The Critical-Analytical Approach to Immigration: Foucault on Security and
Freedom of Movement
Anuja Bose
UCLA Department of Political Science
Abstract: At a time of greater possibilities of mobility, border control has become
paramount for many industrialized nations as they cope with the influx of migrants from
around the world. The normative debate on immigration understands two contending
values of security and freedom of movement to be in need of balance in this political
issue. However, the search for a morally sound balance between security and freedom of
movement has remained detached from the modern state’s responses to cross-border
mobility. In this paper, I turn to Foucault’s lectures on governmentality to articulate a
critical-analytical approach to immigration that is attentive to the rationalities governing
state action. By developing a governmental conception of security and freedom of
movement, I argue that freedom of movement is integral for pursuing the goals of
security. The history of immigration in Australia that culminated in the MV Tampa crisis
of 2001 serves as example that demonstrates this point. At different junctures in
Australia’s immigration history, free movement has been instrumental for facilitating and
augmenting the pursuit of security.
1
The debate on immigration emerges as a response to popular fears of being culturally and
economically submerged by foreigners who bring different cultural practices, beliefsystems and demands upon the welfare state.1 More broadly, this fear of submergence
can be understood as a threat to the security of a nation-state insofar as immigration is
deemed to compromise the institutional, economic and cultural stability of a nation-state.2
This situation sparked the debate in liberalism over the conflicting demands of security
and freedom of movement on issues of immigration. The most promising case for
freedom of movement has been made from a liberal egalitarian perspective, where
restrictions to mobility are only marshaled when there is a direct threat to security in
terms of the numbers of migrants seeking to re-locate. A range of thinkers have criticized
this position as idealistic and removed from the realities of sovereign state power. In
response, they have developed a response to immigration from within the structural
constraints of state sovereignty, privileging security concerns that states face in their
attempt to embrace an open borders policy. This debate on open borders provokes the
question at the heart of this paper: how should we understand the relationship between
freedom of movement and the demands of security on issues of immigration?
1
Michael Dummett understands the fear of submergence to arise from a scenario in which high levels of
immigration make the languages, cultural identity, economic welfare and patterns of association in a
nation-state unsustainable. Thus, Dummett argues that discussions of justice on matters of immigration
should acknowledge the right of indigenous populations to not be submerged by an influx of people with
different cultures. He does however underscore the importance of rejecting the use of this right to deny the
legitimate desires of migrants and refugees to resettle in more developed nations. See, Michael Dummett,
On Immigration and Refugees, (London, New York: Routledge, 2001), 20-21.
2
See Myron Weiner, “Security, Stability and International Migration,” International Security 17, no. 3
(1992-1993): 91-126 for an elaboration of the security problems that results from international migration,
including demands on the welfare state, threats to the ethnic composition of the state and the breakdown of
public order. Importantly, Weiner is the one of the early proponents who argued for the need to shift from a
purely economic analysis, which focused on global economic conditions as key determinants of population
movement to a security/stability framework that considers the social and political reasons why governments
may promote or restrict immigration.
2
The normative approach to immigration conceptualizes the relationship between
freedom of movement and security as a balance, where we must circumscribe our right to
free movement in our desire for security and limit our pursuit of security to affirm the
value of free movement. Such an approach, while useful for adjudicating the morally
difficult issues at stake in immigration, creates a blind spot on the rationalities that
animate and give coherence to the modern state’s reactions to immigration. An
alternative conceptualization of freedom of movement and security, and therefore a better
engagement with the modern state’s responses to immigration, is made available in
Foucault’s lectures on governmentality at the Collège de France entitled Security,
Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. I argue that Foucault offers us a
critical-analytical approach to immigration where freedom of movement is understood to
be integral to the security apparatus. In other words, rather than being in conflict with
security, free movement brings about an equilibrium and growth in social relations that
facilitates and augments the pursuit of security. This alternative relationship between free
movement and security suggests that we consider how free movement has intensified
security concerns to the point of pushing contemporary immigration policies towards
increasingly authoritarian measures. I exemplify this point by drawing on a contemporary
example of border transgression from Australia to demonstrate how the historical
anxieties produced by free movement elicit a politics committed to security that
ultimately culminated in authoritarian measures to defend national borders. In order to
focus our attention on these authoritarian tendencies in immigration policy, it is necessary
to set aside the normative task of balancing the conflicting values of free movement and
3
security to develop the critical-analytical perspective that is attentive to the prioritization
of security in state actions towards immigration.
In developing this argument, the paper is divided into four parts: 1) I will first
reconstruct the liberal debate on immigration to lay bare the conflict between freedom of
movement and the juridico-legal conception of security in liberalism. Namely, freedom
of movement and the juridico-legal understanding of security are understood to be
competing values in need of a balance in the normative approach to immigration. 2) In
order to begin articulating an alternative relationship between these terms, I explicate the
Foucauldian understanding of free movement and governmental security to demonstrate
how they differ and converge with liberal notions of juridico-legal security and freedom
of movement. To that end, this section translates the terms of the immigration debate in
order to shift from the normative approach of liberalism to the critical-analytical
approach offered by Foucault. 3) By drawing on Foucault’s lectures on governmentality
at the Collège de France, I argue that freedom of movement is integral to the deployment
of governmental security. I do this by underscoring the elements of complementarity,
interdependency and augmentation between governmental security and free movement.
This alternative relationship between freedom of movement and governmental security
forms the basis for a critical-analytical approach to immigration, which proposes that
freedom of movement establishes the conditions of equilibrium and growth that facilitate
and augment governmental security. 4) In the final part of paper, I exemplify the criticalanalytical approach by turning to a contemporary example of border transgression from
Australia, the MV Tampa incident of 2001. The historical context of immigration
policies, which culminated in the MV Tampa incident demonstrate how freedom of
4
movement intensified security concerns in Australia to the point of pushing contemporary
immigration policies towards increasingly authoritarian measures.
I. Security and Freedom of Movement: Demands for a Balance in the Normative Debate
A central thematic in liberal political theory is the clash between security and liberty.
Social contract theorists such as Hobbes and Locke highlight how the search for security
begins with the dangers and unpredictability of the state of nature, which culminates in
the creation of sovereign power: an exchange of absolute liberty in the state of nature for
security under the sovereign. This basic thematic has continued to animate debates in
liberalism: How much individual liberty should be curtailed to procure security? 3 A key
assumption in these debates is that an appropriate balance must be struck between the
demands of security and liberty. In other words, the relationship between liberty and
security is understood to be a matter of more or less, and each situation requires a careful
calibration between these competing considerations.4
The debate on international migration over open borders can be understood as a
subset of this larger thematic in liberalism between balancing the demands of liberty and
security.5 Although there is much trepidation about framing the normative debate on
3
For a recent adaptation of the security/freedom nexus in liberalism for the post 9/11 context through
careful attention to balancing competing considerations, see Jeremy Waldron, “Security and Liberty: The
Image of Balance,” Journal of Political Philosophy 11, no. 2 (2003): 191-210.
4
For a discussion of quantitative computations of liberty and security see Hillel Steiner, “How free?
Computing Personal Liberty,” in Of Liberty, ed. A Philips Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983).
