New Border and Citizenship Politics

H. Schwenken, S. Russ, H. Schwenken, S. Russ, Kenneth A. Loparo, Sabine Ruß-Sattar, H. Schwenken, S. Russ, Sabine Ruß-Sattar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137326621
• eBook ISBN: 9781137326638
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection examines the intersections and dynamics of bordering processes and citizenship politics in the Global North and Australia. By taking the political agency of migrants into account, it approaches the subject of borders as a genuine political and socially constructed phenomenon and transcends a state-centered perspective.

Part I

Introduction: The Politics of Redesigning Borders

Helen Schwenken and Sabine Ruß-Sattar

In autumn 2013 the European public is mourning for almost 400 people – mainly from Eritrea and Somalia – who died on 3 October 2013 near the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa when their ship caught fire and sank. Meanwhile, the European border agency Frontex posts a human-touch cover story on a rescue mission in the Mediterranean Sea on its website (Frontex, 2013). One could have the impression that the much criticised agency is in fact a life-rescuing agency. Below the cover story we find pictures of the new European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR) that has been introduced in December 2013. We see men sitting in front of a row of large monitors with satellite images of Europe and in particular the Mediterranean Sea around the south of Italy. Ship icons on the monitors indicate the location of vessels potentially on mission by people smugglers and with unauthorised passengers on board. EUROSUR is supposed to monitor irregular migration flows and to impede the business of smugglers – and to save people’s lives by spotting and rescuing them. The combination of surveillance and rescue is in line with statements issued by politicians such as European Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström, directly after the Lampedusa tragedy: ‘We have to become better at identifying and rescuing vessels at risk. We also need to intensify our efforts to fight criminal networks exploiting human despair,’ (quoted in Europarlamento 24, 2013). Empirically, one can raise doubts on how serious the link between rescue and securitised border control actually is. Only a few days after the 3 October tragedy, another ship sank close to Lampedusa and dozens of migrants died. Further, Frontex had to admit that it actively pushed back ships with refugees, although this practice had been declared unlawful by the European Court of Justice in 2012 (Monitor, 2013). From a discourse analytical perspective the linkage of security, blaming greedy people smugglers for the migrants’ deaths and lifesaving missions by Frontex is characteristic of the current border regime. It allows increasing legitimacy for further Europeanising border controls and the introduction of new technologies. This discursive figure has to be situated in the broader shift from a security-driven approach to what is called migration management, which is often understood as a middle way between repressive control measures and a more liberal approach (Kalm, 2012; Geiger and Pécoud, 2010). What has to be taken into account, though, is the specific space the current debate refers to – the sea. European external borders and in particular their sea borders have been at the centre of redesigning the borders of the European Union (EU) (as well as Australia, as the contribution by Weber and Pickering in this volume shows). Why is the sea border so central in this regard? Border regime studies note a trend towards an externalisation and blurring of borders (e.g. Boswell, 2003; Transit Migration, 2007; Huysmans, 2000 and 2006). The national border, and in particular the sea border, is no longer a clear line with checkpoints guarded by easily recognisable border patrol staff. At the sea there is often a dispute over which state is responsible for saving shipwrecked migrants (see Klepp in this volume). In such an environment of divided responsibilities there is ample space for experimenting with new forms of border control. The Frontex logo visualises this approach: The logo contains the 12 European stars, a ‘protective’ blue circle around one of these stars and a green line from the top left to the bottom right. Both the blue circle and the green line are inside as well outside of the assumed territory of the European Union. The logo thus visualises the spatial understanding of the agency, controlling both in- and outside of the EU’s territory.

