Border Protection Policies Research Articles

‘These people are conning us’: Australia’s Medevac laws and the biopolitical production of the ‘malingering’ refugee

This article examines the effect Australia’s ‘Medevac’ legislation had on the way refugees were depicted by the Liberal-National Coalition and Australian Labor Party in their debate about immigration detention and border security. I argue that by enabling medical evacuations for people detained offshore, Medevac shifted debate about refugees and border security into the realm of the biomedical. I maintain this resulted in the biopolitical production of the figure of the malingering refugee, who falsifies illness to cross the border. While both parties produced this pejorative category, what distinguished them was the degree to which they believed malingering applicants could be rendered ‘ known’ via the medical border. For the ALP, Medevac could recruit the purported ‘objectivity’ of biomedicine, such that malingering applicants could be identified, and border security thereby supposedly maintained. Conversely, for the LNP, no such guarantee could be established, meaning for them, Medevac rendered the border and therefore the nation vulnerable to malingering applicants. Despite their differences, I argue both parties articulated the figure of the malingering refugee for similar nationalistic purposes. Namely, to justify the violence of the Australian border protection regime, while nevertheless simultaneously depicting themselves and the nation as fundamentally ‘good’: not in spite of, but because of their harsh border policing practices. In concluding, this article considers the applicability of its analysis both to the contemporary Australian context and abroad, such as the United States and UK, where similar border protection policies and discourses have emerged.

Witnessing violence: Stories from a migration support worker

In August 2019, academics, practitioners and advocates as well as individuals with lived experiences of confinement, came together at the University of Melbourne to reflect on the parallels between the spaces and practices of care and control in diverse sites of confinement. This research workshop sought to generate insights into places of confinement from varying perspectives. In the following dialogue between former migration support worker, Judge, and one of the editors of this Special Themed Collection of papers, Loughnan, the daily violence of Australia's immigration detention system is brought to light. Judge shares her stories of working in regional offshore processing centres. This provides important insights into the Australian government's border protection policies, described as one of the harshest in the world. Judge witnessed this first-hand when she was employed by the Australian Government to implement these policies and laws as a migration support worker. During this time, she was consistently faced with a tension between her role responsibility and her ethical obligations to others. The decisions she made to document these practices, to resist and then speak out have had a lasting impact on her: she says she is compelled to continue to document these stories, despite the severity of potential criminal repercussions for doing so under ‘gag orders’ on imposed on detention staff through laws enacted by the Australian Government.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Policy Routinely Violates Stated Core Values

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Policy Routinely Violates Stated Core Values

고종의 울릉도 關防정책과 이규원의 울릉도 수토

Threats against the Joseon Dynasty from foreign powers began in the 1860s starting with the French campaign against Korea in 1866 and the US expedition to Korea in 1871. Also, Joseon’s doors were forced open Japan-Korea Treaty of 1876. Japan began unmasking its ambitions for Ulleungdo and Dokdo first, and they sent Japanese citizens to Ulleungdo to engage in logging and fisheries. This was reported in the Ulleungdo investigations of 1881. During their patrols, they found that the Japanese were attempting to cut down trees and move then to Wonsan and Busan. Upon hearing this, King Gojong dispatched Lee Gyu-won as the governor of Ulleungdo ordering him to investigate Ulleungdo in detail. Lee Gyu-won reported the situation of Ulleungdo and produced the ‘Map of Inner Ulleung-do’ and ‘Map of Outer Ulleungdo’ and offered it to the king. Since then, Joseon moved its citizens to Ulleungdo and managed Ulleungdo by placing a governing officer called dojang and installed a military and incorporated it in the provincial governing system and included all of Ulleungdo and Dokdo in the area of jurisdiction. Such policies can be viewed as the border protection policies of Gojong. Once Regent Heungseon Daewongun stepped down and Gojong came into power, he became interested in defending the borders from the early 1870s and searched for plans, while recognizing the importance of border defense. Plans were made to defend the border regions of Dongnae, Uiju and Hwanghae, while also preparing against ships from the western world. Furthermore, Gojong’s border defense policies for Ulleungdo demonstrated his will to protect the territory by pioneering Ulleungdo as a part of the national border defense policy. Ulleungdo was not an abandoned island, but an empty island, and people were transferred to settle Ulleungdo in stages as pioneers, and a military installation was placed on the island, thus showing the changes in Gojong’s policies.