5
In fact, the debate is more popularly understood to be a contention between those who emphasize the
universality of global justice, and those who underscore the bounded nature of democratic communities. In
other words, the opposition is typically conceptualized to be between liberal universalism and democratic
particularism. For a helpful framing of the immigration debate in these terms, see Arash Abizadeh,
“Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders,” Political
Theory 36, no.1 (2008): p.38. And more recently, Sarah Song, “The Boundary Problem in Democratic
Theory: Why the Demos Should be Bounded by the State”, International Theory 4, no.1 (2012): 39-68.
5
immigration in terms of security for fear of legitimating popular articulations of
migration as a security problem akin to terrorism or crime,6 this section will demonstrate
that a juridico-legal conception of security remains a persistent theme in the normative
debate on immigration. “Security’ in liberalism is best understood from a juridico-legal
perspective as the maintenance of law and order, and the protection of life, liberty and
property.7 Given this, the juridico-legal conception of security encompasses the
institutional, economic and political stability of the nation, and free movement is
understood to be a right that threatens these three aspects of juridico-legal security.
The case for freedom of movement is articulated first and foremost as an
argument for global justice. In his 1987 article “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open
Borders”, Joseph Carens utilizes the original position from John Rawls’s A Theory of
Justice to think through questions of immigration and global justice. The purpose of the
original position is to do away with the specific contingencies that result from social and
natural circumstances at a national level. Applying the principle at a global level would
entail nullifying the effects of being born in a rich nation as opposed to a poor one. The
upshot of expanding the scope of the original position to a global level is that the right to
free movement would be included in the system of basic liberties, along with the right to
religious freedom or free speech. Free movement would be considered essential for
6
Lucis Zedner, “Too Much Security?” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 31, no.3 (2003): 155184.
7
This definition of liberal ‘security’ is given in the first lecture of Security, Territory, Population. See
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, ed. Michel
Senellart, François Ewald & Alessandro Fontana, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 4-6.
6
pursuing one’s plan in life, and thus those in the original position could not permit
restrictions to this right.8
There are two contending values at play in the argument put forth by Carens. On
the one hand, free movement is a remedial right that can address the uneven distribution
of wealth, resources and opportunity across the world. It is therefore an argument for
global justice. However, it is also evident from the liberal egalitarian position that
freedom of movement across national borders is fundamental for exercising individual
autonomy and therefore an indispensable part of a system of basic liberties. Carens has
later argued that being able to move and settle in other places is crucial for enabling
individuals, as far as possible, to determine for themselves the circumstances of their
lives.9 Thus, for Carens free movement is not simply instrumental for greater social and
economic justice. Free movement is something that is intrinsically valuable because it
encapsulates a core aspect of what it means to live as free and autonomous individuals.
The larger point is that freedom is just as central to the liberal egalitarian position as
global justice. There has been a tendency to overlook or under emphasize this fact since
adding free international mobility to the stock of protected human rights has been a
controversial step in the liberal egalitarian argument.10
8
Joseph Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” Review of Politics 49, 1989: 258.
For other discussions where open borders are proposed as a remedy for global inequality, see Thomas
Pogge, “Migration and Poverty,” in Citizenship and Exclusion, ed. Bader Veit Michael (Basingstroke :
Macmillian, 1997) and Jonathan Seglow, “Immigration, Justice and Borders: Towards a Global
Agreement”, Contemporary Politics 12, no 3-4 (2006): 233-246.
9
Joseph Carens, “Migration and Morality: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective” in Free Movement: Ethical
Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and of Money, ed. Brian Barry and Robert E. Goodin,
(New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 26
10
See for instance, David Miller, “Immigration: The Case for Limits” in Contemporary Debates in Applied
Ethics, ed. Andrew Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 191-206. Miller’s
contention is that Carens overstates the importance of free international mobility as a human right. Miller
distinguishes between bare and basic interests to argue that international mobility while a genuine interest
is not important enough to deserve protection as a human right. He goes on to argue that the right to
7
For Carens, the main caveat to the argument for free movement is the ‘public
order restriction’, which stipulates that if open borders lead to the breakdown of law and
order, restrictions may be imposed in order to assure the liberty of the national population
as a whole. In fact, the ‘public order restriction’ is axiomatic to the Rawlsian framework
of justice: “liberty may be restricted for the sake of liberty even in ideal theory since all
liberties depend on the existence of public order….”11 In that sense, the ‘public order
restriction’ can be broadly understood as a defense of the juridico-legal conception of
security since the maintenance of law and order are of primary importance. Juridicolegal security provides the conditions of institutional stability within a nation, necessary
to facilitate cross-border mobility without detrimental consequences. The parameters of
what constitutes a breakdown of public order, forms the criterion by which the balance
between juridico-legal security and freedom of movement oscillates. Importantly, the
‘public order restriction’ introduces security concerns to the immigration debate as a
competing consideration against which the right to free movement needs to be weighed,
and the search for a balance between security and freedom emerges as a central theme of
the immigration debate.
Since Carens expounds a fairly minimalist standard for juridico-legal security as
institutional stability (the maintenance of law and order), he tips the balance more
towards freedom of movement.12 However, those who have responded to him have
provided a more expansive criterion for restricting free movement by emphasizing other
aspects that threaten juridico-legal security, such as the economic and political instability
mobility can at best be a remedial right for those persons whose basic rights cannot be secured in their
home country.
11
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p.213.
12
Joseph Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” p.259.
8
of a nation. John Isbister provides a liberal argument for privileging the demands of
economic stability within a nation over those of free movement across borders. He
criticizes the liberal egalitarian position on open borders for assuming general economic
equality within developed nations. Instead, he argues that immigration could worsen the
condition of the least well off in affluent nations by depressing wages, and consequently
undermine the cause of equality and justice within a nation.13 Thus, by emphasizing the
need to safeguard the economic stability of a nation, Isbister provides a more expansive
criterion for restricting free movement. Free movement must now be curtailed to ensure
the institutional and economic stability of a nation, making the juridico-legal conception
of security a more prominent concern than freedom of movement in the normative
debate.
The second sense in which juridico-legal security has been valorized over
freedom of movement is for the sake of political stability. Will Kymlicka makes the
argument that freedom of movement could threaten the social cohesiveness of a nation
since large numbers of immigrants with different cultural and political values could make
the process of socio-political integration challenging. This line of argument understands
freedom of movement as a civil liberty that could undermine other freedoms such as free
speech or religious freedom if open borders were to admit large numbers of immigrants
whose anti-liberal attitudes threatened the survival of domestic liberal democratic
13
John Isbister, “A Liberal Argument for Border Controls: Reply to Carens,” International Migration
Review 34, no.2 (2000): p. 633. See also the response by Carens to the argument for favoring needy
compatriots over foreigners. Carens contends that Isbister takes the notion preferential treatment too far
without any critical engagement with existing arrangements of inequality and privilege, see Joseph Carens,
“Open Borders and Liberal Limits: A Response to Isbister,” International Migration Review 34, no. 2
(2000):636-643.
9
institutions.14 Kymlicka is balancing the relative importance of different types of
freedoms here to privilege the class of civil liberties traditionally protected by national
governments. This argument can also be interpreted as a desire to balance the competing
demands of security and freedom of movement since the class of liberties protected are
those which safeguard the cohesiveness and stability of national political institutions.