This first part of the volume thus focuses on the contested territorial and political dimensions of attempts to redesign borders, in particular external borders. A variety of actors becomes visible that contribute to these processes – governments, border control units, international organisations, media, migrants and borderzone populations. The authors engage with the troubling finding that the meaning of how migration, security, control etc. are understood by different groups of actors often shifts throughout the political process. These strategic shifts are characteristic of the contested politics of redesigning borders and conditioning mobility. While the contributions by Weber and Pickering and Klepp focus on the control claims at to-be-redesigned borders, İçduygu and Üstübici and Ruß-Sattar engage with the cultural politics at play. Both contributions focus the developments in border politics with regard to the EU as the most striking case of the emerging postnational border constellation (Vobruba, 2010). As these case studies demonstrate, the often-used formula of a closed ‘Fortress Europe’ is indeed misleading and may be rethought, as Vobruba proposes, as a ‘bazaar of mobility and migration’ (ibid.). The results of negotiations on migration and border issues may in fact be related to package-deals in other policy fields. Further, the redesigning of borders can be observed not only at the frontlines – some of the scenes where these contested shifts take place are outside public visibility, such as in ‘migration diplomacy’ (İçduygu and Üstübici, in this volume) – but also at the sea, where from time to time the Pope or TV cameras are present and appeal to the humanistic conscience.

1

Constructing Voluntarism: Technologies of ‘intent management’ in Australian Border Controls

Leanne Weber and Sharon Pickering

Australia has attracted a dubious international reputation over the last decade for its harsh policies towards asylum seekers and has become a world leader in border externalisation practices aimed at preventing their arrival. At the same time, Australian governments have also historically shown a preparedness to use their internal enforcement powers to expel non-citizens who commit criminal offences or violate their strict visa conditions. These border control practices which operate, respectively, before and after arrival reflect the external and internal manifestations of the Australian border. Although openly coercive practices such as offshore interdiction, detention and deportation are the most visible and visceral aspects of Australian border control, new forms of border governance are emerging that seek to shape individual decision-making to promote ‘voluntary’ compliance with migration management goals at both onshore and offshore locations. This governmental project is pursued through what Rose (2000: 324) describes as ‘technologies for the conduct of conduct’. A key onshore strategy is the construction of a ‘structurally embedded’ border (Weber, 2013), so that access to work and essential public services is so constrained that unlawful non-citizens are driven to report ‘voluntarily’ to authorities. With respect to the offshore border, the re-implementation in 2012 of the notorious ‘Pacific solution’ has been accompanied by propaganda campaigns aimed at discouraging asylum seekers from travelling to Australia by boat, and with strategies of persuasion intended to produce ‘voluntary’ returns amongst those who are not deterred. These developments in the biopolitics of border control – described in official documents as ‘intent management’ – indicate a partial shift from the open deployment of coercive power towards a neoliberal responsibilisation agenda in which state authority operates through a veneer of individual choice. However, in contrast to the responsibilised citizenry proposed by Garland (1997) as reflecting a new technology of crime control, the aim is to create responsibilised non-citizens who will align their thoughts and behaviour with the border management goals of the Australian state and cooperate in their own exclusion.

Responsibilising non-citizens

In relation to the control of border crossing, intent management may be best understood as pre-emptive migration management. Rather than responding to an unauthorised border crossing with turn-around, prosecution or deportation, intent management seeks to impact the thoughts of those who have been profiled as ‘undesirable’ (see also Sack, in this volume). This represents a shift in focus away from individuals breaching border control or migration requirements, and instead towards pre-emptive strategies that aim to identify threats and make interventions before travel takes place. The desire to manage intent in relation to border crossings requires a range of elaborate processes to manage large populations of potential and actual travellers, only some of whom may seek ‘migration outcomes’ within Australia. Pre-emptive border control has much in common with pre-emptive policing endeavours (Weber, 2006; Wilson and Weber, 2008). In the context of criminal justice, Zedner refers to this development as a shift towards a pre-crime society, ‘in which the possibility of forestalling risks competes with and even takes precedence over responding to wrongs done’, and where the ‘post-crime orientation of criminal justice is increasingly overshadowed by the pre-crime logic of security’ (2007: 261–262).

