upon them. With migration pressures mounting and opportunities for legal immigration to many EU states restricted, larger numbers of potential migrants are turning to alternative means of entry and access, namely irregular migration and asylum channels. The responses of states to these challenges have been to adopt more restrictive policies and practices that have considerably changed the balance between immigration control and refugee protection. While states have the right to control entry and enforce their borders, the restrictive measures that have come to dominate policy-making and recent immigration enforcement initiatives in Britain and its European partners do not sufficiently discriminate between asylum seekers and other kinds of migrants, thereby failing to safeguard the right of refugees to seek protection. Current British proposals to move asylum seekers to 'safe areas' in regions of origin fail to understand the burdens, pressures and priorities of countries in the regions, fail to ensure effective protection for those in need, and are unlikely to deliver the UK policy objective of substantially reducing the numbers of illegal entries to Britain. What is needed is an approach that reduces the number of individuals seeking protection in Europe while maintaining the European tradition of providing asylum to those in genuine need. The 'missing link' in asylum policy that would respond both to the concerns of states and to the protection needs of refugees is more comprehensive engagement in regions of refugee origin. It is in this way that western asylum countries, including the UK, may best address the challenge of providing international protection to victims of persecution and respond to their own concerns about asylum.     

Humanitarianism as conflicted care: Managing migrant assistance in EU Assisted Voluntary Return policies

Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) programs occupy a central role in Europe's “management” of migration today. These state-funded programs allow migrants to meet with humanitarian counselors about the decision to return voluntarily, offering reintegration assistance and one-way travel booking to migrants' country of origin. This paper draws on interviews with practitioners at humanitarian organizations, those who counsel undocumented migrants and appeals rights exhausted asylum seekers about their decision to leave Europe via AVR, to consider the limits and potentials of humanitarian assistance for migrants in the EU's security-focused context. We query the degree to which care, as much as it is incorporated into regimes of bordering, can potentially disrupt hegemonic politics of assistance-as-governance. AVR provides a lens onto the politics of care and humanitarian assistance in migration management today, as migrants and practitioners negotiate together the decision to stay (with a limited range of legal options) or return via this increasingly relied upon policy.     

Bordering through care and control: Policing and sheltering Central American migrant youth in Mexico

Despite rising numbers of unaccompanied child migrants in the Americas, very limited research directly engages with youth as they journey north to seek protection in the United States. In this article, we examine young Central American migrant experiences of bordering, focusing on policing and shelter management. Part of a wider binational, interdisciplinary, and multi-scalar research project along the Mexico-U.S. border, which began on the heels of Programa Frontera Sur, we draw on interviews and a participatory workshop with migrant youth, and complementary interviews with migration officials and shelter workers. Through the uniquely insightful accounts of children themselves, we show how care work in shelters and direct control via policing emerge as powerful and connected techniques of bordering. In these spaces of connected securitization and humanitarian management, children negotiate highly violent, emotional, and extra-legal interactions with officials. These include extortion, apprehension, aggression, confinement and deception, but also disciplinary forms of care and protection. Our findings deepen and complicate extant work on the humanitarian care/control nexus via our focus on, and direct research with, youth from Central America in Mexico. Their narratives make clear that state policies such as Programa Frontera Sur expand the geographies of bordering and bring practices of migrant care and control into deeper relation. This bordering blocks children's access to legal protections like asylum; leaves them more exposed to exploitation and rights abuses; and encourages greater risk-taking in migration journeys.     