Thus, insofar as Kymlicka’s arguments for hierarchizing freedoms are rooted in the
desire for political and institutional stability, I would argue that he tips the balance more
towards security than freedom.15
The range of positions on the normative debate over open borders can therefore
be understood as an attempt to strike a balance between the competing demands of
juridico-legal security and freedom of movement. The initial argument laid out by Carens
favors freedom of movement by considering basic institutional stability as a prerequisite
for the juridico-legal security. Subsequent responses to his position have attempted to
temper his open borders position by introducing a number of security concerns relating to
the economic, political and institutional stability of a nation. In their search for a morally
ideal balance, liberal egalitarians and their interlocutors treat the relationship between
juridico-legal security and freedom of movement as bifurcated, where two separate but
equally important considerations are in normative conflict and in need of balance.
While this approach can be useful for adjudicating the morally difficult issues at
14
Will Kymlicka, “Territorial Boundaries: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective” in Boundaries and Justice:
Diverse Ethical Perspectives, ed. David Miller and Sohail H. Hashmi, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001) 249-275. For an expansion of how institutional stability is compromised without an
immigration ceiling see John A. Scanlan and O.T Kent, “The Force of Moral Arguments for a Just
Immigration Policy” in Open Borders? Closed Societies?: The Ethical and Political Issues, ed. Mark
Gibney (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988) 61-107.
15
For liberal egalitarian critiques of closed border arguments, see Phillip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion:
Liberal Political Theory and Immigration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); and
Howard F. Chang, “Liberalized Immigration as Free Trade: Economic Welfare and the Optimal
Immigration Policy,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 145, no. 5 (1997): 1147-1244.
10
stake in immigration, it creates a significant blind spot on state actions towards
immigration. In other words, the search for a balance in the normative debate occurs at a
fairly detached level from the rationalities that animate and give coherence to state
actions on immigration. As the Australian state’s response to unauthorized immigration
demonstrates at the end of this paper, the modern state exhibits deep-seated anxieties
about freedom of movement, which propel it towards pursuing security interests at the
expense of affirming the value and legitimacy of free movement. In other words, when
we examine the responses of a liberal democratic state to immigration, free movement is
not an opposing value that can temper the unrestrained pursuit of security, as the
normative formulation of the problem suggests. In fact, the Australian example
demonstrates how free movement intensified security concerns on the continent to the
point of pushing immigration policies towards increasingly authoritarian measures.
Therefore a better engagement with the rationalities governing the modern state is
necessary to understand the prioritization of security in state responses to immigration. In
next sections, I turn to Foucault to develop a critical-analytical approach to immigration
that is grounded in an account of the security apparatuses and mechanisms that animate
the governmental state. The critical-analytical approach reveals how freedom of
movement is integral to the security apparatus. Rather than being in conflict with
security, free movement brings about an equilibrium and growth in social relations that
facilitates and augments the pursuit of security. I begin to make this argument by first
articulating a governmental conception of security and freedom of movement.
II. Security and Freedom of Movement: Translating Terms
11
In the lecture series entitled Security, Territory and Population, Foucault develops an
understanding of security as a set of political rationalities and technologies, which
operate on the plane of circulation to manage contingency. In the follow up lecture series,
The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault expands on the dynamic relationship between security
and circulation through a study of liberal and neoliberal forms of government. Although a
number of works have fruitfully traced the complementary relationship between security
and freedom in Foucault’s writings,16 little attention has been paid to the relationship
between security and circulation in Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France. In this
section, I demonstrate that Foucault’s explication of security and circulation offers us an
alternative to the juridico-legal conception of security and freedom of movement in the
normative debate on immigration. In fact, the governmental conception of security and
circulation offered by Foucault underlies the liberal egalitarian argument for freedom of
movement. Foucault’s descriptively rich analysis of liberalism allows us to exhume
elements of the liberal egalitarian argument that reveal an affinity to governmental modes
of power. As a result, this section serves as the switch point for transitioning from a
normative to a critical-analytical approach on immigration.
In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault distances himself from the tradition
of liberal political theory, which understands security in juridico-legal terms as the
maintenance of law and order, and the protection of life, liberty and property through the
rule of law. Instead, he conceptualizes security as an apparatus that deploys statistical
16
The argument that security and ‘freedom’ are not opposing principles but complementary aspects of
liberal governmentality has been taken up in great detail and clarity in the literature on governmentality;
See, Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), 1-51. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, (London: Sage
Publications, 2010), 175-204. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 61-97.
12
knowledge on the population, economy, climate and social routines to preserve the
strength of the state.17 This governmental conception of security is non-juridical and
therefore unconcerned with the prevention of crime and other social dangers through the
penal system. Rather, the aim is to reduce the frequency of crime and social dangers by
using statistical knowledge on the relevant variables at play, such as education, poverty
and employment levels. In other words, the security apparatus works within the reality of
a problem, for example scarcity or crime, to get the different elements of the problem to
function in such a way that the phenomenon itself is minimized.18 This shift to
governmental security occurs when the problem of the cost enters juridico-legal practices
of security. In other words, the relevant question becomes “how much does it cost a
country, or at any rate a town, to have thieves running free?”19 Therefore, the efficacy of
security mechanisms is no longer determined by the prevention of a social crime or
danger, but by the cost effectiveness of prevention.
The juridico-legal and governmental understandings of security exist
simultaneously in the normative debate on immigration. The liberal egalitarian argument
to impose restrictions on immigration is initially an argument for security from a juridicolegal perspective, where the institutional stability of a nation-state is of primary
importance. Carens for instance specifies that institutional stability could be undermined
by the overwhelming numbers of people seeking to migrate from poorer nations which
17
Interestingly, Foucault distinguishes between the different types of knowledges required for
governmental rule (the security apparatus) and sovereign rule. The former is concerned with the complex of
men and things, that is, men in their relationship to a number of variables such as the economy, social
habits, epidemics and territory. Statistics therefore becomes vital for governmental rule. Where as,
according to Foucault, knowledge of the law and territory are the sole elements necessary for sovereign
rule. For more on this distinction see, Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 96-97.
18
Security, Territory, Population, p. 45-47, 59
19
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979, ed. Michel
Senellart, François Ewald & Alessandro Fontana, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), p. 248.
13
developed nations may not be able to fully accommodate. Others such as John Isbister
and Will Kymlicka have criticized Carens for neglecting to consider the economic and
political costs of resettling immigrants and refugees in a new context. Given this, they
argue that the costs of integrating outsiders might be too much for a state to bear without
threatening its economic and political stability. Thus, insofar as liberal egalitarians and
their interlocutors understand immigration as a threat to institutional, political and
economic stability within a nation-state, they embrace a juridico-legal conception of
security.
This juridico-legal understanding of security co-exists with the governmental
notion of security in the normative debate immigration debate. In other words, the
objective is not solely the preservation of institutional, political and economic stability
through restrictions on cross-border mobility, but also the augmentation of state forces
through the effective management of population flows. For instance, a number of thinkers
have bolstered Carens’ liberal egalitarian position on minimal restrictions to immigration
by defending a governmental notion of security. Howard F. Chang contends that the free
movement of workers across borders promotes economic welfare by increasing
production, creating wealth and reducing poverty.20 In a similar vein, Kevin R. Johnson
has argued that immigration barriers are just as costly as trade barriers and should be
liberalized for the sake of economic growth.21 Here, we can detect governmental
conceptions of security at work in the normative debate insofar as the goal is an optimal
equilibrium between labor mobility, resources and employment opportunities to order to
20
Howard F. Chang, “Liberalized Immigration as Free Trade: Economic Welfare and the Optimal
Immigration Policy,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 145, no.5 (1997): p.1150.
