The death of asylum : hidden geographies of the enforcement archipelago

Remote detention centers confine tens of thousands of refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants around the world, operating in a legal gray area that hides terrible human rights abuses from the international community. Built to temporarily house eight hundred migrants in transit, the immigrant “reception center” on the Italian island of Lampedusa has held thousands of North African refugees under inhumane conditions for weeks on end. Australia’s use of Christmas Island as a detention center for asylum seekers has enabled successive governments to imprison migrants from Asia and Africa, including the Sudanese human rights activist Abdul Aziz Muhamat, held there for five years. In The Death of Asylum , Alison Mountz traces the global chain of remote sites used by states of the Global North to confine migrants fleeing violence and poverty, using cruel measures that, if unchecked, will lead to the death of asylum as an ethical ideal. Through unprecedented access to offshore detention centers and immigrant-processing facilities, Mountz illustrates how authorities in the United States, the European Union, and Australia have created a new and shadowy geopolitical formation allowing them to externalize their borders to distant islands where harsh treatment and deadly force deprive migrants of basic human rights. Mountz details how states use the geographic inaccessibility of places like Christmas Island, almost a thousand miles off the Australian mainland, to isolate asylum seekers far from the scrutiny of humanitarian NGOs, human rights groups, journalists, and their own citizens. By focusing on borderlands and spaces of transit between regions, The Death of Asylum shows how remote detention centers effectively curtail the basic human right to seek asylum, forcing refugees to take more dangerous risks to escape war, famine, and oppression. Dedication 6 Epigraph 8 Contents 10 Asylum: An Obituary 12 Preface: The Search for Safe Haven 16 Acronyms 32 Introduction: Mapping Death in the Enforcement Archipelago 34 Part I. Physical Death: State Mobilities 60 1. Externalizing Asylum: A Genealogy 62 2. The Border Becomes the Island 90 Part II. Ontological Death: Shrinking Spaces 124 3. The Island within the Archipelago 126 4. Remote Detention: Proliferating Patterns of Isolation and Confinement 162 Part III. Political Death: Hidden Geographies 196 5. Mobilizing Islands to Restrict Asylum Onshore in Canada (or the Death of Asylum, Even in Canada) 198 6. The Struggle: Countering Death with the Life of Activism 228 Conclusions 258 Acknowledgments 278 Notes 280 Bibliography 286 Index 324 "Alison Mountz traces the global chain of remote detention centers used by states of the Global North to confine migrants fleeing violence and poverty, using cruel measures that, if unchecked, will lead to the death of asylum as an ethical ideal"-- Provided by publisher