Community Antagonism Towards Asylum Seekers in Port Augusta,South Australia

An overtly hostile response to asylum seekers was observed in questionnaire responses provided by residents of Port Augusta, South Australia in April 2002. A social construction approach to identity and representation was used to interrogate this antagonism within its social, cultural, political and geographical contexts. Asylum seekers were constructed as ‘burdensome’, ‘threatening’ and ‘illegal’, and opposition to them was set within the discursive framework of a ‘Self/Other’ binary. Enmity towards asylum seekers was articulated concurrently with overwhelming support for the Federal Government's exclusive and deterrence‐oriented asylum policies. However, vehement opposition was expressed regarding the government's decision to construct Baxter Immigration Reception and Processing Centre in close proximity to Port Augusta. Factors contributing to the respondents’ negative perceptions of asylum seekers include xenophobia (specifically Islamophobia), events of geopolitical significance, and problematic government and media representations of asylum seekers. An awareness of these factors is necessary to unpack and, potentially, to destabilise the negative constructions of asylum seekers circulating in contemporary Australian discourses. Their entrenchment in the national consciousness may lead to tangible social implications including fear, friction and ultimately violence between the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, and this should therefore be countered. Community antagonism also contradicts notions of a culturally tolerant Australia and fosters electoral support for the policies of exclusion and deterrence that undermine Australia's commitment to international human rights frameworks.

相似文献   

The carceral wet: Hollowing out rights for migrants in maritime geographies

Over recent decades, various governments have turned to the spatiality of the maritime realm in the pre-emptive policing of migration, deploying concentrated efforts of mobility regulation to territorial and extra-territorial seas. With and through this process of increased policing, the maritime has concurrently been expunged of frameworks of rights for migrants. This article explores the hollowing out of rights at sea and how it has allowed governments to use maritime environments and more broadly the condition of wetness as a means to hold migrants beyond the juridical order and administrative bodies of the state. This practice emerged in a discernible way in the United States in the early 1990s, when the Refugee Convention was ruled not to apply on the high seas. De-territorialising the maritime from the state's geography of protection allowed the US Government to re-territorialise the sea as a space of heightened policing. Similar strategies of de- and re-territorialising the sea subsequently developed in Australian policies of migration control. Through this, the maritime is used to contain migrants not only in a condition of partial rights and exaggerated policing, it is also used to relocate migrants, exposing a “disciplined mobility” that works through the sea. Interrogating these various legal renditions of the maritime exposes the carceral wet that has developed in migration regulation at sea.     

Spaces of violence: A typology of the political geography of violence against migrants seeking asylum in the EU

This paper, based on research conducted with asylum seekers in three European Union (EU) member-states, examines the connections among various forms of violence against forced migrants in different state settings. Because violence that is produced within states is not uniform and often transcends borders, understanding how it varies across different geographical settings illustrates the complexity of the risks that migrants face. This paper presents a typology that examines interconnections between the production of various forms of violence and the complex spaces that constitute irregular migration into the EU to better understand these multifaceted factors and why we can anticipate certain forms of violence in a particular space. It also fosters future avenues of research as it provides a foundation for greater collaboration and advocacy to expose and rectify hierarchical imbalances of power and actors responsible for such violence.     

The good migrant: Everyday nationalism and temporary migration management on New Zealand dairy farms

Migration regimes that prioritise temporary and restricted work status have become increasingly prevalent globally. Temporary migration schemes that prioritise labour market flexibility, skills assessment and a reduced social burden, insert both legal and social stratification into the workplace and community through the restricted rights and future pathways available to migrants. Our contention in this paper is that in addition to their economic rationalities, such stratifications also take shape around governmental and popular articulations of nationalism that support and justify the differential inclusion of migrants as labour. In order to explore this intersection between nationalism and temporary migration management we focus on dairy farming in New Zealand, a key export industry that is often closely tied to national futures and identities, yet has come to rely on the presence of a substantial labour force of work visa holders who have limited rights and only very narrow pathways to longer term residence. We draw on interviews with people holding work visas, employers and intermediaries to draw attention to the way national stereotypes are created, accepted, and used to legitimise workplace inequalities within temporary migration schemes. National stereotyping had significant impacts on workplace hiring queues and segmentation, with key migrants, host communities and immigration practices commonly ignoring or downplaying the significance of the socio-cultural assumptions on which national stereotypes rest. This account demonstrates the need for greater understanding of the socio-cultural basis of ostensibly economically oriented migration regimes, the legitimation of stratification and the role of identity in negotiating temporally constrained labour migration.     

