Bordering and Ordering the Twenty-first Century by Popescu Gabriel;

Author:Popescu, Gabriel; [Popescu, Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.1 The EU immigrant detention camp system inside as well as outside the EU borders. Source: Migreurop.

A third kind of immigrant detention camp, generally located on isolated islands and in other remote places with ambiguous sovereignty status, deserves special attention. Such examples are Guantanamo (used as a U.S. immigrant detention camp for Cubans and Haitians during the 1980s and 1990s before it was converted to a terrorist detention camp during the 2000s), Guam, Christmas Island, and others (Mountz 2011). Detainees are kept hidden from public scrutiny, and in certain cases they have been denied access to basic rights such as immigration lawyers or medical assistance. This strategy is part of a larger trend of manipulating state borders to include some territories for some purposes while excluding them for other purposes. In-between places are created that are situated inside and outside national borders at the same time. Their purpose is to allow states to avoid sovereignty responsibilities at their own will.

The immigration policy adopted by the Australian government in 2001 best illustrates these border-making practices (Green 2006; Hyndman and Mountz 2008). Asian immigrants intercepted at sea have been denied landing on the Australian mainland and were instead diverted thousands of kilometers away to detention camps on the Australian-held Cocos and Christmas islands in the Indian Ocean. Others have been diverted to islands in the Pacific Ocean belonging to independent states such as Nauru, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia that have been paid by the Australian government to accept the refugees. Another aspect of the plan has consisted in the exclusion of several thousand islands from the Australian territory for immigration purposes (Hyndman and Mountz 2008). Immigrants landing on these islands were not considered to be on Australian soil and were not allowed to file asylum claims in Australia. What is more, some islands were excluded retroactively, after the immigrants had arrived there. Under these circumstances, the Australian borders had become the ultimate expression of mobility, to the point of leaving the real and entering the metaphysical. In a mystifying exercise of spatial and temporal acrobatics, these borders were bending and stretching around the bodies of the immigrants without ever touching them. On display here was the raw power of border making. This policy came to an end in 2008 when a new government came to power in Australia. However, the practice of detaining immigrants on the remote Christmas Island continues (see figure 5.2).

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