Mountz, Alison (2013) Australian Journal of Human Rights.

19(3)

amountz@wlu.ca

Shrinking spaces of asylum: vanishing points where geography is used to

inhibit and undermine access to asylum

Alison Mountz*

Abstract: In this article, I argue that nation states use geography strategically to inhibit and
erode access of asylum-seekers and migrants to the rights accrued when a person lands on
sovereign territory — including the right to seek asylum. Five strategies are offered as
examples of the creative use of geography to undermine access to rights and shrink spaces
of asylum: offshoring of border enforcement, externalisation of asylum processing, remote
detention, use of islands, and separation of families. The article frames these forms of
isolation as what Derek Gregory (2007) calls ‘vanishing points’. These are sites where
national security is prioritised over human security and where the protections of human
rights and human life disappear. This is achieved through what Judith Butler (2004; 2010)
would identify as the dehumanisation of migrants and asylum seekers and the devaluation
of their lives.
Introduction
Many scholars have shown that border enforcement and human smuggling are symbiotic
industries. In sites of crossing between economically disparate regions, growth in one of these
industries fuels growth in the other, however inadvertently (Koser 2000; Nadig 2002; Nevins 2010;
Hiemstra 2013). People who attempt to enter in an illicit manner along the geographical margins of
desirable destinations tend to be characterised by policymakers as ‘mixed flows’: migrants moving
for economic reasons and asylum-seekers looking for protection from a well-founded fear of
persecution if returned home, according to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.
As offshore border enforcement — often known as ‘externalisation’, or the placement of
interception and processing offshore — intensified throughout the 1990s, these groups of mixed
flows in interstitial borderlands grew. Discursive processes of exclusion also intensified in
mainstream media. Through racialisation, homogenisation, xenophobia and the emotional
responses evoked by images of crowded boats approaching sovereign territory, asylum seekers by
boat have been criminalised in the court of public opinion (Greenberg and Hier 2002; Mountz
2010). These discursive processes of exclusion shored up broad public and fiscal support and
political will for unprecedented investment in border enforcement, detention and deportation in
the United States, Australia and the European Union. As a result, migrants take more risks to enter
sovereign territory where they accrue more human rights, such as the right to seek asylum.

There is therefore a cycle in which more enforcement begets more risk, making asylum seekers and
economic migrants more precarious and more vulnerable to exploitation and violence in their
transnational journeys to enter. This cycle is both temporal and spatial in dimension. Individuals
face uncertainty of waiting (Conlon 2011) in interstitial zones between states, moving cyclically
through revolving doors (Human Rights Watch 2008; Pro Asyl 2012): trying to enter, getting sent
back, waiting, spending prolonged periods along the edges of sovereign territory, sometimes in
cities, sometimes in camps or detention centres. Meanwhile, states invest in enforcement to keep
people out.

In fact, states are moving farther offshore to enforce borders, intercept migrants and asylum
seekers, and process and detain. The infrastructure of border enforcement and detention
proliferates in ever-more remote locations. This architecture of exclusion constitutes what I have
called the ‘enforcement archipelago’ (Mountz 2011a), a topology that extends farther outward over
time, closer to countries of origin. The existence of enforcement archipelagos in the places where
people are most desperate to enter wealthier, more politically stable terrain suggests that the
community of nation states, about which Hannah Arendt (1958) so famously wrote, is growing less
able or willing to protect the rights of those displaced and on the move. Rather than addressing the
persecution and poverty that lead to emigration, contemporary governments have opted to contain
these problems offshore. Rather than protecting human rights, this offshoring actually worsens
them as further violence and rights violations are carried out in interstitial spaces.

2
In this article, I argue that nation states use geography strategically to inhibit, erode and undermine
access of asylum seekers and migrants to the rights accrued when a person lands on sovereign
territory, including the right to seek asylum. Authorities create enforcement archipelagos that
undermine access to rights and shrink spaces of asylum. In the enforcement archipelago, geography
trumps rights, and national security trumps human security. I draw on the work of geographer
Derek Gregory (2007) to posit these sites as ‘vanishing points’.

Gregory (2007) identifies sites within what he calls the carceral archipelago as ‘vanishing points’:
places where biopolitical and sovereign powers converge and vanquish people and their humanity,
failing to protect their human rights. Avery Gordon (2008) also writes about what is seen and
unseen in her development of the concept of haunting, finding that oppressive histories hidden
from view never actually disappear, but instead continue to haunt in the present. This article builds
on Gregory’s vanishing points and recent literature on human security, extending these ideas to
offshore zones where migrants and asylum seekers find access to protection inhibited.

I proceed by first building a conceptual framework through which to understand these locations
where human rights and human security disappear, where migrants are haunted along the routes
they traverse. I then detail five geographical moves undertaken to reduce access to asylum: shifting
border enforcement offshore, externalising asylum processing, investing in remote detention, using
islands to process and detain, and separating families. This is followed by analysis of how these
shifts are inhibiting access to asylum, and then conclusions on the implications for human security,
human rights, and access to asylum in the future. Rather than dwell in one location, I move across
national contexts to demonstrate that the shrinking of spaces of asylum is a global phenomenon.

Vanishing points: where the right to seek asylum disappears

In his poignant essay ‘Vanishing points’, Derek Gregory (2007, 206) argues that ‘the war prison
(like the “war on terror” more generally) can be understood as a dispersed series of sites where
sovereign and bio-power coincide’. Gregory understands this new form of war and its new topology
as one that is produced both through and around the soft edges of international law. Importantly,
he notes, ‘law is a site of political struggle not only in its suspension but also in its formulation,
interpretation, and application’ (2007, 207). On this foundation, Gregory builds his analysis of what
he calls the war prison of the war on terror, mapping the topological connections between
Guantánamo Bay and Abu Graib. In these sites, he suggests, international law is ‘decentered,
without a unitary sovereign ground to guarantee its powers; its provisions are distributed through
a congeries of conventions, treaties, and organizations’ (2007, 209). If the global war on terror
involves ‘the vanishing point of the law of war’ (2007, 2009), then Guantánamo Bay and Abu Graib
become ‘an extended series of vanishing points towards non-places for non-people’ (2007, 209).