Post‐Conflict Ambon: Forced Migration and the Ethno‐Territorial Effects of Customary Tenure

In post‐conflict contexts characterized by large‐scale migration and increasing levels of legal pluralism, customary land tenure risks being deployed as a tool of ethno‐territorialization in which displaced communities are denied return and secure land rights. This thesis will be illustrated through a case study of the Indonesian island of Ambon where a recognition of customary tenure — also called adat — was initiated in 2005 at the end of a high‐intensity conflict between Christians and Muslims. Although a system of land tenure providing multiple forms of social security for the indigenous in‐group, adat in Ambon also constitutes an arena of power in which populations considered as non‐indigenous to a fixed historical territory are pushed into an inferior legal position. The legal registration of customary tenure therefore tends to be deployed to settle long‐standing land contests with a growing migrant community, hereby legally enforcing some of the forced expulsions that were brought about by the recent communal violence.     

Ordinary Emergency: Drones,Police, and Geographies of Legal Terror

This paper brings into conversation two ostensibly disparate geographies of state violence: the routine police surveillance and killing of members of the “dangerous classes” in the United States, an issue that is in no way new but nevertheless has gained increased attention over the last year with the Black Lives Matter movement; and the targeted drone strikes against “terrorist suspects” in the “war on terror”. By laying side by side the “war drone” and domestic police power, it becomes readily apparent that despite ostensible differences—foreign vs. domestic, war vs. peace, exceptional vs. normal, military vs. police, legal vs. extralegal—the unmanning of state violence gains much of its political and legal force from the language and categories that have long animated the routine policing of domestic territory. The paper calls for taking the violence of police power more seriously than many drone commentators have.     

A crisis of rights and responsibility: feminist geopolitical perspectives on Latin American refugees and migrants

With the advent of the Trump presidency we are facing the most anti-refugee and immigrant administration in recent U.S. history. This follows on the heels of the Obama era, characterized by record deportations and severe U.S. policies of deterrence towards Latin American refugees and migrants in its own backyard. This aggressive expansion of U.S. Homeland Security migration control included: outsourcing enforcement to Mexico; re-introducing migrant family detention; increasing ‘family unit’ raids; and accelerating immigration court hearings. These strategies of state deterrence and enforcement heightened vulnerability of asylum-seeking women and children from Mexico and Central America to human and legal rights abuses. I employ a feminist geopolitical approach to interrogate the intimate and embodied spaces of migration controls that ground the workings of the state in the normalized, routine, and informal practices of state officials and in the experiences of vulnerable yet resilient women and children refugees. Drawing upon examples from two research projects, informed by personal experience as a volunteer, I critically examine the everyday state practices of U.S./Mexico migration enforcement in three arenas - border security spaces, legal spaces, and carceral spaces. I contend that rather than an ‘immigrant or refugee crisis,’ these restrictive and intimate performances routinely deployed by border and legal bureaucrats reproduce and reinforce the structural and systemic crisis of rights and responsibility we are currently witnessing. Through a feminist ethic of care, social justice, and action, migrant and refugee narratives of everyday restriction may be deployed in resisting rights abuses and fostering responsibility, humanity, and hospitality towards newcomers.     

The Right to the World

The global number of refugees, asylum seekers, and those displaced within their countries are at record levels in the post‐World War II era. Meanwhile, efforts by relatively wealthy and powerful nation‐states to exclude unwanted migrants through enhanced territorial control have reached unprecedented heights, producing great harm–most notably premature death–for many. The factors driving out‐migration from homelands made unviable, coupled with multiple forms of violence experienced by migrants, demonstrate the need for an expansion of rights–conceived of as both entitlements and sites of struggle. So, herein, I assert the need for “the right to the world”–specifically a right to mobility and a just share of the Earth's resources–to help realize the promise of a dignified life for all. In making the case for such, the article offers a critical analysis of the contemporary human rights regime and of the “right to the city”.     

Containing Kassindja: detention,gendered threats and border control in the United States

In 1996, the USA issued a landmark decision to grant political asylum to a young woman, Fauziya Kassindja, due to the threat of forced genital circumcision. The case, Matter of Kasinga, is now a cornerstone in the area of law known as ‘gender-based asylum.’ While the legal victory occurred during a watershed moment for women’s human rights, it also spawned considerable critique for reproducing colonial tropes of third-world women, cultural backwardness, and narratives of rescue. This article offers another perspective by examining key phases of the case that predate the final decision. I demonstrate how logics of containment shaped the case trajectory and outcome. Initially, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) sought to contain Kassindja as a bogus asylum seeker through detention. However, once a powerful advocacy campaign exposed the violence of detention, the INS shifted their containment strategies to safeguarding the legal paradigm and circumscribing its legacy as a precedent-setting case. By focusing on the role of detention and the logics of containment, this article supplements cultural critiques of the case and provides an example of how gender and gender violence can be leveraged by state agencies and actors to reinforce border control and manage refugee/asylee populations.     