21
See Kevin R. Johnson, “Free Trade and Closed Borders: NAFTA and Mexican Immigration in the
United States,” University of California Davis Law Review 937, no.27 (1994).
14
bring about the growth of commerce, production and resources of the state. Security is
not the outcome of repressing or preventing the manifold forms of cross-border mobility,
but rather the result of achieving an appropriate equilibrium and growth in the various
social relations at play in immigration.22
Pivotal to the governmental conception of security is the notion of circulation,
which is central to Foucault’s conceptualization of freedom of movement. Circulation is a
persistent theme in Security, Territory, Population that refers to the constant movement
of a broad range of phenomena such as merchandise, ideas, air, water and most
importantly people.23 Although Foucault is reticent on positive definitions of freedom, we
can deduce that circulation is closely connected to freedom of movement in the
governmentality lectures insofar as Foucault understands freedom to be the possibility of
movement, of both people and things. As he says succinctly at the conclusion of lecture
two in Security, Territory, Population: “…it is in terms of this option of circulation, that
we should understand the word freedom, and understand it as one of the facets, aspects,
or dimensions of the apparatuses of security.”24 Foucault’s understanding of freedom of
movement is therefore markedly different from the liberal egalitarian conception of
freedom of movement as a right that can be created and then protected by the rule of law.
Freedom of movement is rather a condition that is actively produced by the security
22
Security, Territory, Population, 353-354. In fact, Foucault proposes that there is a double system of rule
operating after the 18th century where the regulatory control of the territory and subjects coincides with a
whole series of mechanisms that fall within the province of the economy and the management of the
population. Thus, we could say that he anticipates the co-existence of juridico-legal and governmental
mechanisms of security, which we see in contemporary immigration debates.
23
An idea that is closely related to Foucault’s conception of circulation is the notion of the milieu. In part,
circulation receives such a broad understanding in the lectures because it is understood to operate on the
plane of the milieu (p.21), which is a set of natural and artificial givens. As a result, circulation cannot be
restricted to commerce or people alone, but must include the movement of more unconventional elements
such as flows of water, air and diseases. See, Security, Territory, Population, 20-23.
24
Security, Territory, Population, p. 49.
15
apparatus through the unblocking of circulatory processes. Namely, it is the absence of an
over-regulatory regime that establishes limits, frontiers and restrictions to curb the
circulation of people, merchandise and natural phenomena.
In fact, the notion that a deregulation of circulation is instrumental for producing
greater freedom lays buried in the normative debate on immigration. For Carens, the free
movement of people between rich and poor nations can produce greater conditions of
freedom by opening up access to wealth, resources and opportunities.25 Moreover, in
response to cultural arguments for restricting immigration, some liberal egalitarians have
argued that free movement could under certain conditions produce a more liberal polity
by accommodating a culturally diverse population. For instance, Rainer Bauböck argues
that national cultures that are internally homogenous are likely to become more liberal
through culturally diverse immigration.26 In other words, liberal egalitarians hope to
expand and reinforce existing freedoms by inducing conditions of greater cross-border
mobility. Importantly, these arguments resonate with Foucault’s description of liberal
freedom as that which is actively produced through a deregulation of the circulatory
processes of life.
This section sought to differentiate Foucault’s understanding of security and
freedom of movement from the juridico-legal conception of these terms in the normative
debate. In the process, it was also demonstrated that elements of the liberal egalitarian
25
See Joseph Carens, “Migration and Morality: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective” in Free Movement:
Ethical Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and of Money, ed. Brian Barry and Robert E.
Goodin, (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 26
26
Rainer Bauböck, “Global Justice, Freedom of Movement and Democratic Justice,” European Journal of
Sociology 50, no.1 (2009): p. 7. Also see, Mark Tushnet, “Immigration Policy in Liberal Political Theory”
in Justice in Immigration, ed. Warren F. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 147157. Tushnet underscores the benefits of rethinking liberalism’s basic precepts as the members of its polity
change. Thus, the limitations on entry that attempt to preserve the existing distribution of values in a
society are in consistent with the liberalism’s commitment to revising its own values as the values of its
members change.
16
argument for open borders find an affinity with Foucault’s explication of security and
freedom of movement under governmental modes of power. This is perhaps unsurprising
since scholars of governmentality have argued that immigration is a form of population
management subject to various governmental techniques of power.27 A governmental
conception of security and freedom of movement is therefore immanent to the liberal
egalitarian debate on immigration. In that sense, a critical-analytical perspective that is
informed by Foucault’s analysis of state power, can germinate from the normative debate
on immigration. In the next section, I elaborate on this critical analytical perspective by
re-conceptualizing the relationship between the juridico-legal conception of security and
free movement so that they are no longer understood to be competing considerations in
need of a balance.
III. Security and Freedom of Movement: The Critical Analytical Approach
The juridico-legal conception of security considers the protection of life, liberty and
property through the rule of law as integral to establishing institutional, political and
economic stability in a polity. This conception of security, at the heart of the normative
debate on immigration, understands freedom of movement as a right that compromises
the stability of a polity. As a result, liberals understand the relationship between security
and free movement to be in need of a balance, where the demands of security impose
restrictions on free movement and vice versa. There exists a significant blind spot in this
normative approach towards immigration given its inattention to the rationalities
governing the modern state. In this section, I draw on Foucault’s conception of
27
See Barry Hindess, “Citizenship in the International Managements of Populations,” American
Behavioral Scientist 43, no.9 (2000), p.1493-1494; and Didier Bigo, “Security and Immigration: Toward a
Critique of the Governmentality of Unease,” Alternatives 27, (2002), 63-92.
17
governmental security and freedom of movement to articulate a critical-analytical
approach to immigration, grounded in an account of the security apparatuses and
mechanisms that animate the governmental state. 28 I argue that freedom of movement is
integral to the operation of the security apparatus in the critical-analytical approach. I
make the argument by underscoring the elements of complementarity, interdependency
and augmentation that characterize the relationship between free movement and
governmental security. This alternative relationship between freedom of movement and
governmental security establishes the conditions of equilibrium and growth that facilitate
and augment governmental security.
As mentioned in the previous section, Foucault argues that governmental security
works within reality, by accepting and supporting its various aspects to achieve
equilibrium in social relations. An aspect of reality that governmental security integrates
and works with is that of the constant movement of people, capital, goods, and natural
phenomena. Foucault describes circulation as a necessary, inevitable and natural process
in life.29 Here, governmental security works by “not interfering, allowing free movement,
letting things follow their course; laisser faire, passer et aller.”30 Thus, unlike sovereign
or disciplinary rule, governmental security does not attempt to curb or prevent the
circulatory processes of reality. Rather new elements are constantly integrated and
28
In the recent years, a number of writings on international migration have been influenced by Foucault’s
lectures on governmentality. Thus far, there has been no attempt to elaborate on the general approach in
these works. The critical-analytical approach to immigration put forth in this paper is one way of describing
and grouping these various writings in political theory and sociology. See, for instance: William Walters,
“Deportation, Expulsion and the International Police of Aliens,” Citizenship Studies 6, no. 3 (2002): 265290; Jeff Huysmans, Andrew Dobson and Raia Prokhovnik, ed. The Politics of Protection: Sites of
Insecurity and Political Agency, (New York: Routledge, 2006); Didier Bigo, “Security and Immigration:
Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease,” Alternatives 27, (2002), 63-92; and most recently
Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of
Movement,” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
29
Security, Territory, Population, p. 45.