3
These arguments resonate powerfully with the remarkable and costly strategies pursued by nation
states to keep asylum seekers offshore. There, securitising strategies of the war on terror are
extended to sites where asylum seekers are excluded, where geography and law fold in on one
another in emergent, topological terms. The vanishing points where asylum seekers are detained
and invisibilised through border enforcement are highly productive of not only exclusion, but also
subjectivity, life and death.

International law has been shown often to have little power in the face of challenges by nation
states interested in pursuing their own agendas. The states where I have conducted recent research
on asylum seeking from 2010 to 2012 – Australia, Italy, and the United States – are in fact
signatories to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. Yet
they carry out strategic and politicised agendas offshore — beyond the limits of sovereign territory
— that would seemingly undermine and break international and domestic law if carried out on
mainland territory.

Rather than find broad resistance to offshore enforcement, either from their own national citizenry
or from the publics of foreign places where they operate, these countries show seemingly endless
creative capacity to use geography to produce Gregory’s vanishing points offshore. In these sites,
life and human security disappear, rights are eroded, and national security is prioritised. The
abnegation of responsibility carried about by states that — though formally part of an international
system — act in their own interests allows violence, exploitation, abuse and precarity to flourish
over the protection of human life and rights. Time and again, across a range of geographical
contexts, human rights organisations have documented human rights violations in offshore
locations where migrants and asylum seekers wait: Human Rights Watch (2011) in Greece,
Amnesty International (2010) in Libya and Malta, Pro Asyl (2013) at Turkish–Greek borderlands,
the Australian Human Rights Commission (2010) on Christmas Island, Médecins sans Frontières
(2011a) in Libya and Tunisia, and Amnesty International (2013) on Nauru. Collectively, these
organizations report poor conditions, inadequate access to legal or medical resources, forms of
indefinite detention with inadequate review, and high rates of self-harm and suicide.

On sovereign territory, states are more likely to uphold legal responsibility and international
commitments. Being adrift between sovereign powers and territories leaves migrants and asylum
seekers at greater risk. As I will show, however, rather than address this protection gap, nation
states exploit interstitial spaces by intensifying enforcement and therefore prolonging the limbo,
ambiguity and violence experienced there.

4
Where human rights have been violated and migrants subjected to violence and heightened
precarity, the human security agenda might encourage some modicum of protection from the
international community. With Canada and Norway as early advocates of the concept (Paris 2001,
87), human security signalled a scalar shift away from the territorial definition of human rights as a
welcomed and necessary part of the shift from human rights to human security. Indeed, the United
Nations Human Development Report where the paradigm was first explicated posited human
security as an urgently needed shift away from territorially bounded and state-centric ideas of
(national) security (United Nations 1994). The authors of the report explain this urgency in two
turns: that the concept of security change ‘from an exclusive stress on territorial security to a much
greater stress on people’s security’ and ‘from security through armaments to security through
sustainable development’ (1994, 24). Both of these changes, they note, involve a more people-
centred and less state-centred version of security. The paradigm was designed to address threats to
human security, including the following main categories: economic, food, health, environmental,
personal, community and political security (1994, 24–25).

Since its introduction in the 1990s, many have critiqued the human security paradigm — primarily
for its problematic definitions, discourses and agendas. Roland Paris (2001, 88) notes that one of
the key shortcomings of the paradigm is its lack of a clear definition. Jennifer Hyndman (2008)
observes that the paradigm is subject to politicisation; the concept is only as powerful as those
states committed to intervening in international arenas where human security is not protected. She
thus labels human security ‘a conditional strategy of “imperial benevolence” exercised by groupings
of industrialized countries on an ad hoc basis’ (Hyndman 2008, 242). Hyndman shows that national
security trumps human security where states fail to intervene.

Rhoda Howard-Hassmann (2012) issues an even stronger cautionary note. She argues that the
relatively new human security paradigm in fact undermines and weakens the already limited but
well-established powers of human rights law — a body of law to which states are, at the least,
occasionally compelled to adhere.

Engagement with Judith Butler’s (2004; 2009) recent scholarship can enhance this discussion.
Whereas Hyndman finds that the imperative of human security can be too easily cast into the realm
of geopolitics, Butler finds that life itself can be too easily devalued and disappeared. For Butler
(2009), it is precisely the devaluation of life that enables the politics of erasure to unfold, erasing
people, their injuries and their deaths from view. Like that of Gregory, Butler’s analysis dwells in
sites associated with the war on terror: Abu Graib and the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay. I
extend her work to offshore sites where asylum seekers and migrants are dehumanised and
invisibilised, their human security not attended to. In the next section, I review five geographical
moves undertaken offshore by authorities to inhibit access and therefore erode the right to seek
asylum.

5
Five geographical moves to inhibit access to asylum
As Briskman, Latham and Goddard (2009) note, human rights are too often ‘thrown overboard’ in
favour of the mobilisation of a politics of fear. The spatial pattern of exclusion offshore is
pronounced: states capitalise on dramatic events, such as boat interceptions or drownings at sea, to
further instigate ‘enforcement creep’ ever farther offshore, using rationales for increased
interception and detention related to deterrence. Each geographical move reviewed here traffics in
the power of distance to erase people — their lives, struggles, precarity and deaths — from public
view and memory. This erasure takes the form of invisibility, homogenisation and racialisation in
the public sphere, along with statistical absence from migration records that tend to be organised
nationally and often end at the edges of sovereign territory.

Asylum seeking is a geographically relational phenomenon. As one state intensifies border

enforcement and pursues mechanisms to exclude, asylum seekers and other migrants move
elsewhere. In this article, rather than dwell in one location where these practices are occurring, I
move — like migrants seeking entry and protection — across geographical regions to show this to
be a global phenomenon, the shrinking of spaces of asylum. To do this, I draw on examples from
distinct national contexts, including Italy, Australia and the United States.

