Mandatory Immigration Research Articles

Prevalence, methods and characteristics of self-harm among asylum seekers in Australia: protocol for a systematic review

IntroductionAsylum seekers are at increased risk of self-harm compared with the general population, and the experience of detention may further exacerbate this risk. Despite this, evidence regarding the prevalence, methods...

Moral injury related to immigration detention on Nauru: a qualitative study

ABSTRACT Background Immigration detention is associated with detrimental mental health outcomes but little is known about the underlying psychological processes. Moral injury, the experience of transgression of moral beliefs, may play an important role. Objective Our aim was to explore moral injury appraisals and associated mental health outcomes related to immigration detention on Nauru. Methods In this retrospective study, we conducted in-depth interviews with 13 individuals who had sought refuge in Australia and, due to arriving by boat, had been transferred to immigration detention on Nauru. At the time of the study, they lived in Australia following medical transfer. We used reflexive thematic analysis to develop themes from the data. Results Major themes included 1) how participants’ home country experience and the expectation to get protection led them to seek safety in Australia; 2) how they experienced deprivation, lack of agency, violence, and dehumanization after arrival, with the Australian government seen as the driving force behind these experiences; and 3) how these experiences led to feeling irreparably damaged. The participant statement ‘In my country they torture your body but in Australia they kill your mind.’ conveyed these three key themes in our analysis. Conclusion Our findings suggest that moral injury may be one of the processes by which mandatory immigration detention can cause harm. Although refugees returned to Australia from offshore detention may benefit from interventions that specifically target moral injury, collective steps are needed to diminish deterioration of refugee mental health. Our results highlight the potentially deleterious mental health impact of experiencing multiple subtle and substantial transgressions of one’s moral frameworks. Policy makers should incorporate moral injury considerations to prevent eroding refugee mental health.

Administrative justice theory and benchmarks in mandatory immigration detention: principled tensions or power imbalance?

ABSTRACT The controversial mandatory immigration detention framework in Australia restricts individual freedoms in the most fundamental way and warrants close scrutiny. This article takes a pre-formulated theory of administrative justice as a lens to consider law-making and decision-making in mandatory detention cases where people sought asylum in Australia without a valid visa. In so doing, the article takes novel steps beyond defining the concept of administrative justice to applying a comprehensive administrative justice theory to this particular Australian setting. It provides a basis for analysing the limitations of the mandatory detention framework from a normative legal perspective and highlights areas of concern that are ripe for reform in the delivery of administrative justice. The article proposes a set of normative benchmarks that are founded on four administrative justice themes: the proper exercise of power, equal treatment, due process, and accessibility. These immigration detention-specific benchmarks are drawn from domestic law and policy, international law and literature in public administration and human rights. The article then analyses overseer recommendations, law reform reports and scholarly material to reveal the extent to which immigration detention practices meet normative administrative justice values. The article analyses how power imbalances destabilise the principled tensions that should exist between administrative justice properties and the subsequent effect that such imbalances have on those subject to mandatory immigration detention. This article proves that administrative justice theory provides a suitable lens for normative analysis of a public law system and emphasises the need for principled tensions between administrative justice properties.

An investigation of incident reports from the detention center Nauru: Has Australia breached the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

All asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat are subject to mandatory immigration detention. Since 2001, Australia has housed asylum seekers in offshore immigration detention facilities in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. The detention centers have been criticized both locally and internationally for the inhuman conditions in which asylum seekers are forced to live. In 2016, The Guardian Australia published more than 2000 leaked incident reports from the detention center on Nauru detailing incidents related to health, safety, and well-being of detainees. This study reports on analysis of 2,116 publicly available incident reports recorded from May 2013 to October 2015. A qualitative content analysis was conducted, resulting in the categorization of the reports into six codes based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). More than half of the incidents (n = 1,463, 69.1 percent) were categorized as in breach of human rights Most violations related to the right to life, liberty, and security (n = 748), and the right to an adequate standard of living (n = 673). While some of the reports described minor incidents, others were life-threatening or critical in terms of the asylum seekers’ mental or physical health; numerous reports involved children and youth. The reports reflect the severe mental burden of immigration detention and the inappropriate physical conditions in the center. The results are consistent with other research on immigration detention that has identified poor conditions and negative consequences of detaining asylum seekers.