30
Security, Territory, Population, p. 48.
18
organized by the security apparatus into ever-wider circuits that are self-regulating,
integrative and centrifugal.31 In fact, the equilibrium in social relations sought by
governmental security is achieved through this self-regulating, integrative and centrifugal
character of free movement. In lecture one and two, Foucault emphasizes how the
security apparatus32 often allows a social problem to develop to a point where a process
of self-regulation and self-correction can be activated. In the case of scarcity for instance,
prices are allowed to fluctuate so that they reach a natural equilibrium; goods are
encouraged to circulate in a whole series of markets to meet demands; and without any
artificial measures to prevent and suppress the problem, scarcity becomes a chimerical
problem whose origin, development and solution are obfuscated, resulting in the
suppression of popular dissent.33 In effect, Foucault’s analysis of scarcity demonstrates
that the free movement of goods and capital cancels out the problem to restore a harmony
in social relations.
In this sense, free movement is complementary to governmental security. Free
movement understood in the broad sense of exchange, contact, dispersion and
distribution, is what allows the security apparatus to achieve an equilibrium in social
relations. In fact, it would not be possible for governmental security to function well
without embracing the circulatory processes of life. Free movement is therefore integral
for the security apparatus to govern optimally. As Foucault declares towards the end of
31
Security, Territory, Population, p. 45; Foucault makes an interesting comparison between the
disciplinary and security mechanisms in this lecture, noticing that discipline is essentially centripetal
because it concentrates, focuses and encloses, while security is centrifugal because it has a constant
tendency to expand and allow the development of ever-wider circuits.
32
I use the term ‘security apparatus’ as a synonym for governmental security. Foucault never refers to the
term governmental security, although his discussions on security are for the most part circumscribed to
governmental modes of power. I use the term ‘governmental security’ to distinguish it from ‘juridico-legal’
security.
33
Security, Territory, Population, 31-44. On the issue of how scarcity becomes a chimera that eludes the
population through de-regulatory strategies, see p. 41 and 43.
19
Security, Territory, Population: “Failing to respect freedom is not only an abuse of rights
with regard to law, it is above all ignorance of how to govern properly.”34
If free movement of people and things is an aspect of reality that governmental
security must embrace in order to achieve equilibrium, the security apparatus must also
actively regulate the nature of free movement to encourage the positive elements and
hinder the negative. A pertinent example is given in lecture one where Foucault talks
about the transformation of the town from a tight, enclosed space of legal and
administrative activity into an organ akin to the heart that acts as an agent perfect for
circulation. The impetus for restructuring the town into a space for circulation was the
growth of economic and commercial activity in eighteenth century Europe. As a result,
new streets were built and connected into a network to allow for the flow of goods;
overcrowding was dealt with by creating wider roads and open spaces; housing was
provided to attract labor from the countryside; and new forms of surveillance were
installed to reduce dangerous flows like theft and disease.35 These interventions can be
understood as deployments of governmental security designed to maximize the
movement of positive elements that facilitated commerce, and minimize the risky
elements that undermined the free flow of people and goods. In this instance, free
movement in eighteenth century Europe was the liberation of commercial activity, so the
security apparatus actively worked to manufacture this freedom through a range of
measures, which privileged the flows of commerce over others.
34
35
Security, Territory, Population, p.353.
Security, Territory, Population, 14-20.
20
Thus, we can now delineate two facets of the relationship between governmental
security and free movement. On the one hand, free movement is an aspect of reality that
is complementary to the security apparatus because of its capacity to achieve equilibrium
in social relations. Unlike sovereign or disciplinary modes of power, which resist the
circulatory processes of reality by erecting borders and establishing enclosures,
governmental security operates through circulation to achieve its objectives.36 On the
other hand, the security apparatus must also actively shape and cultivate freedom of
movement to fully liberate its potential from sovereign and disciplinary rule, while
managing the dangers that may arise from this liberation. Foucault’s example of how
towns were restructured in the eighteenth century to promote flows of commerce
exemplifies this point. In that sense, governmental security and freedom of movement
can be understood to have an interdependent relationship, where free movement allows
security to flourish, while at the same time the security apparatus must contain free
movement within acceptable limits in order to achieve its objectives of equilibrium and
growth.37 The interdependent relationship between free movement and security
demonstrates that free movement is integral to the security apparatus, since security
mechanisms must govern through free movement even when circumscribing the scope of
circulatory processes.
A third characteristic defining the relationship between governmental security and
freedom of movement is augmentation of state forces. This third characteristic is most
36
Security, Territory, Population, 13-18.
Foucault articulates the interdependent relationship between security and freedom with great clarity in
the lecture given on January 24, 1979 in The Birth of Biopolitics, 63-68. Here, he contends that the liberal
art of government must breath life into and actively produce freedom. Any additional increase to freedom
under liberalism is introduced through additional control and intervention. In that sense, security/control is
no longer just a counterweight to freedom, as in the case of panopticism, but its mainspring. See The Birth
of Biopolitics, p.67
37
21
clearly elucidated at the nexus of police and circulation. Police can be understood as one
of the two main elements that make up the anatomy of governmental security.38 Primarily
concerned with the growth and strength of the state’s forces while maintaining internal
order,39 police is concerned with two main fields of intervention: the population and the
space of circulation.40 As Foucault attests, the space of circulation is a privileged object
for police because it is by putting people and things in circulation that the state is able to
draw its strength from the population. Moreover, circulation allows humans to live
together, to reproduce, to subsist, to communicate and to associate. It is this collective coexistence of humans in large numbers that enhances the strength of the state, which
police enables by facilitating circulation. Therefore, the relationship between police and
circulation is characterized by augmentation. Notably, the relationship between police
and circulation coincides with that between governmental security and freedom of
movement. Since police encapsulates aspects of the security apparatus concerned with the
growth and strength of the state’s forces, we can conclude that a relationship of
augmentation characterizes the relationship between governmental security and freedom
of movement. In other words, the police/circulation nexus amplifies how the security
apparatus and freedom of movement are engaged in a mutually reinforcing relationship to
increase the state’s strength and internal order.
38
The other element is the military-diplomatic apparatus. See Security, Territory, Population, p. 296 for
Foucault’s elaboration of the structure of the security mechanism.
39
The alternative name given to police is ‘splendor’. Foucault refers to a number of texts in the eighteenth
century, which refer to the object of police as the state’s splendor. The definition of splendor captures the
double goals of police as the growth of state forces and order: ‘splendor is the visible beauty of the order
and the brilliant radiating manifestation of a force’, see Security, Territory, Population, p.314
40
There are five fields of intervention specified for the police apparatus (the number of people in a state,
the necessities of life, the problem of health, the activity of the population and the circulation of men and
things), which I have summarized into two: the population and the space of circulation, see, Security,
Territory, Population, 323-326.