The first geographical move has been happening for a few decades: the shifting of borders and their
enforcement offshore. This trend is well documented in the literature on migration enforcement
(Guiraudon and Lahav 2000; Coleman 2007; Briskman, Latham and Goddard 2009). While most
people associate externalisation with the European Union (for example, van Houtum 2010; Carr
2012), I trace the beginning of these contemporary practices back to the response of the United
States to Haitian and Cuban nationals seeking to enter the United States from the 1970s to the
present (Noble 2011, 76). Denis Noble notes that in the 1970s, at least 7387 Haitian migrants
entered the United States by sea, landing in Florida. These were followed by the well-known Cuban
arrivals during the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, when some 125,000 Cubans entered the United States by
boat (Noble 2011, 4). As Noble documents, the United States intensified marine enforcement
throughout the 1980s and 1990s, developing Haitian migrant interdiction operations in the early
1980s and a preventative ‘buffer zone strategy’ at sea in the 1990s. In 1994, in response to the
arrival of the Golden Venture carrying Chinese nationals to New York’s harbour, President Bill
Clinton developed the now notorious wet foot/dry foot policy. According to this policy, those who
landed on US sovereign territory accrued the right to seek asylum, whereas those intercepted
offshore (and therefore with wet feet) were more likely to be denied the opportunity to submit an
asylum claim. This policy led to frequent cases and media images of US authorities chasing migrants
to prevent them from exiting the water onto dry land along the shores of the state of Florida.
Furthermore, its logic — the use of geographical distance to inhibit access — would be reproduced
in other policies and geographical contexts in the future.

6
By the 1990s, other countries were following suit. Canada started its Immigration Control Officer
network in 1989, posting civil servants abroad to informally police hotspots in foreign territory
where human smugglers were known to operate (Mountz 2010). European Union countries
advanced geographical strategies to deter asylum seekers in the 1990s with safe third-country
agreements. These agreements dictate that asylum seekers must make a claim in the first country
where they land that has an asylum process; they may not pass though one country to another to
make a claim. As EU states removed internal borders through the Schengen Agreement, they
collaborated and eventually, in 2005, operationalised Frontex, the EU agency designed to
coordinate national marine resources to fortify external EU borders. Cetta Mainwaring (2012) calls
this process ‘distalization’, a biological term that refers to the movement of resources to the surface
of the body, in this case the external boundaries of the European Union. Australia also intensified its
marine policing in the late 1990s, a trend that erupted into the news with the notorious MV Tampa
incident in 2001, when Prime Minister John Howard announced that no more asylum seekers
intercepted at sea would be granted access to Australian soil. As with the US wet foot/dry foot
policy, those intercepted and detained offshore would have more restricted access to asylum
through a non-statutory process with fewer rights to appeal, rather than the Refugee Status
Determination process that is part of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) (Australian Human Rights
Commission 2010).

As policing at sea intensified and border enforcement shifted offshore throughout the 1990s, a
second offshore play evolved: the externalisation of asylum processing. The southern frontier of the
European Union offers a case in point, beginning with proposals from EU member states to shift all
processing of asylum seekers to northern African states (Schuster 2005). These proposals were
criticised for suggesting that EU members offshore their responsibilities as signatories to the 1951
Convention to places where neither a fair hearing of an asylum claim nor human rights protections
could be guaranteed. Some noted that outsourcing processing should not be confused with any
meaningful outsourcing of protection. Although none of these proposals moved forward formally, it
can be argued that they moved forward in practice, with the movement of EU policing deeper into
the transit routes travelled to enter the European Union from southern and eastern points (Carling
2007; Collyer 2007).

The European Union also saw more pronounced enforcement negotiations along its southern
border, where island states or states with islands received the vast majority of migrants attempting
to enter the Union. As Frontex intensified policing around Spain’s Canary Islands following a spike
in landings in 2006 (Carling 2007), Lampedusa received more arrivals (Andrijasevic 2010). Soon
thereafter, arrivals spiked on Malta and Greece (Lutterbeck 2009). These boats departed primarily
from the coast of Libya and Tunisia, but carried nationals from many countries in Africa.

7
While several islands have seen increased migration by sea, the small island of Lampedusa serves
as an important case. Lampedusa is the closest part of Italian territory to the African coast. Between
2004 and 2010, it turned from a relative safe haven of passage into the European Union to a zone of
exclusion (Andrijasevic 2010). It used to be that those landing on Lampedusa could make an asylum
claim and be transferred to Sicily. In 2004, however, the Italian government started to detain
migrants on the island. As the number of arrivals grew, conditions in detention deteriorated,
tensions flared, and authorities became more aggressive in policing marine arrivals and deflecting
them from landing. This was known as the ‘push-back policy’, or respingimento. In 2009, the
government greatly intensified its push-back policy and relied on bilateral arrangements for return
with Libya and Tunisia (Andrijasevic 2010). By 2010, there were very few boats arriving on
Lampedusa. When the Arab Spring happened in 2011, however, the cycle began again. More than
55,000 people arrived on Lampedusa (Ministero dell’Interno 2011). Some were able to stay, while
others were quickly and quietly deported in groups by boat and plane. Lampedusa once again
received international attention in October 2013, when a boat sank tragically within site, resulting
in over 350 deaths of men, women and children. Frontex announced that it would increase marine
resources to monitor, and thus began the cycle anew (de Haas 2013).

This brief account of Italian enforcement efforts on Lampedusa and across the Mediterranean
shows the progressive externalisation of asylum — rarely an official policy, but an ever-more
dispersed effect of enforcement practices with life-threatening consequences.