Life in the Shadow Carceral State: Surveillance and Control of Refugees in Australia

This article critically examines techniques employed by the Australian state to expand its control of refugees and asylum seekers living in Australia. In particular, it analyses the operation of Australia’s unique Asylum Seeker Code of Behaviour, which asylum seekers who arrive by boat must sign in order to be released from mandatory immigration detention, with reference to an original dataset of allegations made under the Code. We argue that the Code and the regime of visa cancellation and re-detention powers of which it forms a part are manifestations of what Beckett and Murakawa call the ‘shadow carceral state’, whereby punitive state power is extended beyond prison walls through the blurring of civil, administrative and criminal legal authority. The Code contributes to Australia’s apparatus of refugee deterrence by adding to it a brutal system of surveillance, visa cancellation and denial of services for asylum seekers living in the community.

Redrawing the border through the ‘Right to Rent’: Exclusion, discrimination and hostility in the English housing market

The UK Immigration Act 2016 is central to the Conservative Government’s drive to create a more hostile environment for potential migrants and current ‘illegal’ migrants residing in the UK. The Right to Rent provisions of the Act, which require private landlords in England to conduct mandatory immigration document checks on prospective tenants, or face sizeable fines and criminal prosecution, have been highlighted as a key facet of the legislation. Drawing on qualitative interviews with key experts and analysis of Home Office guidance documents, we argue the Right to Rent has turned the private rental market into a border-check, with landlords responsibilised to perform ‘everyday bordering’ on behalf of the State. This creates a potentially discriminatory environment for all migrants, as well as for British citizens who lack documentation and/or may be subject to racial profiling. It may also be forcing vulnerable, undocumented migrants into even more precarious housing situations.

The People’s Inquiry into Detention: Social work activism for asylum seeker rights

In 2008, findings from the People’s Inquiry into Detention were published as Human Rights Overboard: Seeking Asylum in Australia. The People’s Inquiry, led by social work academics in Australia, exposed injustices within Australia’s privatised detention network for asylum seekers and interrogated policies and practices that ensued since mandatory immigration detention was introduced by legislation in 1992. With reference to the global context, the article presents a snapshot of policies and practices revealed by the People’s Inquiry that were considered antithetical to human rights and discusses this extensive undertaking within a broader context of asylum seeker social movements and professional advocacy endeavours that continue as harsh policies escalate. The article speaks to the resilience of the asylum seeker movement, often against the odds, a movement that includes responsive and tenacious professional groups.

Responding to mandatory immigration detention: lessons for the health care community.

Now that children have been removed from offshore immigration detention centres and with the Migration Amendment (Urgent Medical Treatment) Bill (2018) being passed into legislation, what can the healthcare community learn after over two decades of advocacy? Below we offer some reflections on the progress that has been made, including the medical community’s contribution to the reform of these policies and what we can learn for future action.

Values or origin? Mandatory immigrant integration and immigration attitudes in Europe

ABSTRACT One of the most significant European policy developments of the past decade has been the proliferation of mandatory immigrant civic and language integration requirements. The primary intention of these policies is to facilitate immigrant integration, but do they also improve public support for immigration by fulfilling the type of deservingness criteria many hold for benefits or status? Or do such integration requirements contribute to growing mass anti-immigration sentiment through signalling cultural distance? We contribute to this ongoing debate by examining whether mandatory integration fosters or diminishes public support for immigration. In doing so, we first use biennial data across 14 Western European countries between 2007 and 2014 and second implement an original survey experiment in the UK. Our unique contribution across these two studies reveals that neither mandatory language nor civic integration requirements appear to meaningfully affect public support for immigration. Rather, we identify immigrant origin as the deciding line between open and antagonistic immigration attitudes. Further, we find these patterns persist regardless of integration target, policy measurement, requirement difficulty, or analytical strategy. We thereby conclude mandatory integration of immigrant communities appears to do little in terms of reducing widespread anti-immigration sentiment.

Immigration detention: An Anglo model

Over the last twenty-five years, immigration detention policies and practices have proliferated around the globe. We look at four liberal democratic countries with the largest immigration detention systems—Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and identify components of an immigration detention policy ‘package’ as well as historical parallels in the early adoption of detention in these countries. This ‘Anglo model’ of detention is based on three main features: (1) the existence of indefinite and/or mandatory immigration detention policies; (2) the use of private security actors and infrastructure; and (3) the use of creative legal geographies in order to interdict and detain people offshore. Past scholarship on detention has focused on single national case studies or assumed the leadership of the US as the primary innovator in the field. Our paper establishes the empirical and theoretical grounds for considering these countries as a group and suggests a more complex process of policy adoption among them. Identifying an Anglo model of detention lays the critical groundwork for understanding the expansion of immigration detention and the transnational diffusion of detention policies among these countries, as well as where and how countervailing pressures to detention might form.

