This book explores the regional coordination and impact of state responses to irregular migration in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The main argument is that regional and international trends of securitisation and criminalisation of irregular migrationâoften associated with framing the issue in terms of migrant smuggling and human traffickingâhave intensified carceral border regimes and produced greater precarity for migrants. Bilateral and multilateral processes of regional coordination at multiple levels of government are analysed with a focus on the impact on asylum seekers and migrant workers arriving or staying in major destination and transit countriesâincluding Malaysia , Thailand , Singapore , Indonesia and Australia.
When I began work on the research for this book, I was based in Melbourne, Australia, where I witnessed the steady escalation of political discourse framing the movement of asylum seekers by sea as an international security and criminal threat. The two major parties of government, Labor and Liberal, appeared locked into a battle of competitive xenophobia in their public statements about both asylum seekers and migrant workers, and shared bipartisan commitments to policies of restrictive labour migration and deterrence of asylum seekers. Policies of asylum deterrence backed by both major parties are based on arbitrary enforcement of migration borders through intercepting and turning back boats at sea, mandatory and indefinite detention of asylum seekers, and deportation without due process.
The externalisation of Australiaâs border to deter and prevent the arrival of asylum seekers has created what Hyndman and Mountz (2008, 253) describe, borrowing Gregoryâs (2004) phrase, as an âarchitecture of enmity, framed as protectionâ. The âarchitecture of enmityâ refers to the institutional framing of criminalisation and securitisation, together with the carceral responses and production of precarity covered in subsequent chapters. That these policies can continue to be âframed as protectionâ owes much to the ambiguity of the shared discourse of Liberal Humanitarianism, with claims on both sides of parliamentary politics to be âsaving lives at seaâ by âdisrupting the people smugglersâ business modelâ. Dauvergne (2005) calls this shared, though ambiguous, discourse the âhumanitarian consensusâ of migration debates, and draws attention to its roots in appeals to nationalist identity.
Nationalist identity is at the core of debates over migration policy. From the nationalist perspective of opponents of migration, the national identity is seen as threatened by the arrival of those marked as foreign and other to the imagined cultural identity of the nation. On the other hand, for the mainstream liberal advocates of increased openness to migration and protection for refugees, it is a mark of national identity to be generous in extending hospitality to those similarly marked as foreign and other. In the words of a poster campaign that appeared around Melbourne in 2015, advocating greater openness to refugees, âReal Australians Say Welcomeâ. As Verma (2015) observes, there is something jarring in seeing white anti-racist activists claiming the right to welcome others to the land of a settler colonial nation, with no acknowledgement of the sovereign rights of Aboriginal owners over that land. In taking up the position of welcoming others, white liberal humanitarians valorise themselves as the inheritors of the settler-colonial mandate to control territory and migration while showing their willingness to conditionally open membership to others as an act of generosity, or what Verma calls âpretended largesseâ.
The convergence of carceral and humanitarian discourses of migration border management around national identity is matched by a convergence in practice of carceral and humanitarian border work. In a comparative study of carceral border regimes of Europe and Australia, Vaughan-Williams and Little (2016) draw attention to the ambiguous roles of humanitarian organisations and discourses. In a research note based on their fieldwork with unaccompanied minors among refugees and asylum seekers recently arrived in Europe, Sigona and Allsopp (2016) reported that children and young adults who wanted to continue their journeys into Europeâand avoid detention in so-called care facilitiesâhad learnt to run from volunteers and staff of humanitarian NGOs conducting outreach work. In Australiaâs regime of migration detention in the Pacific states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea , the integration of humanitarian and carceral border work is even starker as humanitarian NGOs, including the Salvation Army and Save the Children, have accepted government contracts to operate in the detention camps.
The insular and nationalistic nature of public and parliamentary debates around policy responses to asylum seekers and migrant workers in Australia leave little room for consideration of how these issues fit into a broader regional context. Having spent some time learning about conditions for refugees and migrant workers in Southeast Asia, including through previous research with trade unions and other community based organisations from Myanmar and the Philippines , I knew that the regional context was important for understanding how and why asylum seekers and migrant workers arrive in Australia, as well as for putting into a more appropriate context some of the exaggerated claims about the difficulty of managing the arrival of relatively small numbers of asylum seekers by sea. I decided that the best way for me to contribute to public and academic debates around migration border governance was to undertake a detailed study of the regional institutions and processes of inter-state cooperation that I saw as playing a significant role in shaping responses to irregular migration in the region, although with relatively little public attention or scrutiny.
As I completed the manuscript for the book in 2017, the inauguration of Donald Trump as US President seemed to guarantee that carceral and restrictive approaches to migration border management would remain in the news for the foreseeable future. Based on the findings of the research in this book I have two responses to the initial policy announcements of the Trump administration. First, the arbitrary enforcement of migration borders targeting undocumented migrants for arrest, detention and deportation, together with the restriction of asylum and refugee resettlement, represents an escalation of existing trends in the US rather than new developments, and in many ways mirrors the status quo in Australiaâs carceral migration border regime. Second, the lack of an evidence base for claims by the Trump administration that migrants with irregular status and refugees constitute criminal and security threats reinforces the argument in this book that carceral border regimes are produced by securitisation and criminalisation of irregular migration, but are independent of trends in the form or scale of migration itself. Unlike in the European Union, where an escalation of carceral responses and arbitrary enforcement of migration borders from 2015 has coincided with increases in the arrival of asylum seekers at the Mediterranean borders of the EU, similar developments in the framing and enforcement of carceral migration borders in Southeast Asia and the Pacific have developed in the absence of such movements or in response to much smaller numbers of migrants with irregular status travelling by sea. For this reason, the Melbourne-based organisation Refugees, Survivors, and Ex-Detainees (RISE 2015) rejects the label ârefugee crisisâ, arguing instead that âit is a crisis of state abuse and hyper-militarisation for which the abused are blamedâ. A staff member at the UNHCRâs regional office for the Asia-Pacific made a similar argument, although in different terms, in explaining that UNHCR also rejected the term ârefugee crisisâ to describe the stranding of several thousand Rohingya asylum seekers and Bangladeshi migrant workers in the Andaman sea in May 2015. It was pointed out that the approximately 5000 people on the boats represented âno more than arrive in a single day in Europeâ, and that the crisis was caused by state responses rather than by the movement of asylum seekers and other migrants.