Geopolitical bickering intensified with the expansion of the EU — not only about burden-sharing,
but also about the safe return of migrants to EU member states and whether they would find safe
and fair hearing of their asylum claims. In January 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled
in favour of an Afghan asylum seeker who had entered Europe through Greece, travelled to
Belgium, and was threatened with return to Greece. His counsel argued that conditions of detention
and access to asylum in Greece were so poor that the country could not be considered a safe place
to seek asylum (EurActiv 2011). Greece has been labelled one of the worst violators of migrant
rights in the reception, processing and detention of migrants and asylum seekers in recent years
(Human Rights Watch 2011). Human rights practitioners and attorneys currently working the
frontlines in the Evros region describe another revolving door wherein migrants are turned back
from Greece to Turkey, and turned back again from Turkey to Greece. The human rights violations
transpiring there — including physical and mental torture, as well as a lack of clean water, space to
sleep, food and access to medical services — have prompted the human rights community and the
European Court of Human Rights to condemn conditions in Greece (Human Rights Watch 2011).

This decision raised the recurring concept of ‘burden sharing’ and power struggles wherein states
attempt to shift the burden of processing elsewhere. Mainland EU states appear to want
extraterritorial processing, while also wishing to maintain access to asylum and protection of

8
human rights in principle — if elsewhere. This decision threw into question the application of
Dublin III, a regulation that involves processing an asylum claim in the first country where a
person’s biometric data recorded and asylum claim submitted. Fierce debates ensued about who
bears the ‘burden’ of processing asylum claims, and there has been no end to geographical
strategies to effectively offshore and outsource responsibilities. One immigration attorney
addressed this conflicting mix of ‘burden sharing’ and its displacement in an interview: ‘I think they
want to empty Europe starting from Greece’ (interview, Athens, December 2011). With this
statement, she addressed the rationale of deterrence: by making conditions in detention so
horrendous, it was hoped, people would stop trying to come to Europe.

A third geographical move made to inhibit access to asylum involves increased investment in
remote detention offshore. In this area, all three geographical regions mentioned thus far — the
United States, the European Union and Australia — demonstrate expertise. Remote detention has
been pushed not only to the outer edges of the European Union, but also into northern Africa.
Médecins sans Frontières (2011a) conducted extensive research to find out what kind of medical
services were needed by the thousands of migrants travelling from southern and Sub-Saharan
African states to the north with plans to cross the Mediterranean into the European Union. The vast
majority of migrants seen by Médecins sans Frontières staff in the camp for assistance with mental
health issues — 96% — were young men between the ages of 19 and 45 (2011a, 8). The main
conditions experienced were insomnia, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (2011a, 9).
Women, too, were interviewed for the report and shared traumatic stories of sexual violence and
slavery in the custody of Libyan officials. Multiple testimonies reported women migrants who had
been brought to local hospitals for injections of Valium ‘to make me calmer during the rapes’, as one
woman explained (2011a, 13). Many men, too, had experienced sexual violence in the form of
electroshock, genital torture, beatings, enforced nudity, enforced masturbation, enforced rape and
incest (2011a, 12).

In addition to systematic violence, the Médecins sans Frontières team found acute problems with
access to medical care for those who had experienced the trauma of sexual violence and torture.
Camps and medical facilities were run by the military and therefore did not function as safe havens
for those who had experienced abuse by authorities (2011a, 14). In short, migrants trying to enter
southern Europe find little relief. They face difficult conditions during their journeys over land and
at sea, only to face physical abuse in detention in Libya, and frequent loss of life among companions
during Mediterranean crossings — sometimes in a cycle that repeats itself. Those who do reach
Lampedusa are now less likely to find a safe haven (Médecins Sans Frontières 2011b). The
geographic shift to remote detention has clearly contributed to a failure to protect migrants from
human rights violations.

9
The fourth geographical move involves the use of islands to process and detain. In this arena,
Australia proves a model case. The seeds of the story are planted with a policy of mandatory
detention of asylum seekers that began in 1992. In the late 1990s, the country found increasing
numbers of boats arriving (though these numbers were still relatively low when placed in the
context of other modes of entry and other categories of immigration or migration). In 2001, then
Prime Minister John Howard faced poor chances for re-election, according to polls. When the
Norwegian freighter the MV Tampa rescued 433 asylum seekers on a ship in distress, Howard drew
his line in the sand. He made a case of the boat by not allowing its captain to dock in an Australian
port where those on board could reach Australian soil (Mares 2002). This gave rise to what became
known as the Pacific Solution: a two-tier system that placed migrants intercepted at sea in facilities
on excised islands offshore, including the Australian overseas territory of Christmas Island, Papua
New Guinea’s Manus Island, and the small island state of Nauru. Those intercepted or arriving in
excised territory face a non-statutory process in the hearing of their claims. Like the US wet
foot/dry foot policy, this solution put into place a two-tier system of access, with those detained
offshore having less access to asylum than those processed onshore through a combination of
formal and informal modes of mediation: less access to legal representation, fewer advocates, and
fewer rights to appeal decisions. Thus, distance once again is used to mediate access. Australian
authorities worked creatively with what Gregory referred to as the ‘soft edges’ of law. Excision
laws, for example, were passed by parliament in 2001, declaring thousands of bits of Australian
territory; and in 2013, declaring mainland Australia, no longer part of sovereign territory for the
purposes of migration.

There exists extensive documentation of poor conditions of detention on islands during the time of
the Pacific Solution and in the more recent re-opening of the facilities on Nauru and Manus
(Australian Human Rights Commission 2010, Amnesty 2013. There, detainees often lack adequate
medical and psychological care (Australian Human Rights Commission 2010, Amnesty 2013).
Disease and infection rates were high as a result. There were no lawyers or advocates on the
islands, and so asylum seekers detained there tried to find and retain legal counsel in Australian
cities. Asylum seekers held on these islands entered into years of prolonged legal, spatial and
temporal limbo. The majority of them fit into the Convention definition of a refugee, but were
ultimately resettled in third countries such as Canada and New Zealand. Some were eventually
resettled in Australia.

