Outsourcing Deterrence

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores government outsourcing of asylum seeker welfare services, surveillance, and reporting functions to non-government organisations (NGOs). It focuses on Australia, where the government has outsourced the delivery of core welfare services for asylum seekers living in the community to NGOs. The outsourced welfare services have been appraised as ‘starving out’ asylum seekers and deploying deprivation as a means of deterrence. The government-contracted NGOs are also required to report on asylum seekers who are in breach of Australia’s Asylum Seeker Code of Behaviour, which prohibits actions such as spitting, swearing, and spreading rumours. The chapter argues that the Australian government’s outsourcing of refugee welfare services co-opts and captures NGOs as direct partners in immigration control and deterrence. Further, it analyses state capture of the NGOs as exemplifying the alliance between care and immigration control involved in humanitarian forms of governance at the border. By virtue of contractual outsourcing, the Australian government has both created new sites of discretion and control over asylum seekers and constrained the capacity of NGOs to contest government policy, instead involving them in the enforcement of sovereign borders as a condition for providing support and assistance.