Spatial interaction and security: a review and case study of the Syrian refugee crisis

ABSTRACT

Sir Alan Wilson's ideas have been highly influential in the modelling of phenomena including migration, transport and economics. Latterly, research has explored the application of similar ideas to new problems at larger scales. Many of these studies relate to global challenges with significant policy implications. Here, we present an example in the form of original empirical work concerning forced migration associated with the current Syrian refugee crisis. We employ a spatial interaction framework to examine the flows of migrants fleeing Syria and the characteristics which influence their choice of destination country. In line with the broader literature, we find that shorter distances, economic prosperity, and cultural similarity (e.g. shared language) attract forced migrants, as does the probability of being granted asylum; a finding with potential implications for policy. Contrary to expectation, we find little influence for levels of security in potential host nations (e.g. absence of terrorism).     

Rethinking commonality in refugee status determination in Europe: Legal geographies of asylum appeals

The Common European Asylum System aims to establish common standards for refugee status determination among EU Member States. Combining insights from legal and political geography we bring the depth and scale of this challenge into sharp relief. Drawing on interviews and a detailed ethnography of asylum adjudication involving over 850 in-person asylum appeal observations, we point towards practical differences in the spatio-temporality, materiality and logistics of asylum appeal processes as they are operationalised in seven European countries. Our analysis achieves three things. Firstly, we identify a key zone of differences at the level of concrete, everyday implementation that has largely escaped academic attention, which allows us to critically assess the notion of harmonisation of asylum policies in new ways. Secondly, drawing on legal- and political-geographical concepts, we offer a way to conceptualise this zone by paying attention to the spatio-temporality, materiality and logistics it involves. Thirdly, we offer critical legal logistics as a new direction for scholarship in legal geography and beyond that promises to prise open the previously obscured mechanics of contemporary legal systems.     

The ambivalent relations behind civil society’s engagement in the “grey zones” of migration and integration governance: Case studies from Belgium

Based on qualitative data collected in two different Belgian cities (Brussels and Liège), this article focuses on the emergence of civil society initiatives to address the grey zones of migration and integration governance in the country. We define the concept of grey zones as situations that appear in specific time-spaces where problematic issues arise and the state fails to intervene. This triggers the intervention of civil society to deal with specific governance issues. In Belgium, the state – through an indifference-as-policy approach – delegates the responsibilities of reception and integration policies to multiple actors and leaves space for a variety of citizens’ initiatives to emerge. The grey zones of government policies become spaces for possible citizen-organised actions aimed at both providing initial reception and legal support to migrants, and denouncing the absence of state intervention. These citizen actions operate in particular on the issue of housing and reception of forced migrants with different legal status and migration aspirations. We also highlight the ambivalent relations emerging between civil society actors and the state. Through the analysis of two situated case studies, this article aims to provide evidence on how these civil society initiatives develop and how their humanitarian approach becomes political.     

Calling 911: intimate partner violence and responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era

For most of United States’ history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated within the home or intimate relationships. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This article’s inquiry centers on two policing practices – preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution – that emerged in the 1980s to redress the state’s long history of ignoring intimate partner violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how these two policing practices affect the experience of citizenship for intimate partner violence survivors by showing how the state creates a distinction between ‘cooperative’ victims who support the arrest and incarceration of their abusers and ‘uncooperative’ who do not. To develop this argument, I conceptualize the policing and prosecution response to intimate partner violence as a social contract of rights and responsibilities that mediates the relationship between the state and women who experience intimate partner violence. By illustrating how the state discursively constructs ‘uncooperative’ victims as irrational, this article utilizes a feminist geographic analytic to examine the everyday discursive and material technologies that the state employs to reregulate responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era.