“I See Nothing but a Fence of Tears”: The Impact of Australia’s Immigration Detention and Border Protection Policies on the Asylum Seeker Child’s Geographies of Hope and Hopelessness

As a signatory to both the United Nation Refugee Convention and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Australia’s border protection policy to detain offshore asylum seekers who reach Australian borders by boat, including accompanied and unaccompanied minors, is under intense international scrutiny. In the context of Australia’s “Operation Sovereign Borders,” however, the asylum seeker child’s perspectives and their geographies of hope and hopelessness have not yet been fully explored. Drawing on recent literature within children’s geographies, which emphasizes the “emotional” matters within policy development and professional practice, and how they affect children, this paper seeks to contribute to emerging debates exploring borders, asylum seeker children, and children’s emotional geographies. Utilizing drawings, letters, and poems produced by children for an Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention on Nauru, a child-centred approach was applied to privilege children’s own perspective of their indefinite internment. The primary focus of the paper is to emphasize the ways in which “the asylum seeker child” constructs their own emotional geographies within the inherently complex and restrictive context of Australia’s border protection policy.

Protecting the Swiss milk market from foreign price shocks: Public border protection vs. quality differentiation

AbstractSwitzerland applies a number of different border protection policies for milk products. While dairy products such as butter and milk powder are still subject to tariffs and tariff‐rate quotas, cheese trade with the European Union (EU) is fully liberalized. To understand how such different levels of protection affect spatial price transmission, we analyze price transmission between Germany and Switzerland for several products at the wholesale level, and for raw milk producer prices. We find that not the level of border protection determines the degree and speed of price transmission, but rather the qualitative differentiation of the Swiss products. While prices of tariff‐protected dairy products are influenced by German price developments, cheese prices are not. Also, at the producer level, milk prices for cheese processing are less strongly linked to foreign prices than milk prices for industrial dairy production. Our results suggest that for small high‐income countries such as Switzerland, promoting high‐quality products and hence reducing international substitutability alleviates international price pressure more than protection via tariffs. [EconLit classifications: Q11, Q13, Q18].

"I See Nothing but a Fence of Tears": The Impact of Australia's Immigration Detention and Border Protection Policies on the Asylum Seeker Child's Geographies of Hope and Hopelessness

"I See Nothing but a Fence of Tears": The Impact of Australia's Immigration Detention and Border Protection Policies on the Asylum Seeker Child's Geographies of Hope and Hopelessness

Does Trade Policy Impact Food and Agriculture Global Value Chain Participation of Sub‐Saharan African Countries?

AbstractThe emergence of food and agriculture global value chains (GVCs) is challenging the way scholars look at trade data, as well as how policy makers establish their trade policies. The common perception is that Sub‐Saharan African (SSA) countries, unlike most Latin American and Asian countries, are not deeply integrated into global production networks. Consequently, it is believed that the border protection policies of the former may have a limited impact on GVC participation. This paper challenges this conventional knowledge in two ways. First, by decomposing bilateral gross export into its value added components, we show that the sectoral and bilateral SSA participation in GVC for food and agriculture is substantial. Second, we demonstrate that trade policies impact backward and forward value chain linkages. These results call for a refinement of trade policy priorities in SSA.

#LetThemStay#BringThemHere: Embodied politics, asylum seeking, and performativities of protest opposing Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders

The body is the object of border protection. Yet the body remains largely outside reigning notions of the political in debates on bordering practices and challenges to it. Exploring what bodies do in their performativity as they negotiate and resist the securitisation of forced migration can open up new ways of understanding the disruptive potential of the body. In this paper, I draw on Judith Butler’s seminal work on contingency and norms of existence, along with her musings on forms of assembly, and recent feminist scholarship on social movements, to think through what the #LetThemStay and #BringThemHere protests in Australia might signal as advocates for those seeking asylum put their bodies on the line to disrupt the federal government’s border protection policy – Operation Sovereign Borders. While people seeking asylum themselves are at the bodily forefront of opposition and resistance – their bodies and bodily tactics negotiating border enforcement technologies – it is the bodily performativities of advocates for those seeking asylum that are the focus of this paper. The paper describes the way linguistic and bodily performativity coalesce in these performativities of protest as advocates embody the sociality being asserted. By making explicit the embodied politics at play in these forms of assembly, I explore the transformative potential of the body in its myriad capacities adding to long-standing feminist calls for a ‘corporeal geopolitics’ in political geography, one that centres the already existing politics of bodies.

Missing the Boat: Australia and Asylum Seeker Deterrence Messaging

AbstractMany of Australia's border protection policies have focused on attempts to deter the arrival of asylum seekers by boat. These include government ‘messaging’ in the hope this will influence the decision‐making of would‐be boat arrivals. This article outlines the findings of an exploratory study on the sources of information accessed by asylum seekers, prior to and during their boat journeys to Australia, about their destination country. The findings suggest that government media and Internet strategies focused on deterring asylum seekers are adopted without full regard to how information is sourced before and during these boat journeys.

