In the first chapter, for example, Billings shows how Australia has inverted its social welfare provisions to deter and deprive asylum seekers and refugees so they will leave the country rather than try to settle. By denying them the right to work as well as by denying them social assistance this puts people on a fast track to deprivation. For a time, Australia imposed a “no work” condition on temporary visa holders, essentially making them dependent on the state, which ushered in a vicious circle of dependence, social stigma, and social blame. By taking away the right to earn a living or support oneself, the state created the conditions to blame asylum seekers and refugees for their own desperation, increasing hostility and making them drains on the state. In this context, we can see how social welfare does not buffer or moderate coercive state practices, but rather is integral to it. Next to the inversion of social welfare support, Billings outlines how legal frameworks for protection were similarly turned against refugees. Analysing the work found in the Report of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers (Australian Government 2012), he shows how asylum seekers were transformed from rights-bearing individuals into illegal or unauthorised migrants simply because they arrived by boat. These “unauthorised maritime arrivals” and the related excision laws created a separate and second-class legal protection for those who arrived by sea—they made refugees illegal by virtue of their transportation method. Billings further details how temporary protection visas (TPVs), the denial of family reunification and its prolongation of up to 20 years for some families, and the catch-22 of welfare provisions, all worked to uphold Australia’s border regime with its expressed aim of deterrence.

Likewise, in Chapter 2, Weber argues that Australian welfare policy functions as a form of border control. In Weber’s provocative conceptualisation, this border control through welfare is really a way for the state to control the lives of refugees, the literal life and death of refugees. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics,” Weber describes how Australian welfare agents provide refugees with just enough support to stay alive without killing them. In a series of revelatory interviews with welfare officials, Weber illustrates how and why the state withholds certain entitlements, benefits, and even needed medical care. As one official stated, “I think it’s very much about notions of citizenship and who’s Australian and who’s not Australian and the punishment that people have for wanting to seep through our borders.” In other words, the ameliorative benefits of social welfare are restricted to citizens, while the coercive elements of social welfare are reserved for non-citizens—and not only to deprive noncitizens but also to punish them for their assumed transgression for coming to Australia “irregularly.”

Finally, in Part 1, Tazreiter, Tofighian and Boochani present an unfiltered look at the absolute violence of Australia’s border regimes and offshore sites of detention for asylum seekers and refugees. Specifically, the authors outline the “Manus Prison Theory” which Boochani developed while imprisoned on Manus Island, weaving together his lived experience with poetical reflections and political philosophy. Boochani’s remarkable work was transmitted over encrypted social media and later published as an award-winning book. The Manus Prison Theory argues that Australia’s carceral archipelago is designed to dehumanise, deter, deprive, and torture those who cross its borders uninvited. Like Kafka’s fictionalised penal colony in which the machinery of harm, suffering, and torture literally wrote the death sentence on the body of the condemned, Australia’s use of isolation, denial of healthcare and treatment, and recurring physical violence and epistemic violence about the nature of reality is a full-on assault on fellow humans, not for a crime they have committed but simply because a border was crossed. Manus Prison Theory goes on to detail how this system further corrupts those who implement it as our shared systems of knowledge for understanding border violence have been transformed if not obliterated. As a society, we can no longer recognise what is happening at the border, and most do not want to know.

Taken together, the three chapters in Part 1 of this collection build on one another to reach a crescendo of violence—this crescendo of violence might be better called a war. I take up this point in more detail ahead after first considering a few comparative questions, which may, counterintuitively, push this warfare approach forward.

The violent case of Australia raises several pressing questions, particularly in global and comparative perspective. How are we to understand these developments in Australia in relation to similarly situated countries? Are these the same across democratic societies? Is the Global North at war with certain types of migrants? Is Australia simply more violent than Europe or the United States? Why is this happening now? Has Australia always been this way? Is Australia’s intricate use of welfare provision to deter, if not starve, asylum seekers and refugees, emulated elsewhere? If Australian society is based on settler colonialism and long histories of racialised coercion, what explains changes in migration policies? The totalising use of force against refugees in Australia sets up questions about resistance and agency. Is it possible to find sources and sites of opposition to this holistic regime?

In what follows, I outline a few key points of convergence in comparative perspective. At first glance, it may be gratuitous to compare Australia with the Nordic countries. The Nordic countries are often thought to be progressive, inclusionary, and egalitarian; they are often noted for their humanitarianism, support for human rights around the globe, and more recently, at least with the case of Sweden, as proponents of a feminist foreign policy based on gender equality and international peace and security. Yet, like Australia and the United States, the Nordic countries have their own set of carceral apparatuses that similarly restricts and deters unwanted mobility (Barker 2018; Franko 2020). The Nordic countries are not exceptions to global border control developments even when they may travel under the radar or are simply dismissed as small scale or not as bad or inhumane as the rest. This is a major misunderstanding of the Nordic countries. It is also a failure to recognise those who are crushed by the welfare state, as if their lives and life chances do not matter.