22
Taking stock, this section highlighted the elements of complementarity,
interdependency and augmentation between governmental security and freedom of
movement. Given this close association, I argue that freedom of movement establishes
the conditions of equilibrium and growth that facilitate and augment governmental
security. Freedom of movement is therefore not simply an independent and competing
value to be balanced against security, but rather integral to the deployment of security
mechanisms. In order to arrive at this argument, it was necessary to rethink the
definitions of security and freedom of movement prevalent in the normative debate. The
juridico-legal conception of security in liberalism understands freedom of movement as a
threat to the institutional, political and economic stability of a polity. As a result, liberals
have expended much energy attempting to achieve a morally ideal balance between the
conflicting demands of security and freedom of movement and consequently paid little
attention to the rationalities that animate the modern state. A relationship of
complementarity, interdependency and augmentation between security and freedom of
movement provides new conceptual coordinates to understand state responses to
immigration. In the next section, I exemplify the critical-analytical approach by turning
to a contemporary example of border transgression from Australia. The historical context
of immigration policies, which culminated in the MV Tampa incident demonstrate how
freedom of movement intensified security concerns on the continent to the point of
pushing contemporary immigration policies towards increasingly authoritarian measures.
IV. Security and Freedom of Movement: Immigration in Australia and the MV Tampa
Incident of 2001
23
Since the early 1980s, there has been a sharp rise in asylum claims across Western
countries. Whereas the total number of applications across Western Europe averaged no
more than 13,000 annually in the 1970s, the annual totals had grown to 170,000 by 1985
and to 690,000 in 1992. By the beginning of 2000, the number of claims had dropped to
412,700, a figure still far in excess of the levels in 1970s and 1980s. Outside of Europe,
only three out of twenty-one countries received fewer asylum applications in the threeyear period between 1998 and 2000 than they received between 1995 and 1997.41 Thus,
in the vast majority of Western countries, there has been a growth in asylum
applications.42 The response of Western countries to this rising trend in asylum applicants
has been paradoxical. While many have recognized the moral importance of the principle
of asylum, and publicly acknowledged the legal responsibilities to refugees and others in
need of protection, a remarkable array of restrictive measures to prevent and deter asylum
seekers have also been implemented.43 This contradictory response of Western states to
the claims of asylum seekers has been attributed to the challenges faced by governments
when trying to balance the demands of national security with commitments to
41
UNHCR, State of the World’s Refugees 2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.325.
Matthew Gibney and Randall Hansen attribute the growth in asylum seekers since the 1980s to four
main causes: 1) In 1967, a Protocol was added to the UN Convention on Refugees expanding the
application of the Convention to refugees who emerged as a result of events occurring after 1951 and came
from countries outside Europe 2) By the early 1970s, France, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia and the
UK had all ended policies that encouraged or tolerated labor migration from Southern Europe and former
colonies/the third world. Around the same time, even countries of permanent settlement, such as Australia,
found themselves cutting back on immigration, in part due to rising unemployment. 3) From the 1970s,
refugee-producing events in the South, and, after 1989, in the Balkans escalated. 4) A global industry in the
smuggling and, in some cases, trafficking of people has enabled asylum seekers to evade immigration
control measures imposed by western nation-states. See, Matthew J. Gibney and Randall Hansen Asylum
Policy in the West: Past Trends, Future Possibilities, Un/University/Wider Discussion Paper, 2003/68,
September.
43
For an account of the changing modalities of regulation in international immigration in Europe and
North America see, James F. Hollifield, "Migration and the New International Order: The Missing
Regime," in Bimal Ghosh, ed. Managing Migration: Time for a New International Regime (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 75-109. Hollifield distinguishes between external measures of immigration control
such as visa regimes, carrier sanctions and airport liaison officers, and internal measures such as detention,
dispersal regimes and restrictions to access to welfare and housing.
42
24
international human rights instruments like the 1951 UN convention Relating to the
Status of Refugees. In other words, the response of Western governments to asylum
seekers is considered to be an institutional manifestation of the ethical challenge faced by
liberal egalitarians when trying to balance the demands of security and freedom of
movement. The incongruence in state responses is critiqued by liberal egalitarians as a
failure to strike the appropriate balance between security and free movement by
capitulating to the dynamics of electoral politics, economic interests and foreign policy
concerns.44
In this section, I draw on the history of immigration in Australia to argue that the
contradictory response of liberal democratic states to asylum is better understood from a
critical-analytical perspective where freedom of movement establishes the conditions that
facilitate and augment the pursuit of security. The Australian state’s response to
unauthorized immigration exhibits deep-seated anxieties about freedom of movement,
which propelled it towards pursuing security interests at the expense of affirming the
value and legitimacy of free movement. In other words, rather than being a competing
consideration that can temper the demands of security, free movement has intensified
security concerns to the point of pushing immigration policies in Australia towards
increasingly authoritarian measures. Thus, although great emphasis is attached to the
principle of asylum, even greater efforts are made to ensure that refugees never reach the
territory of the state where they could receive protection. I demonstrate the prioritization
44
Matthew Gibney makes the argument there is gap between the realm of ethical theory and the actual
behavior of states because states face real world constraints such as elections, economic interests and
foreign policy concerns. He argues that normative theory on immigration must to some extent mesh with
real world possibilities of choice and action by acknowledging that the capabilities of governments to enact
ethical principles are for the most part politically constructed within the sovereign structure of the state.
See, Matthew Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to
Refugees, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 194-228.
25
of security in state approaches to asylum by taking up the MV Tampa incident of 2001 in
Australia. I elaborate on the incident and the context that led to it in order to illustrate
how freer cross-border movement consolidated the security apparatus through a process
of complementarity, interdependency and augmentation.
Australia constitutes an important example for understanding the practices of
liberal democratic states to asylum because of the way it has pioneered new forms of
restrictive policies towards asylum seekers over the last decade, all the while continuing
to support and implement relatively inclusive immigration policies towards regular
migrants. In 2001, the Australian government embroiled itself in a heated international
controversy when a crisis relating to border security erupted on the shores of Australia. A
wooden fishing boat carrying 433 asylum seekers, mostly Afghan nationals, began to sink
in the Indian Ocean approximately 140 kilometers north of Australia’s Christmas Island
territory. The fishing boat was soon in distress and after responding to an alert by
Australia coastal officials, a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, rescued the 438
asylum seekers on board. The freighter, now carrying a human cargo, charted a course for
Christmas Island at the request of its passengers, where they would be able to make a
demand for asylum from Australia. Wishing to prevent such a scenario, Australian
government officials telephoned the captain and warned him not to enter Australia’s
territorial waters. The captain ignored the warning, giving rise to a stand off between
troops from the Australia Defense Force and an overloaded and under-resourced ship.45
After several days, a resolution was achieved whereby the asylum seekers were
forcefully transferred to another ship that took them to Papua New Guinea and the Pacific
45
Ernst Willheim, “MV Tampa: The Australian Response”, International Journal of Refugee Law, 15(2),
2003: 160-163.
26
Island of Nauru. The Australian government reached a financial deal with these countries
to hold the asylum seekers until other states could be convinced to give them asylum. The
government’s efforts to resolve the crisis by drawing upon resettlement options in other
states became known as the ‘Pacific Solution’. In addition, new legislation excised a
number of Australian island territories (Christmas Island, Ashmore Reef and Cocos
Island) from the country’s ‘migration zone’. Asylum seekers landing on these territories
would no longer be deemed to have landed in Australia for the purposes of immigration
law, effectively denying them access to the protection of the Australian courts.