Anticipating the risky traveller is now a focus for the Intent Management and Analytic section of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC).¹ The aim is to pre-empt potential claims on Australia’s refugee protection obligations and anticipate post-arrival compliance breaches, such as working when on a tourist visa. Australian immigration authorities describe their ‘layered’ approach to intent management as follows: ‘The process starts even before the person books a ticket or lodges an application for a visa to enter Australia’ (McCairns, 2011; emphasis added). This places intent management at the outermost edge in border policing – one that temporally occurs well before the usual preparatory actions associated with travel (e.g. buying a ticket or applying for a visa) and physically well before any border crossing. Those who are not intent-managed out of the system at this preparatory stage are then streamed into visa processing categories described as ‘risk tiering’:

The client’s details are assessed against a set of risk ratings. [The] key objective of risk tiering is to be able to predict high and low risk clients based on historical patterns, aligning processing effort to client risk levels. Depending on the risk rating, visa applications will be streamed to a particular processing queue: streamlined, standard, high rigour.

(McCairns, 2011)

Those who are ‘intent-managed’ at either of these stages are effectively policed out of the licit market in the movement of people. Intent management links state actions to suspicion about potential travellers without assessing an individual’s rightful need or desire to undertake an illegalized border crossing in relation to specific frameworks of human rights and without specific investigation or charges in relation to migration law.

Intent-management strategies display many of the features of classical deterrence. Both envisage a rational actor choosing a course of action by weighing up the costs and benefits associated with each of the available choices. But intent-management strategies also carry the hallmarks of distinctively neoliberal forms of governance described by Rose (2000: 321) as ‘regimes for the continual, silent and largely invisible work of the assessment, management, communication and control of risk’. Rather than rely on the threat of punishment, these regimes mobilise a wider array of threats (such as the risk of drowning or shark attack); typically target threats to specific, ‘high-risk’ populations rather than the populace as a whole; often communicate risk statements through new social media and information technologies; and seek to manage intent by attempting to shape the field of choice through the application of risk-based technologies. And whereas deterrence may be understood as exerting either a general or specific impact on behaviour, intent management is expressed as a stage before action – acting on the thoughts (intentions) that may or may not fuel an ‘undesirable’ act. Although the technologies may not be as developed as the consciousness-penetrating techniques imagined by Orwell, intent management effectively expands the remit of border control/migration management in a way that hints at his vision of ‘thought policing’.

After individuals have crossed the Australian border, intent management manifests most clearly in attempts to manufacture various forms of ‘voluntary’ self-policing. As a first step, DIAC annual reports assert that ‘the department seeks to create an environment where people voluntarily comply with their visa obligations’ while at the same time ‘it actively identifies and locates those who are not complying with their obligations under Australia’s migration laws, through robust enforcement strategies’ (DIAC, 2012). Voluntary compliance is presented as preferable to the less palatable alternative of ‘robust enforcement’, and is to be promoted through the provision of information about visa conditions, overlaid with messages about harsh consequences for refusal to comply voluntarily. The promotion of voluntary compliance shares some of the characteristics of intent management, being directed towards influencing thought processes through the provision of information. It also has a pre-emptive quality, aiming to achieve border management goals while avoiding the necessity for coercive intervention.

Attempts to manufacture ‘voluntariness’ continue even when voluntary compliance with immigration controls has manifestly failed. ‘Voluntary’ reporting to DIAC offices consistently accounts for the vast majority of detections of individuals in breach of visa conditions. Significant increases in the detection rate have been attributed to ‘a range of reforms’ introduced in 2007–2008 ‘to encourage voluntary approaches to the department from non-complying visa holders’ (DIAC, 2012). Individuals presenting themselves ‘voluntarily’ to immigration officials no doubt hope for a resolution of their visa breach through regularisation of their status. However in recent years, annual reports have also documented increasing numbers of expulsions of non-compliant individuals, which they attribute largely to departmental success in promoting ‘voluntary’ departures. The 2011–2012 annual report even claimed that the majority of removals from detention were voluntary (1689, compared with 86 ‘involuntary’ removals), attributing a remarkable level of agency to a group experiencing mandatory and potentially indefinite incarceration. Since then, the reinstatement by the former Labor government of offshore detention in the Pacific has generated a new wave of ‘voluntary’ returns, primarily involving Sri Lankan asylum seekers facing long-term detention on Nauru (Pickering and Weber, 2014).