The Pacific Solution continued for several years. In 2008, when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was
elected, he declared an end to the Pacific Solution. By that time, however, a high-security AUS$396
million (Hawke and Williams 2011) facility had already been constructed and opened on Christmas
Island, Australian overseas territory governed by Canberra but located closer to the coast of
Indonesia than Australia. The facilities on Nauru and Manus were emptied, and most migrants
intercepted at sea were brought to Christmas Island.

10
By 2010, there were approximately 2500 people in detention in three facilities on Christmas Island
(Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2010). Statistics show that asylum seekers held
offshore by Australian authorities have both high rates of acceptance of their claims and, due to the
prolonged and uncertain nature of limbo in detention offshore, higher rates of suicide (Bastians
2011). By 2011, more than half of the incidents of self-harm in the entire Australian detention
system transpired on Christmas Island (Bastians 2011). Detainees experienced problems with
health and mental illness. Self-harm and other expressions of despair and depression were common
(Australian Human Rights Commission 2010).

In its 2010 report, the Australian Human Rights Commission expressed several concerns about
detention on Christmas Island, including breaches in the protection of fundamental human rights.
The report noted a lack of medical services, and especially a lack of mental health services. Also
alarming were the lack of a time limit on detention and the failure to review reasons why
individuals were being held — both violations of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) guidelines regarding detention of asylum seekers (UNHCR 2012). The 2010 report also
detailed dehumanising treatment of asylum seekers and poor conditions in facilities.

Rather than respond to frequent criticism by shutting down offshore facilities, Australia continues
to employ its economic and political might across the region to detain offshore, including support
for at least twelve facilities across Indonesia (Taylor 2009). For a while, authorities tried to hide
this use of foreign island territories to stop people from reaching Australia. Indonesia is not a
signatory to the Convention, so those detained there enter into even more prolonged legal limbo
than those on Australian overseas territory, where a system for processing claims is in place. There
are serious consequences of detaining offshore in places that are not signatories to the Convention.
The most basic among these is the inability of those detained in non-signatory spaces to seek
asylum. As a result, people remain there for years, unable to travel on to make a claim and often
unwilling to return home – although they are pressured by authorities and sometimes offered
financial incentive to do so (Mountz 2011b). Many become stateless.

The restless Australian geographical imagination has continued with a search for new solutions on
new islands. In July 2010, new Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that all asylum seekers
would be processed in East Timor (Tillett 2010). News soon emerged, however, that her
government had not actually consulted officials in East Timor, and this prompted resistance by the
East Timorese.

The offshore processing facility was reopened in November 2012. In 2013, Prime Minister Rudd
and Prime Minister Peter O’Neill of Indonesia announced the Regional Resettlement Agreement
between Australian and Papua New Guinea, news that all asylum seekers arriving by boat in

11
Australia would be settled in Papua New Guinea rather than Australia. It was argued that ample
facilities did not yet exist at the time of the announcement. A site visit conducted by the UNHCR in
June 2013 found the following:

The current PNG policy and practice of detaining all asylum-seekers at the closed Centre, on a
mandatory and indefinite basis without an assessment as to the necessity and proportionality of the
purpose of such detention in the individual case, and without being brought promptly before a judicial
or other independent authority amounts to arbitrary detention that is inconsistent with international
human rights law.
Transfer arrangements remain problematic and do not appear to reflect the required procedural
safeguards under international law, or under the bilateral agreement between Australia and PNG.
[UNHCR 2013, 1.]

A subsequent site visit by Amnesty International in November 2013 found the violation of human
rights occurring in detention on Papua New Guinea, including the risk of refoulement, arbitrary
detention without time limit or review, discrimination and penalization based on mode of asylum-
seeker arrival, a failure to provide procedural protections, and humane treatment of detainees
(Amnesty International 2013: 3-4). The report detailed poor conditions of detention and transfer
from Christmas Island.

The securitisation of migration in Australia’s enforcement archipelago across the region was
construed during national political campaigns with the construction of xenophobic narratives that
preyed on fears of outsiders (Tsiolkas 2013). What remained hidden from view was the plight of
those detainees shuttled quietly through the system, their lives devalued through their very
invisibility.

The fifth and final geographical measure is particularly inhumane precisely because of its
application of distance as a punishment in the most intimate fabric of daily life: the separation of
families during prolonged periods of spatial, temporal, psychological and legal limbo. Separation
and segregation are themselves geographical strategies, forms of containment that rely on distance
as a punitive measure (Sibley 1995). Although the UNHCR guidelines on detention caution firmly
against both the detention of children and the separation of families (UNHCR 2012, 34), both
practices feature commonly and are more pronounced in offshore sites of detention (UNHCR 2013).

The practice of separating family members has been well documented both within the Australian
national system and in offshore facilities funded by Australia. In Indonesia, male family members
have been removed from female family members and placed in higher-security facilities on
different islands far away. One case involved an extended family from Afghanistan being held in
detention on the small island of Lombok for seven years, from 2001 to 2008. Authorities repeatedly
visited the family and encouraged them to return to Afghanistan. After family members refused to
do so, authorities appeared one morning and removed all the men in the family, placing them in

12
higher-security detention on the island of Sulawesi (Mountz 2011b). In 2011, human rights
advocates discussed two problems for children of migrant families in detention in Indonesia. On the
one hand, it was problematic for children to be held in detention, against UNHCR (2012) guidelines.
Still other children were removed from parents and held by families in unknown conditions.
Consider the following observation recorded during fieldwork in Indonesia and Australia by
Research Assistant Kate Coddington:

SURABAYA detention center: one man has three children … all under 6 years. All are in cell with 18
men. The baby, 14 month old, was taken by guards. Sometimes they bring the baby to visit, at first
through the fence but now father can hold baby. For 4 months the family was not let out of the cell but
now they are able to get out occasionally. [Activists] alerted UNHCR, Canberra, Geneva. All claim that
they are aware and can do nothing. [Fieldnotes, Melbourne, October 2011.]

The United States has also been criticised for its punitive separation of children from their parents
during what have been the highest rates of deportation in US history. Between 2010 and 2012,
some 200,000 parents of children who were American citizens were deported, leaving 5000
children in the foster care system (Nazario 2013).

Whether applied broadly to large populations of people arriving by boat or on an individual basis at
the intimate scale of family or household, geographical distancing not only inhibits access to
asylum, it also punishes through isolation. Those held offshore, shuttled to islands after being
intercepted, experience jurisdictional complexity and legal limbo, rather than a clear path to having
an asylum claim heard and adjudicated.

The implications of using geography to erode rights

As the discussion above shows, these geographical moves to distance are punitive, part of a
pronounced global pattern that is shrinking routes and access to asylum by pushing people to
locations that are more remote from the infrastructure of asylum processing, advocacy, legal
representation and family. Though distinct national histories of immigration enforcement policy
can and should be traced, my aim here is to show that authorities across national contexts are
mimicking each other’s ‘best practices,’ from externalisation to remote detention. The global
movement of best practices demonstrates the general belief that if border enforcement intensifies
in one place (such as Australia), then human smuggling routes and asylum seeking will increase
elsewhere (such as Canada, the United States or Europe).

Each of these moves shows the distancing of asylum seekers from sovereign territory, with the use
of remote locations such as islands to invisibilise people and the violence they endure en route. This
distancing of foreign others also mobilises the politics of fear through which national publics
imagine others as security threats offshore (Bigo 2002). While distancing utilizes geography, its
effects are felt more deeply about the erosion of access to asylum and the protection of human

13
rights. Distancing also functions as a dehumanising mechanism, removing proximity between self
and other. This erasure of humanity makes it possible for violence to occur in offshore locations of
enforcement. As Butler would argue, this dehumanisation devalues the lives lost in the enforcement
archipelago. Indeed, the rare occasions when these issues do surface in public consciousness is
generally during tragic events, such as deaths in detention and drownings at sea, such as the loss in
2013 within sight of Italy’s island of Lampedusa.

The violence endured begets more enforcement, as in the response of the European Union —
coordinating additional marine resources through Frontex to police the Mediterranean — and thus
reinforces the cycle of precarity. Each time crises reach mainstream media and conjure
international attention, enforcement agencies and politicians renew commitments to policing at
sea, whether in the name of enforcement or humanitarian rescue. With the arrival of Sri Lankan
Tamils on (only) two boats in Canada in 2010 and 2011, the Canadian federal government brought
in a raft of dramatic and reductive changes to the Canadian refugee claimant system (Canadian
Council for Refugees 2012). Australia, in perhaps the most stunning repetition of all, reopened
island detention centres that had been previously shut down, renewing its commitment to
processing all asylum seekers offshore on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. History thus repeats
itself (de Haas 2013).

The sites where asylum seekers find themselves isolated in limbo across the archipelago are a form
of Gregory’s vanishing points. There, Howard-Hassman’s and Hyndman’s critiques of the human
security paradigm bear out. Geopolitics and national security prove more powerful than
international agreements and laws in place to protect. Instead, there is a failure to protect as states
show their capacity to evade international law. As Hannah Arendt noted in the aftermath of World
War II when the 1951 Convention was written, the protection of human rights requires not only
legal instruments, but the political willingness of the international community to protect.

Judith Butler frames the loss of those whom she argues cannot be mourned through three kinds of
death: the physical death of the body, the political death of the subject who can be forgotten, and
the ontological death of the person (2004, 31–35). Butler’s three kinds of death are readily visible
in the enforcement archipelago. Migrants die physical deaths all too often in their crossings.
Furthermore, the political death of the subject who can be forgotten means that asylum seekers
have no voice to represent themselves. Their histories and lives are erased by distance. The
ontological death involves dehumanisation, resulting in the effects of prolonged limbo, isolation and
uncertainty: a profound existential crisis resulting directly in higher rates of suicide, depression,
self-harm and physical ailments in remote locations of detention offshore.

14
In spite of their death and disappearance, migrants continue to haunt the international state
system, where they do not fit into legally determined categories and where they are not protected
by territorially demarcated commitments, but where they nonetheless continue to live.

Conclusions
The primary argument offered for excessive shows of migration-related enforcement is deterrence:
more enforcement and interception, detention and deportation regimes will deter future border-
crossings. Research shows instead that increased enforcement does not deter (Koser 2000; Nadig
2002; Nevins 2010; Hiemstra 2013). On the contrary, enforcement measures prove damaging,
disruptive and unsustainable. They prolong experiences of insecurity and intensify precarity
offshore, often retraumatising the displaced. They cut off participation in social and economic life
and livelihoods and instead assemble vanishing points where migrants and asylum seekers live in
limbo.

The repetition of violence and death throughout this analysis and in offshore zones of enforcement
prompts me to return once more to Butler’s (2004) argument that we turn precarity and grief into a
relational politics. Butler explores loss as an experience shared by everyone, if not in the same way.

Butler (2004) understands us all to be socially constituted bodies attached to others through loss
and vulnerability. She suggests that mourning involves a transformation that is permanent, and she
aims to shift understanding of grief as a private and personal act to one that is relational and
political: a loss in which we are all complicit. She argues that loss and mourning be politicising:
‘[grief] furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by
bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorising fundamental
dependency and ethical responsibility’ (2004, 22).

I want to engage Butler’s call to use precarity as a basis for the formation of political community, to
‘guard against injury and violence’:

I propose to consider a dimension of political life that has to do with our exposure to violence and our
complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows, and with finding a
basis for community in these conditions. [Butler 2004, 19.]