Furthermore, in 2006 an Immigration Detention Centre, containing approximately 800
beds, was constructed on Christmas Island for the Department of Immigration in
Australia.46
The Australian government’s response to the Tampa affair demonstrates the fear
of submergence by foreigners that I opened this paper with. The government’s response
remains distinctive for a number of reasons. Compared with other developed nations that
have faced unauthorized immigration, Australia’s severe response was provoked by so
few asylum seekers. Whereas the US, Germany and the UK have faced tens and
thousands of applicants on an annual basis, Australia has at most faced a few thousand.47
Second, although other Western nations have also implemented increasing punitive
policies towards unauthorized immigrants, the Australian government was the first to not
only enforce mandatory detention, but also accomplish territorial re-definition to prevent
46
The State of the World's Refugees, Safeguarding Asylum, The Tampa Affair: Interception and Rescue at
Sea, 19 April 2006. Accessed online at: http://www.unhcr.org/4444d3c320.html
47
United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Sea Change: Australia’s New Approach to
Asylum Seekers, 19 February 2002. Accessed online at:
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,USCRI,,AUS,,3c99bc884,0.html
27
unauthorized immigration.48 Moreover, there was unprecedented public support for the
government’s policy on refusing entry to asylum seekers. It has been argued that no
Western government in recent decades can claim a direct link to their re-election and the
issue of restricting asylum seekers as the Howard government of 2001.49 The fear of
submergence by foreigners is clearly apparent in Australia’s response to the Tampa
affair, for the asylum seekers were treated like an invasion force even though the actual
numbers of migrants seeking entry into Australia was quite small. The extremity of
Australia’s response to unauthorized immigration suggests that unique historical anxieties
are propelling Australia’s intractable defense of national borders.
The root of Australia’s anxieties towards asylum seekers can be explained by the
history of cross-border mobility on the continent. Between 1945 and 1976, the link
between immigration and the nation’s security was considered to be crucial. Australia’s
leaders embraced mass migration from Europe in order to expand the labor pool and
maximize economic growth. Furthermore, fears of invasion from the more populous
Asian nations to the North convinced political leaders that a population of 7 million in
1945 was too small to deter or repel any hostile nation. As a result, Australia’s first
Ministry of Immigration was set up in 1945 with Arthur Calwell as its first minister. By,
1978, the implementation of the Calwell program resulted in over 3.5 million immigrants
from Europe settling in Australia.50
48
James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration, (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002) p.187
49
Anthony Burke, In Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety, (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 150-151.
50
James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration, 130-137.
28
Therefore, the first post-war wave of European immigration to Australia was
crucial for the economic and demographic security of the nation. Here, we can draw on
the critical-analytical approach to illuminate aspects of governmental security in
Australia’s immigration policy. Australia’s openness to freer movement across its borders
allowed the nation to achieve the governmental security objectives of equilibrium and
growth. In the immediate post-war period, Australia’s economy was exceedingly
vulnerable to fluctuations in international commodity prices because of its
overdependence upon the production of primary goods derived from farming and mining.
Thus, a larger supply of labor was necessary if the nation was to construct a strong
manufacturing base. Migrant labor from Europe led to an expansion in the country’s
manufacturing base, which according to Arthur Calwell, the immigration minister in
1951, “greatly assisted in breaking bottle-necks in the production of iron and steel, bricks,
tiles, cement and other building materials.”51 In other words, freer cross-border
movement brought about the equilibrium and growth in the economy that facilitated the
Australian government’s pursuit of economic security. Similarly, Australia’s desire to
expand its migrant intake from Europe stemmed from the belief that the country was
under-populated and therefore unable to draw on a population large enough to ensure the
nation’s military security. In that sense, freer cross-border movement resulted in
population growth that struck an equilibrium between Australia’s military needs and the
nation demographic deficit. Given this, we can identify a complementary relationship
between free movement and security in Australia’s post-war intake of European
51
Arthur Calwell, quoted in Francis Keble Crowley, Modern Australia Documents: Volume II 1939-1970,
(Melbourne: Wren, 1973), p.14.
29
immigrants. Freer cross-border movement on the continent established the conditions of
equilibrium and growth that facilitated the nation’s pursuit of governmental security.
While European refugees after 1945 had benefited from the fortunate coincidence
that their need for protection served Australia’s security interests, Vietnamese refugees
that arrived in Australia after 1975 could not rely on such good fortune. The arrival of
Vietnamese refugees in Australia after US forces pulled out of Saigon rekindled longestablished public concerns over the nation’s ability to insulate itself from the ‘poor and
over-crowded’ nations of Asia.52 In the face of a highly anxious public, the Labor
government of 1978 spearheaded international discussions with the UNHCR and the US
to share the responsibility of refugees from Vietnam. These discussions, which led
eventually to the establishment of an orderly departure program for Vietnamese refugees,
attempted to prevent future arrivals by boat by giving potential unauthorized immigrants
an official route to enter Australia, along with other Western countries, notably the US.
By 1981, around 50,000 Indo-Chinese had been allowed to enter Australia as refugees.
The government had also committed itself to accepting approximate 15,000 more
annually.53
Thus, the second wave of refugees entering Australia between 1975 and 1981 was
accepted with great trepidation. In fact, if it had not been for Australia’s involvement in
the Vietnam war and the need to strengthen Australia’s geopolitical connections to Asia
as the region rose to global economic prominence, there may have been no compelling
52
For instance, the White Australia Policy that survived until 1973, was motivated by concerns that the
importation of Asian and Pacific Islander migrants would jeopardize the ‘Britishness’ of Australian society.
See James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration, 1-13.
53
Nancy Viviani, “Refugees – The End of Splendid Isolation?” in P.J Boyce and J.R Angel, ed.
Independence and Alliance: Australia in World Affairs 1976-80, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin and the
Australian Institute of International Affairs, 1983), pp. 56-78.
30
reason for Australia to dismantle its restrictive immigration policies.54 In this instance,
free movement was necessary for Australia to obtain its security objectives, but the racial
make-up of the migrants conditioned Australia’s response to the refugees. Australia
sought to constrict freedom of movement through a process of ‘burden-sharing’ with
other liberal democratic states, and the establishment of quotas to regulate the flow of
refugees.
These interventions should be understood in the context of a highly racialized
discourse on immigration in Australia where maintaining the European-ness of Australian
society was a pressing concern. Vietnamese refugees were considered to be a cultural and
economic threat to Australia since it was argued that they would shift the European
demographic makeup of Australian society and create difficult and competitive
conditions for Australian workers by providing cheap and flexible labor to employers.55
In this context, restrictions on free movement were designed to manage the substantive
identity of the Australian population, while safeguarding the rights and privileges of
Australian citizenship. In that sense, the second wave of immigration to Australia
exemplifies the interdependent relationship between governmental security and free
movement. Although free movement fulfilled security needs during the first wave of
immigration, the security apparatus soon has to contain it within acceptable limits in
order to achieve its objectives equilibrium and growth in a racially homogenous society.
The character of free movement is therefore something that is constantly produced by the
54
James Jupp argues that the viability of White Australia Policy depended upon Australia’s key economic
and security interests being tied to Europe and North America. By the beginning of the 1970’s however,
Australia’s connections to the North Hemisphere weakened and it became necessary to forge new alliances
with Asia. See James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration,41-56.
55
Nancy Viviani, The Long Journey: Vietnamese Migration and Settlement in Australia, (Beaverton:
Melbourne University Press, 1984), p. 89.
31
liberal state in accordance with the changing exigencies of governmental security.