Mental health of children and adolescents in Australian alternate places of immigration detention.

Mental health of children and adolescents in Australian alternate places of immigration detention.

Healthcare and clinical ethics in Australian offshore immigration detention

Part of Australia’s ongoing efforts to deter asylum seeker boat arrivals, offshore immigration detention has been widely criticised since its reintroduction in 2012. These environments undermine the principles that would normally drive clinical and ethical decision-making, resulting in circumstances that are uniquely problematic and compromising. In addition to the more general complaints about Australia's policy of mandatory immigration detention, riots, violence, abuse, self-harm and a number of deaths have been reported in offshore centres. Centring on a number of recent inquiries, this article provides a review of the literature, focusing on the uniquely problematic issues faced in Australia's offshore immigration detention centres.

Starving for freedom: an exploration of Australian government policies, human rights obligations and righting the wrong for those seeking asylum

Australia is a signatory to a number of United Nations conventions and protocols which prescribe the responsibilities of nations which receive asylum-seekers. While Australia receives very few asylum-seekers in a global context, its policy of mandatory immigration detention, for those who arrive by boat, has unnecessarily led to long-lasting and devastating mental health consequences. This treatment results in Australia systemically breaching a range of recognised human rights agreements, conventions and protocols. It is a matter of concern that these human rights violations have historically received bi-partisan political support. Reactions to this treatment have seen some asylum-seekers participate in hunger strike protests. This has revealed a lack of appropriate procedures for managing these non-violent protests, which has resulted in further human rights violations. This research paper importantly examines Australia's human rights obligations to asylum-seekers, finds that their treatment is inconsistent with these obligations and discusses the hunger strike protests which result from this treatment.

Technology, Control, and Surveillance in Australia’s Immigration Detention Centres

Although mandatory immigration detention for “unauthorized” arrivals in Australia receives considerable attention, the use and abuse by government of technologies within sites of detention is less publicized. Control and surveillance are exercised in a number of ways. Immigration detainees have been denied adequate access to technologies that would enable them to fully communicate with family and friends and are deprived of the capacity to acquire information that can ensure their human rights are realized. At the same time that asylum seekers experience restrictions, devices are in place to control detainees through technological surveillance. Despite the prohibitions and impositions, detainees have adopted alternative means of communication in defi ance of the limits foisted upon them.

Hidden Men: Bearing witness to mandatory detention in Australia

The Australian government policy of mandatory immigration detention has been the subject of critique by human rights bodies and civil society. With many immigration detention facilities being located in remote sites, distance and expense means that few people get to observe detention practices in Australia directly. Through direct observations and through the voices of three men detained in the Curtin Immigration Detention Centre outside of the remote Western Australian town of Derby, the human costs of mandatory detention are presented and discussed. This is done through positioning this discussion as part of the process of bearing witness to mandatory detention in Australia.

Toward Temporal Limits on Mandatory Immigration Detention

Since 1996, the Immigration and Nationality Act has required the government to take into custody individuals in removal proceedings who have past convictions for any of a wide range of criminal offenses. This provision has led to more than a five-fold increase in the number of people detained each day, with harsh consequences for these individuals, their families, and communities across the country.Such sweeping, categorical detention is not easily reconciled with the Supreme Court’s 2001 decision in Zadvydas v. Davis, which extended to immigration detention the due process limits that the Court has recognized on other forms of civil detention. In Demore v. Kim, decided just two years later, the Court rejected an as-applied due process challenge to the mandatory immigration detention statute. Throughout the past decade, lower courts have sought to reconcile Demore with Zadvydas. As of this writing, three circuit courts have avoided a constitutional problem with the mandatory detention statute by construing its ambiguous language to impose temporal limits on mandatory detention. However, they have not reached consensus on how to define these limits. One circuit has adopted a bright-line rule that detention beyond six months requires a bond hearing, while two others have adopted a reasonableness standard for determining when a hearing is required.This Article argues that the mandatory detention statute should be construed to govern detention for no longer than six months, after which time a bond hearing should be required. It reaches this conclusion by analyzing Supreme Court due process doctrine, surveying decisions that have implemented the rule and standard discussed above, and considering key institutional features of the administrative removal system, including the dearth of legal representation for people in detention.