While voluntary compliance has much to recommend it when compared with the prospect of intense and potentially coercive enforcement, many questions arise about the quality of individual choice being exercised and the processes shaping the available options, not least of which is the underlying fairness of the legal provisions with which individuals are intended to comply. In relation to the intent-management practices described earlier, anticipating future breaches of border controls raises serious legal and ethical issues not least of which include the fairness and legality of discouraging those seeking refugee protection from carrying out their security-seeking plans. In the remainder of this chapter, we seek to shed some light on these questions by analysing in greater detail some of the techniques of intent management and voluntary compliance in operation at Australia’s external and internal borders.

Managing travel intentions

Managing the travel intentions of undesirable travellers is an extension of the central pillar in border control in Australia, Europe and the US: pushing interventions and border control further out from the nation-state. In the case of Australia, managing travel intentions has been the focus of efforts to deter asylum seekers. The two most notable campaigns have been geared around two equally flawed premises: that undesirable travellers need to voluntarily make ‘better choices’, and that those ‘voluntary’ choices can be influenced by clearer messages sent by the receiving state.

In 2000, Australian immigration authorities commissioned an online advertisement trilogy: The Trip, The Reception and Experiences and Expectations of Travellers. Sharks, fires, crocodiles and snakes featured in the videos aimed at deterring asylum seekers from arriving without authorisation in Australia.

The message was clear: asylum seekers should seek asylum elsewhere as they face the risk of being eaten by sharks or crocodiles, incinerated in wildfires or attacked by poisonous snakes. The opening video, The Trip, includes the voiceover:

They lied to them, promising state of the art boats with satellite navigation. What did they get? A run-down fishing boat at the end of its useful life. The boats often break down en route and are usually abandoned by their crew once they reach their destination. People are often left in remote areas thousands of kilometres from their destination. It is not worth the risk.

(Carmody, 2000)

There is no available evidence that asylum seekers have fallen prey to the wildlife detailed, but the deterrent message was more general. The contentious issue is not the likely grounds for a protection application, but rather that asylum seekers should not bring those claims to Australia but voluntarily go elsewhere. The minister for immigration at the time remarked:

Now when you see them [the videos,] you might think that they are a little sensational. You may think that they’re horrific, and that maybe we’re trying unnecessarily to scare people from coming to Australia. So I want to stress that the information in all of these videos is based on fact.

(Carmody, 2000)

The minister toured the Middle East and Europe showing the videos to media in a kind of reverse promotion campaign. The information kit also included material that stated: ‘paying people smugglers could leave prospective immigrants in debt to criminals who will demand you work for them selling drugs or force you and your family into prostitution to pay off your debt’ and that asylum seekers ‘face racial hatred and violence because citizens are angry at having to support them’ (quoted in Uprooted People, 2001).

The most recent manifestation of the management of ‘travel intentions’ has been the ‘No Advantage’ campaign directed at asylum seekers travelling to Australia. By announcing that those interdicted at sea will be transported to offshore places (namely Nauru and Papua New Guinea) where they will remain in restricted conditions for an indefinite period, the Labor government sought to construct a rationality in which making the hazardous maritime crossing confers no advantage over a person who patiently waits in a neighbouring or transit country for processing by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The ‘no advantage principle’ was a key recommendation of the Expert Panel on Asylum that was charged with developing policy recommendations to prevent the loss of life of asylum seekers. Drawing on classical deterrence approaches, but also expanding the scope of interventions to include a range of positive and negative incentives, the set of policy recommendations includes a vast extension of the mandatory detention regime for unauthorised arrivals.

UNHCR wrote to the minister for immigration and citizenship commenting on the No Advantage principle in 2012:

The practical implications of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• New Border and Citizenship Politics: An Introduction
• Part I: Introduction: The Politics of Redesigning Borders
• Part II: Introduction: The Technologies of Bordering
• Part III: Introduction: Politics of Citizenship as Border Politics
• References
• Index