Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border

7. What Kind of State Are We In?

167 If we pause for a moment on the meaning of “states” as the “conditions in which we find ourselves,” then it seems we reference the moment of writing itself or perhaps even a certain condition of being upset, out of sorts: what kind of state are we in when we start to think about the state? —Judith Butler (2007, 3) T H I S B O O K H A S E X P L O R E D the relationship between discourse and practice, between the production of mobile subjectivities—the smuggled, the refugee, the spontaneous arrival, the detainee—and their abjection. Contemporary discourse on migration and asylum is indeed riddled with metaphors of exclusion by states. Australia excises islands, Europe externalizes processing, and Canada crafts the long tunnel. These metaphors represent exclusionary geographies that contribute to the shrinking of spaces of asylum. Meanings of asylum, initially designed to protect, are themselves crossing into a new phase of securitization. The very border enforcement regimes developed to curb human smuggling also stop asylum seekers from reaching sovereign territory. The securitization of migration renders those persons in search of protection more vulnerable. States themselves act as the architects of statelessness, by utilizing legal ambiguity, temporary policies, and detention centers. It is imperative, therefore , that we turn our attention not only to those sites and persons that are stateless by geographical design, but also to states themselves, to document and understand their practices. While civil servants work furiously to manage human migration, social scientists must work equally hard to trace the changing nature of sovereignty and the many contradictions involved in Chapter 7 What Kind of State Are We In? 168 What Kind of State Are We In? its exercises in border enforcement. We must write our way to and through the state, to understand just what kind of state we are in. The book has examined state practices and their effects, from the conventional borders of sovereignty, to the preemptive transnational state that stops migration abroad. The analysis began at the administrative center and then moved progressively outward—along state borders and abroad to the international staging areas of human smuggling, to the margins of sovereign territory where asylum seekers find themselves detained, and then into daily life, where we negotiate and confront immigration and refugee policies. States enact violence not only in the act of detention, but also in the more mundane practices of exclusion, where migrants and asylum seekers are haunted as policy reverberates through work and life. I have argued that states of migration are capitalizing on crises to advance enforcement agendas that exclude those in search of refuge. Whether viewed from the outside in or the inside out, the state is imagined , enacted, and encountered in our daily lives. In these processes, state borders expand far beyond political boundaries, moving outward to bring into being paradoxical zones and extraterritorial locales of policing and detention. The text dwelled in zones of exclusion: the tunnel, the detention center, the hearing, the island. These cartographies of enforcement demonstrate the securitization of borders that corresponds with shifting, privatized, dispersed, transnational areas of sovereignty. New political geographies of the state have been drawn, often constructing intimate and proximate boundaries around the body. The competing views of borders held by civil servants and transnational migrants point to contradictory “states,” where states act more transnationally in their enforcement practices, exercising sovereign powers that extend beyond traditionally conceived boundaries of sovereign territory. The book’s ethnography of CIC has shown that, in the realm of human smuggling by sea, crises in the media often intersect with voids in policy, with exclusionary results. A battle in the naming and categorizing of those intercepted—typically, “bogus” refugees—accompanies remote institutional geographies of processing and detention. Canada does not act alone in these practices; rather, it is accompanied by other countries that are “leaders” in realms of border enforcement and refugee resettlement. States prove performative in their responses to human smuggling crises in the media, working their way productively—if perilously—through competing narratives of vulnerability and might with corresponding geographies of stateless spaces, remote detention, and interdiction. What Kind of State Are We In? 169 Most migrants who came by sea to Canada were repatriated in highly publicized and controversial chartered flights in 2000. As for Canada, after years of negotiations to draft and sign an interdepartmental Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) that would fill...