Understanding precarity and loss relationally means that loss of anyone anywhere affects the
precarity of everyone everywhere. Recognition of violence holds potential as a basis for the
formation of political community in Butlerian terms. Social and political organisations, suggests
Butler, develop in ways that maximise precarity for some in order to minimise precariousness for
others. Our own government’s investment in border control makes the lives of others elsewhere
unsustainable, even untenable. Recognition of detention in vanishing points without limits as a loss
of life would lead to a radically distinct migration politics, one that builds on recognition and

15
relationality, protection and human security. This position could be argued as a rationale to
increase protection in the very places where people have been abandoned by the international state
system that so readily devalues those outside of formal categories of belonging. The politics of
mourning could be mobilized to protect human rights and human security.

For all of this discussion of distancing, there is a certain irony when one compares offshore and
onshore practices. Mainland territory does not necessarily offer significantly better protection.
Each of the geographical moves discussed offshore can be shown to be actively at work internally to
sovereign territory as well. In the dislodging of the border, its enforcement has moved not only
offshore, but also onshore. Local enforcement officials internal to sovereign territory have taken up
the work of border enforcement as federal authorities travel abroad to police borders in foreign
territory. In the United States, for example, various initiatives have achieved some degree of
devolution of immigration enforcement to local authorities. Though once the domain of federal
authorities who operated primarily near the border, foreign nationals are now more likely to
encounter border authorities in the mundane and intimate spaces of daily life: the laundromat,
medical clinic, bus station or traffic stop. Detention centres are often built strategically in relation to
boundaries of federal jurisdiction, such that where one is detained may influence the outcome of
asylum cases submitted, processed, heard and appealed according to location. In Australia and the
United States, the use of remote sites of detention internal to sovereign territory as a means to
detach migrants from families, legal advocates, and communities of support is well documented (for
example, National Immigrant Justice Center 2010). Detention facilities themselves become islands,
and migrants within them islands within islands, often cut off from information about their own
cases, interpreters, and legal avenues to exit. Within national detention systems, both Australia and
the United States have been criticised for the unnecessary detention of children and separation of
families.

The distancing that I trace offshore is also used to isolate and inhibit access to asylum onshore.
Vanishing points emerge in a topology of punitive distancing to erode protection over safe haven.
Rather than a robust exercise of the mandate to protect encoded in the Convention, we see a
profound erosion of the right to even seek asylum: the shrinking of spaces of and paths to asylum.

References

Australian legislation
Migration Act 1958 (Cth)

European Union legislation

Dublin Regulation (Regulation 2013/604/CE) (Dublin III)

16
International legal materials
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 8 July 1951, United Nations, Treaty Series,
vol 189 p 137
Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, 31 January 1967, United Nations, Treaty Series,
vol 606, p 267

Other references
Amnesty International (2010) Seeking Safety, Finding Fear: Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Migrants
in Libya and Malta [Online] Available:
www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/REG01/004/2010/en/d0e71b60-71ec-4c4b-8b2f-
d03a881b90f6/reg010042010en.pdf [2013, December 10]

Amnesty International (2013) This is breaking people: Human Rights Violations at Australia’s Asylum
Seeker Porcessing Centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. [Online] Available:

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA12/002/2013/en/b2f135dc-3353-420d-b587-
05d2b3db6e2f/asa120022013en.pdf [2014, April 8]

Andrijasevic R (2010) ‘DEPORTED: the right to asylum at EU’s external border of Italy and Libya’
48(1) International Migration 148–74

Arendt H (1958) The Human Condition University of Chicago Press

Australian Human Rights Commission (2010) ‘Immigration detention on Christmas Island’ [Online]
Available: www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/2010-immigration-detention-christmas-island
[2013, December 12]

Bastians K (2011) ‘Christmas Island self-harm on rise’ The Age 23 May 2011 p 5

Bigo D (2002) ‘Security and immigration: toward a critique of the governmentality of unease’ 27
Alternatives 63–92

17
Briskman L, Latham S and Goddard C (2009) Human Rights Overboard: Seeking Asylum in Australia
Scribe Publications, Carlton North

Butler J (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence Verso, New York

Butler J (2009) Frames of War Verso, London and New York

Canadian Council for Refugees (2012) ‘Protect refugees from Bill C-31: joint statement’ [Online]
Available: ccrweb.ca/en/protect-refugees-c31-statement [2012, November 29]

Carling J (2007) ‘Unauthorized migration from Africa to Spain’ 45(4) International Migration 3–37

Carr M (2012) Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent New York Press, New York

Coleman M (2007) ‘Immigration geopolitics beyond the US–Mexico Border’ 39(1) Geopolitics 54–76

Collyer M (2007) ‘In-between places: trans-Saharan transit migrants in Morocco and the
fragmented journey to Europe’ 39(4) Antipode 668–90

Conlon D (2011) ‘Waiting: feminist perspectives on the spacings/timings of migrant (im)mobility’

18(3) Gender, Place & Culture 353–60

de Haas H (2013) ‘Smuggling is a reaction to border controls, not the cause of migration’ [Online]
Available: http://heindehaas.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/smuggling-is-reaction-to-border.html [2013,
December 11]

Department of Immigration and Citizenship (2010) Immigration detention statistics summary, 30

July (available from the author)

18
EurActiv (2011) ‘Court exposes appalling detention conditions in Greece’ EurActiv 24 January
[Online] Available: www.euractiv.com/en/justice/court-exposes-appalling-detention-conditions-
greece-news-501500 [2011, March 2]

Gordon A (2008) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Greenberg J and Hier S (2001) ‘Crisis, mobilization and collective problematization: “illegal”
Chinese migrants and the Canadian news media’ 2(4) Journalism Studies 563–83

Gregory D (2007) ‘Vanishing points: law, violence, and exception in the global war prison’ in Violent
Geographies, ed D Gregory and A Pred, Routledge, New York pp 205–36

Guiraudon V and Lahav G (2000) ‘The state sovereignty debate revisited: the case of migration
control’ 33(2) Comparative Political Studies 163–95

Hawke, A., & Williams, H. (2011) An Independent Review of the Incidents at the Christmas Island

Immigration Detention Centre and Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. Available:

http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/independent-review-incidents.htm. [2014, April 8]

