The Death of Asylum

Alison Mountz

Published by University of Minnesota Press

Mountz, Alison.
The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago.
University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/77519.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/77519

[ Access provided at 4 Nov 2020 18:43 GMT from Harvard Library ]

 Asylum:
An Obituary

Border deaths at sea are increasing at alarming rates. While many mourn
this loss of life, another death goes unnoticed: the death of asylum itself.
This death is visible where money is invested in walls, fences, intercep-
tion, and detention rather than in processing claims and legal avenues
to entry. People who are starving or displaced by violence must travel
somewhere to survive. If one country locks its doors, they must knock
elsewhere. Recent border deaths are, therefore, not only a European
or North American crisis but part of a relational, global geography. As
Canada, Australia, the United States, and other countries close their
doors to people fleeing strife and persecution, these countries become
complicit in their deaths elsewhere. Amid these moves, the right to
asylum is being buried, disappearing in public discourse and in the
closure of geographical and legal routes to safe haven.
The loss of asylum is a loss to be grieved like any other.
Asylum was born in Geneva, a child of state-­sanctioned atrocity
and subsequent displacement during World War II. This lineage as-
sured its place among human rights conventions developed after 1945
to protect victims of oppression. The 1951 Convention Relating to the
Status of Refugees was designed to prevent further abandonment of
those displaced.
Asylum offered the right to seek protection from a well-­founded
fear of persecution. In its seventy years, asylum helped millions flee
persecution, enjoying its greatest support from Canada, Australia, and
the United States. Each now shuts down paths to protection in its own
way, as countries of the Global North attempt to contain displacement
and countries in the Global South invest more heavily to provide shelter.

xi
x i i    A S Y L U M

Asylum’s deterioration began at sea in the Caribbean in the early

1980s, when the United States intercepted, detained, and returned
Haitian and Cuban nationals. Other countries followed suit, contraven-
ing international obligations to protect by prohibiting people from land-
ing on sovereign territory where they accrue the right to make a claim.
Potential asylum seekers are, thereby, prevented from seeking asylum.
The United States responded to a 2014 surge in asylum seeking by
Central Americans by building its largest detention facility in Dilley,
Texas. Authorities detained women and children there while also mov-
ing processing offshore. When a surge happened again a few years later,
Donald Trump’s administration separated families and children, reduced
access to asylum to particular social groups, and moved processing
offshore through bilateral agreements with Mexico and Guatemala.
Although the violence that drove the exodus from Central America
continues, the effect was a steep drop-­off in asylum claims from Hondu-
ras, El Salvador, and Guatemala and a steep climb in violence targeting
those displaced and in limbo in Mexico. By 2018, U.S. authorities had
separated families, detaining children in facilities along the border, and
forced asylum seekers into limbo in Mexico.
Asylum became diseased in public discourse, declining rapidly in
its final years. Children crossing into the southwestern United States
were called illegal, treated as security threats, admonished, detained,
and told to go home by hysterical protestors who trod on familiar ter-
ritory: “not in my backyard.” These protestors would like their country
to abdicate obligations under international law.
Many people seeking asylum travel by boat. Marine arrivals inspire
fears of invasion and cost, and politicians stoke these fears. Australia
banishes asylum seekers to island countries that are not bound by the
Convention and therefore offer few chances for asylum. It funds de-
tention in Nauru (a small independent state), on Papua New Guinea’s
Manus Island, and across Indonesia, places where rights violations of
those detained—­including sexual violence and deprivation—­have been
well documented. People detained on these islands respond with hunger
strikes, self-­immolation, and other attempts at suicide and expressions
of protest. Australian authorities respond, in turn, by paying for their
imagined resettlement in Cambodia and beyond.
Asylum died a sudden death in Canada, until recently a leading
advocate among Western countries offering protection. After enjoying
 AS YLUM     x i i i

global repute as a leader in refugee resettlement and refugee claimant

programs, thanks largely to mass resettlement in the early 1980s of more
than sixty thousand Indochinese displaced during the Vietnam War,
at the same time that it opted to resettle displaced Syrians from camps,
Canada recently continued to close doors to and open space in deten-
tion facilities for asylum seekers, expanding the Safe Third Country
Agreement to limit access to asylum in 2019.
When the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) reported a 54 percent rise in claims worldwide in 2014, Can-
ada boasted a 49 percent drop in claims and recently reached its lowest
rate of resettled refugees in decades. In 2013, when the number of people
making asylum claims globally grew by 24 percent, the number making
claims in Canada fell by 49 percent (Government of Canada 2019, 47;
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] 2014b).
In 2019, the UNHCR reported 70.8 million displaced people around
the globe. In the same year, the United States resettled the lowest number
of people since it had begun refugee resettlement.
Meanwhile, asylum seeking is reaching new heights globally. By the
end of 2018, 3.5 million people awaited adjudication of their asylum
claims, according to the UNHCR (2019).
As the number of asylum seekers rose globally, some European
Union (EU) states refortified national borders, Australia once again
relegated asylum seekers to reopened detention facilities offshore, and
the United States banned asylum seeking and all travel from several
countries by executive order.
In Canada, cancerous language criminalized asylum seekers as
security threats, labeled terrorists before they ever landed. This lan-
guage metastasized with importation of U.S. and Australian politics
and practices of intercepting and detaining people deemed illegal and
bogus refugees rather than asylum seekers. Though small in number,
boat arrivals catalyzed dramatic changes, including mandatory and
indefinite detention. These mirrored efforts to deny landing to Indians
who were British subjects on the Komagata Maru in 1914 and German
Jews on the St. Louis in 1939.
To block asylum seeking, governments invest in policing and de-
tention to contain displacement elsewhere. Divesting from protection
involves looking away from humanitarian crises from Central America
to the Mediterranean and Syria.
x i v     A S Y L U M

Governments are complicit in migrant deaths due to their heavy

investments in border enforcement and detention, when research shows
consistently over time that deterrence fails. Deterrence is perhaps the
most expensive and lasting public policy failure of our time. Between
2006 and 2015, EU states invested €299 million in enforcement opera-
tions at sea through Frontex alone (Frontex 2016). Italy, Malta, and
Greece expanded detention and deportation. In 2014, the U.S. border
enforcement budget was $19 billion. During the Barack Obama ad-
ministration, approximately four hundred thousand were detained
and deported.
And still, people came. They endured perilous journeys and spent
years languishing in detention and limbo en route. In 2015, the Econo-
mist estimated that 1 million people were waiting on the north coast of
Africa as thousands more embarked across the Indian Ocean.
In its heyday during the Cold War, asylum enjoyed nearly universal
respect. Asylum was unique in protecting those who used grit and de-
termination to land in a country that adjudicated claims. Authorities
retained the right to determine which claims were accepted. Although
never guaranteed, asylum will be remembered for the right at least to
be heard.
Asylum is survived by the United Nations High Commission for
Refugees and by the principle of protection in countries of origin—­the
idea that people be protected at home. Asylum is also survived by its
cousin, the refugee camp. Its prognosis is more robust: some 16 million
people now live in protracted refugee situations, displaced for five years
or more. While those displaced and held in camps do not enjoy the same
recognition in law, they proved more palatable politically for providing
the displaced with basic shelter closer to home. Recent years have seen
the proliferation of temporary-­seeming sites where displaced people seek
shelter, from France’s Calais to Rohingya in Bangladesh and Syrians in
Turkey, and the increased use of remote islands to confine and isolate.
Judith Butler (2004) writes that obituaries facilitate the public dis-
tribution of grief. Asylum will be remembered by those it saved and
for those whom it could not. It leaves behind a dark world, drowning
in its own cynicism.