In the process of interviewing staff with responsibilities related to irregular migration and border management in a range of regional organisations, I was struck by the prevalence of a shared set of liberal humanitarian values and aims that these staff saw as guiding their work, including at organisations such as UNODC, IOM and the Regional Support Office to the Bali Process with active commitments to promoting cooperation on law enforcement responses to irregular migration. These professionals generally framed their work in humanitarian terms as contributing to the protection of migrants, despite, or perhaps connected to, the fact that many of these regional organisation staff were engaged in projects explicitly connected to the criminalisation of people smuggling and trafficking in persons, which I connect in Chap. 4 to the securitisation of carceral border regimes, or in the promotion of cooperation between states to prevent and deter irregular migration more generally.
This apparent consensus around liberal humanitarian values was certainly in stark contrast to my brief experience of engaging with officials at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta on the issue of irregular migration. While visiting the embassy, accompanying a group of students, I had raised a question in the discussion about whether the embassy saw potential to cooperate with advocacy organisations working with asylum seekers on developing safe alternatives to dangerous sea journeys. The junior diplomat briefing our group had previously worked on the embassyâs counter-smuggling projects, but responded defensively and refused to comment. Later, at an embassy function, she explained her view that asylum seekers in Indonesia were not genuine, because she had heard that some held parties with their friends before boarding boats to Australia. âIs that how genuine refugees would behave?â she asked me rhetorically. Pickering (2014) has documented similar attitudes among frontline officers in Australiaâs border enforcement attitudes, who made negative inferences when asylum seekers did not conform to their gendered and racialised expectations about the correct behaviour for genuine refugees.
I expected to find some similar level of prejudice among staff of regional organisations towards asylum seekers and other migrants with irregular statusâor at least a wider range of views than the almost unanimous commitment to liberal humanitarian values I encountered. I had previously associated a liberal humanitarian perspective with support for legal protection mechanisms for refugees and migrant workers, but was surprised to hear similar values and commitments expressed so universally (although admittedly among a very small sample) among those I perceived to be working to restrict irregular migration. This prompted me to become more curious about the role and function of liberal humanitarian discourse, including in helping to legitimise aspects of carceral border regimes.
Structure of the Book
I begin Chap. 2, Border Spaces, with an explanation of the approach of this book to conceptualising borders as techniques of state power, producing political spaces and regimes of governance that extend across and beyond state territories. My focus is on the development and distribution of techniques of state powerâincluding through inter-state and regional co-ordinationâas the basis for the evolution of national and regional border regimes. This differentiates my approach from theories of regime formation in the International Relations literature that prioritise the role of international norms. While international norms, including those of humanitarian protection, do have a role and function in regimes of border management, I argue that this is often as post hoc justifications for regimes formed by the selective adoption by states of techniques of border management.
I make use of Deleuzeâs concept of the fold to describe the political spaces of the border formed by techniques of governance that make strategic use of obscurity and ambiguity in the sites and processes of migration processing. Using examples from Australiaâs responses to the maritime arrival of asylum seekers transformations, I describe the folds of location, legality, logistics and legibility in the political space of contemporary migration border regimes.
In situating the study of border regimes within the regional context of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, I draw on Waliaâs (2013) concept of border imperialism to understand the role of Australia in perpetuating the power dynamics established through settler colonialism. The legacies of settler colonialism are visible in the techniques of contemporary border management in Western states, in the ways that populations are racialised and defined as risks, and in the ways that borders are externalised through unequal relations with neighbouring states.
Finally, I discuss the particular context of Southeast Asia with reference to the ongoing processes of ASEAN integration. The formation of the ASEAN Economic Community from 2015 is an ongoing and open-ended process which has already produced substantial integration of markets and production through the free movement of goods, services, investment, and skilled labour among the 10 ASEAN member states. This economic integration produces a tension with the lack of adequate mechanisms for the free movement of people, including migrant workers and asylum seekers. The institutions and processes of ASEAN integration will continue to be central to the regional dynamics of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, although developments in the area of migration border management may be produced as much by contradictions and gaps in ASEAN integration as by the organisationâs initiatives.
In Chap. 3, Leaving Home, I give a detailed overview of the patterns and trends of migration in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, focusing on key source and destination countries for migrant workers and asylum seekers. Using close engagement with statistics on asylum seekers and migrant workers based on UNHCR figures and World Bank estimates, I present a fine-grained analysis of the patterns of collective decisions to depart, and choices of destination and mode of travel made by migrants. By relating these patterns in official statistics on migration to trends in economic grow...