Australia’s experience with Vietnamese refugees has defined the nation’s
relationship to freedom of movement. The landing of Vietnamese refugees in 1976
transformed public attitudes in Australia such that immigration matters became one of the
most divisive issues facing the nation,56 paving the way for the MV Tampa controversy
of 2001. Although the policies of the Howard government to MV Tampa incident has
been widely characterized as constituting a radical departure, a ‘sea change’57 in
Australia’s response to refugees, previous governments have consistently refused the
mantle of Australia as a country of first asylum since the mid 1970s. For instance, the
previous government of Paul Keating had attempted to deter asylum seekers by making
detention mandatory and reducing prospects for judicial review.58 The Howard
government, finding policies of deterrence inadequate, shifted its response to the direct
prevention of arrivals through interdictions. This movement from deterrence to direct
prevention should be understood as consistent with the trajectory of policy-making on
asylum seekers since the late 1970s where security, economic and demographic
justifications reduced refugee intake.
In that sense, the nation’s reaction to the Tampa incident arises in this context
where free movement since the 1970s has posed a threat to the security of the nation. In
response, freedom of movement was carefully managed to promote the needs of security.
The severity of Australia’s response to the Tampa incident is an extension of this
56
Freda Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration: Australia and Canada Compared, (Kingston, Ontario:
McGill and Queen’s University Press, 1991), 35-39.
57
United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Sea Change: Australia’s New Approach to
Asylum Seekers, 19 February 2002. Accessed online at:
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,USCRI,,AUS,,3c99bc884,0.html
58
Freda Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration: Australia and Canada Compared, 67-69
32
management of free movement. The nexus between police/circulation best captures the
violence involved in the management of free movement because it amplifies how security
and freedom of movement are engaged in a mutually reinforcing relationship of
augmentation to increase the state’s strength and internal order.
To elaborate on this dimension of augmentation, I consider the detention and
deportation of the asylum seekers on board the MV Tampa. In the aftermath of the
Tampa incident and the ‘Pacific Solution’, the Australian government constructed
Immigration Detention Centers on Christmas Island to prevent irregular entry. While the
Australia courts process the claims of the detainees for asylum, they are detained,
monitored and subject to isolation and punishment.59 A report by the Australia Human
Rights Commission expressed concern over the high security, prison-like conditions of
the detention center. The report also states that the detention facilities on the remote
island are not appropriate for asylum seekers since under international standards,
authorities should seek to minimize differences between life in detention and life at
liberty in the design and delivery of detention services and facilities.60 After months of
detention in these facilities, 181 asylum seekers were deported from Christmas Island. 61
The detention and deportation of the asylum seekers on board MV Tampa can be
productively illuminated through the nexus of police/circulation. The circulation of nonEuropean migrants into Australian territory is a feature of modern life that Australia
59
Michael Leech, "'Disturbing Practices: Dehumanizing Asylum Seekers in the Refugee 'Crisis' in
Australia, 2000-2002," Refuge 21, no. 3 (2003): 25-33.
60
Australian Human Rights Commission, Immigration Detention on Christmas Island 2010, Accessed
online at: http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/immigration/idc2010_christmas_island.html#Heading595
61
William Kirtley, “The Tampa Incident: The Legality of Ruddock v. Vadarlis Under International Law
and the Implications of Australia’s New Asylum Policy”, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 41, no.2
(2002), p. 254.
33
reluctantly accepted from the 1970s onwards. It attempted to curb these waves of
migrations by displacing the burden to other liberal democratic states, and instituting
annual quotas that regulated circulation. At the nexus of police and circulation, we are
able to identify the repressive techniques of detention and deportation used to control
circulation. Police is concerned with maintaining internal order while putting men in
circulation so the state can draw its strength from the population. In that sense, the
detention and deportation of asylum seekers is a method of regulating circulation with the
aim of maintaining internal order. Internal order should be understood in relation to the
population, so that the aim of police is to control the ethnic and class make-up of the
population through exclusion (detention) and removal (deportation).62 Since, control over
the character of the population is aimed towards the growth and strength of state forces,
there is a dimension of augmentation that characterizes the Australian state’s response to
the MV Tampa incident.
In order to understand Australia’s response to the MV Tampa incident, it was
necessary to delve into the history of immigration on the continent. Australia’s encounter
with immigration from Europe and Asia demonstrated how freedom of movement was
integral for the consolidation of governmental security concerns on the continent. I drew
on the critical-analytical approach developed in this paper to make this point. The
elements of complementarity, interdependency and augmentation that characterize the
62
For a discussion on the deportation of aliens as a practice within the international police of population
see, William Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion and the International Police of Aliens”, Citizenship Studies,
6, no. 3 (2002): 280-284.
34
relationship between governmental security and freedom of movement could be traced in
the Australian state’s responses to immigration. This suggests that free movement across
borders furthers the goals of governmental security and ceases to be a competing
consideration that can temper the demands of security. The valorization of security is best
exemplified in the “Pacific Solution”, in which the Australian government argued that
such drastic measures as detention and deportation were necessary to curb the unending
flows of asylum seekers would make their way to Australia’s northern shores.
V. Conclusion
If the specific policies employed by Australia appear harsher than those of European
countries, the difference is mostly one of degree. The trajectory of Australia’s asylum
policies since the 1970s is one of increasing radicalization in the measures used to deter
and prevent arrivals, particularly those arriving by boat. Yet, this kind of radicalization is
evident in other liberal democratic nations as well. Germany moved from the mild
reforms in its asylum procedures in the 1980s to whole-scale constitutional change in the
1990s; in the 1960s, the US tried to manage Cuban arrivals with organized resettlement
schemes but, by the 1980s was employed interdiction as well. The UK, faced with
unprecedented numbers of asylum seekers after 1999, stated that, in addition to
continuing its policies on detaining and restricting welfare to asylum seekers, it was now
considering ‘Australian style’ turning back of ‘illegal’ migrants in the Mediterranean
35
sea.63
This paper sought to develop an approach that could understand why
contemporary immigration policies are increasingly moving towards such authoritarian
measures. In other words, why is there a radicalization in the measures used by
governments to prevent and deter unauthorized entry? The normative approach to the
problem understands the drastic state responses to asylum seekers as emerging from the
failure to strike an appropriate balance between security and free movement. In other
words, the right to free movement is not appropriately weighed against security concerns
when states capitulate to the dynamics of electoral politics, economic interests and
foreign policy concerns. The attempt to strike a balance between security and freedom of
movement can be a useful philosophical exercise for adjudicating the morally difficult
issues at stake in immigration. However, it creates a significant blind spot on state actions
towards immigration because the search for a balance in the normative debate occurs at a
fairly detached level from the rationalities that animate and give coherence to state
actions on immigration. By re-conceptualizing the relationship between security and
freedom of movement in the normative debate, a critical-analytical approach was
developed to understand the prioritization of security in immigration policies of liberaldemocratic states. Freer cross-border movement consolidates the security apparatus
through a process of complementarity, interdependency and augmentation. In other
words, rather than being a competing consideration that can temper the demands of
63
Matthew Gibney, “The State of Asylum: Democratization, Judicialization and the Evolution of Refugee
Policy” in Susan Kneebone ed. The Refugee Convention 50 Years On: Globalization and International Law
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p.20
36
security, free movement has intensified security concerns to the point of pushing
immigration policies in liberal-democratic nations towards increasingly authoritarian
measures.
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