Deter, Detain, Dehumanise: The Politics of Seeking Asylum

When it comes to deterring and incarcerating people seeking asylum, there is a fusion between racialisation and politicisation. The bedrock is the colonisation of the nation now called Australia, where the dispossession of Indigenous peoples was a national project that later merged into the building of a state that lauded British heritage and the exclusion of migrants through the White Australia policy. This foundation of nationhood continues in a manner that challenges the myth of harmonious multiculturalism by determining who is deemed worthy and who is excluded. The centrepiece of racialised bordering is the immigration detention regime which is increasingly characterised by transporting people to offshore sites. This chapter argues through examples, how people seeking asylum have been racialised, dehumanised and criminalised, particularly through a national security lens.

This chapter explores the proposition that Australia’s abusive treatment of refugees and asylum seekers can be traced back to a denial of the foundational violence of colonisation.

By adopting a psychoanalytic frame, the research explores three questions: is Australia engaging in cruel, degrading and humiliating treatment of asylum seekers, a treatment that devolves into torture? If so, how is this operationalised? And finally what does the abuse satisfy within the state?

The work uses Freud’s paper, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, and Melanie Klein’s work on the paranoid/schizoid position to describe the psycho-affective terrain from which this abuse emanates.

The chapter takes this psycho-affective terrain as the foundation and then investigates the impact the privatised detention regime has had in enabling the known/unknowability of the abuse and mechanisms at work within media practice to create ‘torturable subjects’ (Mendiola, 2014, p. 13).

Public information campaigns (PICs) have increasingly become part of global migration deterrence projects. Australia’s No Way campaign has been widely publicised for its harsh messaging, declaring to would-be asylum seekers that ‘you will not make Australia home’. In this chapter, the author argues that in addition to targeting potential asylum seekers throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the No Way campaign is directed towards multiple audiences, including diaspora communities in Australia, the Australian voting public, and a wider network of anti-immigration political figures. The No Way campaign represented one of the largest and best-funded Australian deterrence campaigns to date, with the distribution of materials ranging from billboards and social media advertisements to street theatre performances and graphic novel storyboards between 2014 and 2016. In the sections that follow, the author situates this argument within the context of the rise of PICs throughout the globe, as well as their use within Australia. Through the lens of this campaign, the author considers the question: for whom is this deterrence messaging? How does it target multiple audiences? The author concludes by considering the future of information campaigns as deterrence projects around the world.

This chapter provides a decolonial critique of Kenya’s encampment and asylum policy. By using a decolonial framework, the chapter examines how asylum, a supposedly humanitarian gesture, has become a political tool of deterrence, dehumanisation and detention in this country. In examining the camp through a decolonial lens, the author advances an Afrocentric perspective and foregrounds that asylum policy across the African continent, which is largely focussed on keeping asylum seekers on this continent, should be understood against the context of colonial relations in Africa. The author contrasts Kenya’s refugee camp with Australia’s offshore detention camp. Central to the author’s critique is Australia’s outsourcing of its offshore detention camps to Papua New Guinea and Nauru which epitomises a neo-colonial engagement with these post-colonies. Inspired by the author’s personal experience as a former refugee, this chapter also challenges refugee literature which is dominated by voices either without lived experience of the camp or produce work that is inadequately attentive to such knowledge.

In this chapter, the author dwells on the effects of documenting and the failure to document, border lives and deaths. Despite their apparent differences, both practices function as forms of erasure. While the Australian government has historically been keen to document the number of asylum seeker arrivals in this country, it has shown no interest in the numbers and names of those who have died in attempting to arrive here. In contrast, those who manage to cross the border, are subject to intense classificatory and numbering regimes. The latter manifests in bureaucratic control and excessive intervention, while the former reveals governmental denial of complicity in these deaths by not acknowledging them. Both practices share a refusal to encounter the other on ethical terms, reflecting the politics of numbers (Andreas & Greenhill, 2010) at and within the border. This also reveals a paradox, between being represented and not being represented. In the lacuna of details about border deaths, human rights organisations, researchers and advocacy groups have sought both to honour these deaths and to ensure that the scale of border violence is marked by statistical records on the numbers of border deaths. While it might seem that being ‘counted’ – or in Butler’s (2003, p. 41) terms – ‘represented’ is better than not being counted/represented at all, representation is never straightforward (Szörényi, 2009b, p. 185): being counted is often barely a form of representation, with such ‘numbering’ practices contributing to the effacement, rather than the recognition of refugees’ humanity.

This chapter considers the modes and politics of refugee representation, and the function of art and literature as sites of resistance to, or the reinforcing of, dehumanising or idealised tropes of people seeking refugee protection. Specifically, the chapter addresses the connection between dehumanised representations of the imagined refugee and the violence and ‘logic’ of Australia’s offshore detention regime in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. In engaging with these issues, the chapter draws on Manus Prison Theory and its focus on who gets to represent refugee experience, and to generate knowledge about it and on what terms. It considers these questions through an examination of two contrasting art projects, which alternately raise and contest the idea of the ‘deserving refugee’. In exploring these questions, the chapter also engages with the temporalities of refugee representation and the role of crisis in generating ‘stock’ refugee representations. It ultimately argues that the politics of refugee representation are central to questions of refugee and migrant justice, and further, that we cannot separate contemporary forms and representations of violence against refugees from colonial and neocolonial acts of sovereignty and expulsion.

In recent years, many Western states have moved towards funding the asylum processing and resettlement systems of countries in the Global South. These forms of outsourced migration governance are upheld by a vast industry of state and non-state actors. This chapter draws on fieldwork conducted in the Republic of Nauru to look at the people and places on the frontlines of the extractive asylum industry. Using Alexander Weheliye’s (2014) concept of ‘racialising assemblages’, the author argues that outsourced asylum regimes exacerbate the continuous subjection of Indigenous and migrant communities to toxic practices and discourses. Outsourced asylum is a contemporary practice of resource extraction (much like other forms of mining) that builds on colonial extractive projects that disproportionately target communities of colour. Ongoing processes of dispossession and displacement are occurring as people and places are rendered into resources and frontline sites for the extractive asylum industry. This chapter also shows how humanitarian and liberal democratic discourses are part of the mechanics of racialised geopolitical ordering. Racialised refugees are made into destitute victims, whereas locals become brutish villains, rather than political subjects. In attending to the politics of refusal, where Nauruans and refugees refuse ingrained racialising assemblages that deny them personhood, the author stresses the importance of intersectional advocacy that highlights the toxic effects of extractive asylum regimes on local and migrant populations alike.

This chapter offers a critical evaluation of the concept and application of global carceral archipelagos designed as punitive barriers to refugees. With a focus on policies and practices in Australia for over two decades, the chapter shows how more recently, the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK) are also adopting similar strategies to Australia in a pattern of Western countries turning their backs on their human rights obligations. The histories of colonial practices of the racialisation of certain minorities within and outside nation-state borders are an important aspect of understanding contemporary bordering regimes that exclude refugees. The chapter discusses examples of resistance, as well as alternative politics emerging from refugees who have suffered from the carceral border complex, drawing on creative and collaborative work and practices.