Hiemstra N (2013) ‘“You don’t even know where you are”: chaotic geographies of U.S. migrant
detention and deportation’ in Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant
Detention, ed D Moran, N Gill and D Conlon, Ashgate, Farnham pp 57–75

Howard-Hassmann R (2012) ‘Human security: undermining human rights?’ 34 Human Rights

Quarterly 88–112

Human Rights Watch (2008) ‘Stuck in a revolving door: Iraqis and other asylum seekers and
migrants at the Greece/Turkey entrance to the European Union’ [Online] Available:
www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/greeceturkey1108web_0.pdf [2012, July 19]

19
Human Rights Watch (2011) ‘The EU’s dirty hands: Frontex involvement in ill-treatment of migrant
detainees in Greece’ [Online] Available:
www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/greece0911webwcover_0.pdf

Hyndman J (2008) ‘Conflict, citizenship, and human security: geographies of protection’ in War,
Citizenship, Territory, ed D Cowan and E Gilbert, Routledge, New York pp 241–57

Koser K (2000) ‘Asylum policies, trafficking and vulnerability’ 38 International Migration 91–111

Lutterbeck D (2009) ‘Small frontier island: Malta and the challenge of irregular migration’ 20(1)
Mediterranean Quarterly 119–44

Mainwaring C (2012) ‘Resisting distalization? Malta and Cyprus’ influence on EU migration and
asylum policies’ 31(4) Refugee Studies Quarterly 38–66

Mares P (2002) Borderline University of New South Wales Press, Sydney

Médecins Sans Frontières (2011a) ‘Torture, exploitation and abuse of migrants in North Africa’ May
(available from the author)

Médecins Sans Frontières. 2011b. From North Africa to Italy: Seeking Refuge, Finding Suffering.
May 2011.
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/reports/2011/MSF_From%20North%20Afri
ca%20to%20Italy.pdf [2012, July 30]

Ministero dell’Interno (2011) ‘Informativa al Senato sui flussi migratori a Lampedusa’ 29

September [Online] Available:
www.interno.it/mininterno/export/sites/default/it/sezioni/sala_stampa/notizie/immigrazione/0
000070_2011_09_29_informativa_Viale_al_Senato.html

20
Mountz A (2010) Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Mountz A (2011a) ‘The enforcement archipelago: detention, haunting, and asylum on islands’ 30
Political Geography 118–28

Mountz A (2011b) ‘Where asylum-seekers wait: feminist counter-topographies of sites between

states’ 18(3) Gender, Place and Culture 381–99

Nadig A (2002) ‘Human smuggling, national security, and refugee protection’ 15(1) Journal of
Refugee Studies 1–25

National Immigrant Justice Center (2010) ‘Isolated in detention: limited access to legal counsel in
immigration detention facilities jeopardizes a fair day in court’ [Online] Available:
www.immigrantjustice.org/isolatedindetention [2013, December 12]

Nazario S (2013) ‘The heartache of an immigrant family’ New York Times 15 October p A27

Nevins J (2010) Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The Rise of the ‘Illegal Alien’ and the Making of
the U.S.–Mexico Boundary (2nd edn) Routledge, New York

Noble D (2011) The U.S. Coast Guard’s War on Human Smuggling University Press of Florida,
Gainesville

Paris R (2001) ‘Human security: paradigm shift or hot air?’ 26(2) International Security 87–102

Pro Asyl (2012) ‘Human cargo: arbitrary readmissions from the Italian sea ports to Greece’ [Online]
Available: www.proasyl.de/fileadmin/fm-dam/p_KAMPAGNEN/Flucht-ist-kein-
Verbrechen/humancargo_01.pdf [2012, July 16]

21
Pro Asyl (2013) ‘Pushed back: systematic human rights violations against refugees in the Aegean
Sea and at the Greek–Turkish land border’ [Online] Available: www.proasyl.de/fileadmin/fm-
dam/l_EU_Fluechtlingspolitik/pushed_back_web_01.pdf [2013, December 12]

Schuster L (2005) ‘The realities of a new asylum paradigm’ COMPAS Working Paper 20, University
of Oxford, Policy Documentation Centre [Online] Available:
www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publications/Working%20papers/Liza%20Schuster%20wp0520.pdf [2007,
April 4]

Sibley D (1995) Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West Routledge, New York

Taylor J (2009) ‘Behind Australian doors: examining the conditions of detention of asylum seekers
in Indonesia’ [Online] Available: www.law.monash.edu.au/castancentre/news/behind-australian-
doors-report.pdf [2013, December 12]

Tillett A (2010) ‘Gillard’s Indian Ocean solution to boat people’ West Australian 7 July p 1

Tsiolkas C (2013) ‘Why we hate refugees’ The Monthly September pp 22–31

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (2012) Detention Guidelines: Guidelines
on the Applicable Criteria and Standards Relating to the Detention of Asylum-Seekers and Alternatives
to Detention [Online] Available: www.unhcr.org/505b10ee9.html [2013, December 12]

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (2013) ‘UNHCR monitoring visit to
Manus Island, Papua New Guinea 11–13 June 2013’ [Online] Available:
www.refworld.org/pdfid/51f61ed54.pdf [2013, December 12]

United Nations Human Development Report (1994) New Dimensions of Human Security [Online]
Available: http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr1994 [2013, December 12]

22
van Houtum H (2010) ‘Human blacklisting: the global apartheid of the EU’s external border regime’
28(6) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 957–76

Acknowledgements:

Many thanks go to the many people who participated in this research, and to Dr.
Kate Coddington for her wonderful research assistance. I am also grateful to Drs.
Claudia Tazreiter, Sharon Pickering, and Leanne Weber for thoughtful feedback,
encouragement, and an invigorating workshop in Sydney. This material is based
upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0847133.

* Balsillie School of International Affairs and Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfrid
Laurier University, Ontario, Canada. Email: amountz@wlu.ca.

23