Offshoring and outsourcing the ‘unauthorised’: The annual reports of an anxious state

Since the inception of Australia's mandatory immigration detention policy for ‘unauthorised’ arrivals, border issues have generated significant public discussion. The policy is controversial and has been made more complicated by the outsourcing and offshoring of detention centre management and processing. Despite the diversity of actors involved in the government's mandatory detention policy (such as private security firms and intergovernmental organisations), we argue that the management of ‘unauthorised’ migration has been framed as a matter controlled by the state that is beholden to no other interests except its own. In order to explore the role of state and non-state actors in Australia's detention policy, this paper offers a reading of departmental annual reports over a 14-year period from 1996 to 2010. Using the theoretical work of Wendy Brown, we explore the representation of non-state actors in border management and the impact this has on the identity of the state as revealed in the annual reporting process. In line with Brown, we argue that the department's annual reports demonstrate the tension that exist between the apparent “opening and barricading”, the “fusion and partition” that underpins globalisation (2010, p. 7). In addition, we argue that emergent forms of border fortification provide an opportunity for the nation-state to reassert its sovereignty whilst at the same time these reflect deep anxieties over the role of the state in a globalised and privatised future. We contend that the annual reporting process provides a performative opportunity for the nation-state to demonstrate its strength and relevance. At the same time it is dependent on multinational security firms and inter-governmental authorities to execute the policy.

Let Them Land: Christmas Islander Responses to Tampa

Christmas Island is the site where Australia’s mandatory immigration detention policies are implemented. Protests by Christmas Islanders against the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers have surfaced since boatpeople began arriving in 1992 and reached a pinnacle during the Tampa affair. Based on interviews conducted in 2009 with island residents and archival material, the paper explores Christmas Islanders’ responses before and during the Tampa affair through the notion of hospitality that was disrupted when a state of emergency removed control of both ethical responsibility and island sovereignty.

Detention and the dwelling: Lévinas and the refuge of the asylum seeker

The Australian government introduced mandatory immigration detention in 1992 as a means of deterring ‘unauthorised arrivals’ from coming to these shores and it has since been supported and extended by successive federal governments. Whilst immigration detention only forms one component of Australia’s Migration Act 1958 (Cth), it has attracted widespread attention in recent years as the federal government has turned increasingly towards modifications in the Act, arguably as a means of augmenting its capacity to exercise punitive control. Such modifications, aside from the introduction of mandatory detention, have included the introduction of offshore processing, whereby asylum seekers are dispatched to detention in remote locations whilst their claims are assessed. These are located on the island republic of Nauru, approximately 4000 kilometres from eastern Australia, and a naval base on Manus Island, an outpost of Papua New Guinea. Removing them physically from Australian territory minimises their access to community and legal support, and presumably acts as a warning to asylum seekers that any attempt to land on Australian soil without going through the proper channels is precarious. The offshore processing of claims, known as ‘The Pacific Solution’, is all the more distressing given the isolation of these locations, the lack of support and other resources at hand, and the often inhospitable landscape and climate. (Nauru, for example, after many years of intensive phosphate mining, resembles a barren lunar wasteland.) A number of detention centres on Australian soil were initially set up in similarly remote locations, mainly in the desert, where detainees have often spent years awaiting the processing of their claims, many miles from towns and communities, surrounded by dry, flat, landscapes.

Immigration Detention Reforms: A Small Gain in Human Rights

ustralia’s mandatory immigration detention regime came into force in 1994. From the outset, the regime has been vigorously opposed by many civil society organisations and some of its aspects have been criticised by Commonwealth Government agencies such as the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) and the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office. Increasing media scrutiny since 2000 has also had an effect on public opinion (Taylor, 2001). Both the Labor Government, which introduced the regime, and the Liberal/National Coalition Government, which continued it, have sought to respond to political pressure by progressive mitigation of the harshness of the regime without significant change to the fundamental framework. The Prime Minister’s announcement of a number of changes to the mandatory detention regime on 17 June 2005 was the most recent bid to ease political pressure in this way (Howard, 2005).