Neoliberalism and nationalism: Representations of asylum seekers in the Australian mainstream news media

In this article, we build on previous critical discursive research concerning the deployment of nationalist rhetoric in the negative representation of asylum seekers to also consider the interplay between neoliberal and nationalist discourses regarding asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia. Rather than arguing that neoliberalism and nationalism are incompatible (by virtue of the former being about internationalization and the latter about protecting the nation-state), we argue that in fact media representations of asylum seekers are compatible with both neoliberal and nationalist discourses, with both ultimately aimed at protecting the sovereignty of the (White) Australian nation-state. Utilizing a synthetic approach to critical discourse analysis, we analyze two incidents concerning asylum seekers that were widely reported in the mainstream media in late 2009, namely, the Oceanic Viking and the Jaya Lestari 5 incidents. Our article demonstrates that while many of the discourses concerning asylum seekers can be read as nationalistic in nature (i.e. through ‘protecting’ a sovereign state and maintaining border control), they can also be seen as neoliberal in relation to the (supposed) economic benefits of excluding asylum seekers and their undesirability on economic terms. The ‘threat posed by asylum seekers arriving by boat’ was positioned as one that required increased economic support for stricter border protection policies. The economic nature of border protection and security came to the fore not only in terms of its role in keeping out those seen as economically undesirable, but also in the economic investment required in ensuring that the nation-state was able to protect its sovereignty through the maintenance of a homogeneous population regulated at the borders.

Extraterritorial Application and Customary Norm Assessment of NonRefoulement: The Legality of Australia's 'Turn-Back' Policy

This article considers whether the Commonwealth Government’s border protection policy of turning back asylum seeker boats breaches its international obligation not to refoule refugees, as imposed under the Refugee Convention art 33(1). In addressing this issue the article examines whether art 33(1) applies extraterritorially, and whether a similar obligation has become embedded in customary international law. The conclusions reached are applied to specific situations where Australia has returned refugees.

Fear and Instrumentalism: Australian Policy Responses to Migration from the Global South

Immigration and border protection policies are driven by national interest. However, the national interest can be more broadly and more narrowly conceived, depending in part on the degree to which the future of the individual state is understood to be contingent on a shared global future and on the recognition that the short-term costs of international cooperation may bring long-term collective benefits. Whereas such global interdependence is recognised in international statecraft in the domains of aid, trade and climate change, such recognition does not extend to immigration. Australia's national policies towards human movement from the Global South tend to be driven in large part by exaggerated fears (of unregulated border crossings) or a narrowly instrumental approach to the economic benefits of human capital transfers (migrants filling skills gaps and providing flexibility in the labour market). A broader conception of migration would take into account the potential developmental benefits of human movement for source nations and for migrants themselves.

U.S. Security and Border Protection Policy before and after 9/11: A Policy Impact Assessment

This study utilizes key analytical concepts from complex interdependence theory to examine the impact of U.S. security and border protection policy on the U.S.–Mexico land border before and after 9/11. It seeks to answer whether post‐9/11 U.S. security and border protection policy responses make any difference to the protection of the U.S.–Mexican land border. The results of the analysis demonstrate that, other things being equal, post‐9/11 U.S. security and border protection policy responses have had only marginal effects on the protection of the U.S.–Mexican land border compared to the pre‐9/11 period. In other words, those policy responses make little difference when their performance is compared before and after 9/11. I conclude that the U.S.–Mexico land border is more secure, but is not completely safe in the aftermath of 9/11.Este estudio utiliza conceptos analíticos claves de la teoría de interdependencia compleja para examinar el impacto de la seguridad estadounidense y la política de protección de la frontera en la tierra límite de E.U.–México antes y después del 11/9. Busca responder si las respuestas de seguridad estadounidense y políticas de protección posteriores hicieron alguna diferencia en la protección de la frontera de E.U.–México. Los resultados del análisis demuestran que, ceteris paribus, la seguridad estadounidense y las respuestas de protección fronteriza posteriores han tenido sólo efectos marginales en la protección de la misma comparados con el periodo anterior. En otras palabras, estas políticas de respuesta hicieron poca diferencia después del 11/9 en comparación con las condiciones que prevalecían antes de 11/9. Concluyo que la frontera E.U.–México es más segura, pero no completamente en el contexto que dejó el 11/9.