ABSTRACT

Policies designed to keep asylum seekers out of the Western democratic states of Europe and North America range from the seemingly banal to the obviously pernicious. The list of policies includes carrier sanctions, international safe havens, visa requirements, safe third country agreements, offshore processing, “non-arrival” zones, mandatory detention, temporary protection and the withdrawal of socio-economic benefits. If nothing else, this list is impressive for its sheer transparency; these policies all have a common aim, to ensure that refugees and asylum seekers have minimal access to the protection regimes of the receiving state. The creation and implementation of such policies in Western states seem puzzling given that these same states have acknowledged in international treaties that the failure to offer protection to refugees raises humanitarian concerns and has the potential to destabilize international order. In fact, it was these very concerns that contributed to the creation and maintenance of the current international refugee regime by Western states in the first place. This seemingly contradictory approach to refugees and asylum seekers reveals

three complexities of modern international politics: states possess multiple and often contradictory interests and identities, protection for those fleeing persecution is an established if not universally observed international norm, and control over borders remains an essential practice of state sovereignty and national security. The movement of refugee populations and the unauthorized arrival of asylum seekers are not simply matters of humanitarian concern or of national security; they expose the complexity and contradictions of the modern nation-state and demonstrate the competing political, economic and humanitarian values associated with the management of international migration. This book studies the processes through which border control policies

designed to prevent or deter asylum seekers from seeking protection have been implemented in Western states that have a demonstrated commitment to refugee protection. It is a book about the implementation of border policy, but it is not a book on public policy. It is about how one set of priorities associated with protecting national security has come to predominate the discourse on humanitarian migration and how that discursive change has

altered the policy options available to political elites. In this book I ask: how is it that migration policies designed to limit the number of asylum seekers that can access the protection of the state have come to be accepted by liberal states that are (or claim to be) committed to the protection of refugees? I address this timely and important question through the lens of secur-

itization. By drawing on and further developing a framework of securitization, this project examines how humanitarian migration has been constructed as a security threat to receiving states, and how this securitized view of migration has made the use of more restrictive policies both acceptable and necessary. In its conventional understanding, securitization is a process whereby political elites justify emergency measures and break the normal rules by which they are otherwise bound by arguing and persuading an audience that a particular development represents an existential threat to the state or society (Buzan et al., 1998). Unlike conventional studies of securitization, this book begins by distinguishing what is meant by a securitized and a non-securitized relationship between the state and asylum seekers and by identifying policy measures that violate existing norms governing the treatment of asylum seekers. I focus on the process by which these extraordinary policies were rendered acceptable and essential in Western states. With such a reorientation, this book prioritizes three previously neglected elements of the securitization process: 1) the distinction between institutionalized and episodic forms of securitization; 2) the influence of legitimizing actors such as the political opposition, the media and the judiciary on the success of securitization attempts; and 3) the necessity of incorporating the domestic and international contexts. The theory of securitization advanced in this project has relevance beyond

the issue of humanitarian migration. It could be applied in a genealogical fashion to immigration policy generally to explain the gradual shift away from racial immigration criteria toward economic and family reunification. The theory is also applicable to a wide range of states, for instance it could be used to illuminate the response of the United States to Muslim immigrants since 11 September 2001, the rise of anti-immigrant parties in the EU and to the current debate over undocumented Mexican workers in the United States. Furthermore, it has the potential to make contributions far beyond the migration policy area, and could help illuminate a range of security topics such as humanitarian intervention, environmental change, strategic resource supplies, as well as intra-and inter-state war.