Let’s take the case of Denmark, for example. Denmark made international headlines in 2021 for its proposal to deport Syrian refugees in cases where their homes or neighborhoods have been destroyed by war. In June 2021, the Danish Parliament passed new legislation to process asylum seekers offshore, much like Australia, to prevent refugees from making landfall in Denmark. As my colleague Peter Scharff Smith and I (Barker and Smith 2021) document in a recent article “This is Denmark: Prison Islands and the Detention of Immigrants,” Denmark has undertaken a flurry of restrictive migration controls as it relies on the extensive use of prison and prison-like facilities to confine asylum seekers and other unwanted migrants. The government actively seeks to discourage refugees and migrants from coming to Denmark. In the words of former Immigration Minister, Inger Støjberg: “These people are unwanted in Denmark . . . it should be as intolerable as possible to be on a tolerated stay” (Støjberg quoted in Barker and Smith 2021: 1548). In other words, the conditions upon arrival, reception, and confinement should all be so horrible and intolerable than no one would want to stay. This is the 21st-century version of the 19th-century British “less eligibility” principle and approach to crime and punishment—conditions should be so bad inside workhouses and prisons, including hard labour sustained by a diet of gruel, even the poorest and most destitute would do anything to avoid going to prison. In 2021, the Danish government has pursued this less eligibility approach for people fleeing war and persecution in the hopes that refugees would elect not to enter Denmark, let alone want to stay, settle in the country, and make a life for themselves and their families, echoing similar developments in Australia, outlined earlier.

The detention regimes themselves are bleak, regimented, and cold, as they inflict the pains of punishment on those people who have not committed a crime but are rather seeking refuge. These difficult conditions have been well documented and reported by the Red Cross, the Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), border criminologists such as Vicky Canning (2020), and detention researchers such as Julia Suárez-Krabbe et al. (2018). For example, following antiquated less eligibility conditions, detainees are denied mobile phones, spend almost 24 hours confined in the cells, are allowed one hour of exercise outside and one phone call per week (Barker and Smith 2021: 1548). For those confined in these institutions, their mobility inside and outside the facilities is highly regulated and monitored by a well-developed security apparatus. At the Ellebæk Detention Centre and the Nykøbing Falster Holding Centre, for instance, its security system includes walls, fences, and extensive surveillance that are deployed to ensure that no one gets in or out. At another facility in Vridløselilles, isolation chambers and security cells with restraints have been used on immigrant detainees without their understanding what was happening to them or why they were shackled to a bed (Barker and Smith 2021: 1551–1552). Like the less eligibility principle, the shackling of inmates is a remnant of the 19th century, a cruel relic of the past that surely confounds Danish high ground on human rights. Developments that parallel Australia’s machineries of harm.

In these cases, we can ask how these societies were able to manage or subsume the apparent contradiction of reliance on repression within liberal democracies. Like mass incarceration in the United States, we need to ask at what point does the scale of coercive confinement undermine the very nature of the democracy itself? As various contributors to this edited collection point out, Australia’s growing migration controls were not challenged or opposed on democratic grounds. Instead, they were part of a popular political project that garnered electoral votes for whichever political party pursued them. Why are these repressive approaches so popular in democratic societies such as Australia, the United States, Denmark, and beyond? How is it that these societies can deny the dignity and human rights of so many people, particularly people of colour?

And that factor, the disproportionate impact of people of colour from the Global South, is the key to understanding the proliferation of migration controls across the Global North, long recognised by pioneering figures in the field such as Liz Fekete (2001) and Gurminder Bhambra. As Tazreiter, Tofighian, and Boochani explain in Chapter 3, rather than see these illiberal practices as an aberration to democratic society, the intricacies and range of migration controls can be understood as part of a continuum and colonial legacy of control, coercion, and expulsion of people of colour outside of Australia’s white settler heritage. The carceral archipelago has a long history in Australia.

What I would add there is the necessary component of statecraft and nationalism (see Kaufman 2015; Barker 2017; van der Woude 2020; Bosworth 2008). Part 1 of Regulating Refugee Protection Through Social Welfare makes this dimension evident and compelling. The Kafkaesque nature of the legal frameworks and welfare provisions in Australia depend on a high level of state capacity and agency to exclude so many asylum seekers and refugees, and to be perceived as legitimate by the public for doing so. As such, I suggest that Australia, Denmark, Sweden, and the United States, among many others, all engage in what I would call racialised nationalism. Racialised nationalism is organised around the goal of statecraft to protect the territory, people, and resources of the nation for those considered to belong. In other words, “It is very much about notions of citizenship and who’s Australian and who’s not.” Racialised nationalism includes the two central features of the dynamics of nationalism and the dynamics of racism: