My saucy analysis of three recent events in migration politics
Australia makes a migration deal with Nauru, UK suspends family reunification system, and the Pentagon makes military lawyers immigration judges
Event 1: Australia will send hundreds of detained migrants (the current exact number is 354, if anyone was wondering) to the island-nation Nauru, one of the smallest countries in the world, and pay the Nauru government $1.6bn for it over 30 years. The Australian government claims these migrants have no legal right to stay in Australia.
Analysis: It’s about political optics. The government needs to show itself as tough on immigration for the usual reasons, most having to do with redirecting anger from the human costs of failed neoliberal policies and the far-right excremented from said failures, and so on. To say that these people have no legal right to stay in Australia is probably bullshit if the Australian government actually followed international humanitarian law, but there’s the sovereignty thing, you know. This recent move continues, in a modified form, in a symbolically more humane form, the politics of Australian offshore detention where, since 2001, asylum seekers have been placed in truly horrific prisons centers in Nauru and Manus. But there’s a but: The awful experience of these centers gave rise to one of the best neo-Dickensian books of our time (Behrooz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains).
Event 2: The UK has suspended its family reunion system for asylees, because asylees’ family members run the risk of being exploited by smugglers, said the government. Asylees will instead have to apply through the standard family scheme, which applies to UK citizens. So now asylees will have to show they have a joint income of at least £29,000 a year to be able to bring a partner to the UK. So that’s going to be kind of really fucking hard to do for asylees, too put it in diplomatic terms.
Analysis: It’s about political optics. And other stuff. The government needs to show itself as tough on immigration, and so on, especially since the current Labour government has virtually no ideas of its own on how to improve the conditions of the working class in the UK, and is all but certain to continue exacerbating existing economic and social inequalities, which give rise to a politics of anger, which said anger is redirected toward easy scapegoats, which said scapegoating Labour believes will keep them in power, and so on. To say that these people have no right to be reunited with their family members is probably bullshit if the UK government actually followed international humanitarian law, but there’s the sovereignty thing, you know.
Event 3: The Pentagon has approved sending up to 600 military lawyers to act as immigration judges as the Trump administration continues its firing streak of undesirable judges.
Analysis: Takes the word militarization of immigration control to another level. But I believe there’s optics to this too. We should pay attention to how this plays out, because it just sounds so fucking bad. There’s business to it too, because the ever-growing American immigration and deportation machine is about making private prison and security companies a lot of money. Like a lot of money. And with the recent exorbitant increase of application fees for all types of immigration cases, the government is set to make a buck or two as well. Who was it that said: The chief business of the American government is… business?
That’s all y’all.
The world is a really dark place right now. Scary.