Borders provocation from State of Emergency : Melbourne Indymedia

“There is a better way of dealing
with the needs of refugees arriving
in Australia – whether with or
without a visa, by boat or by plane.
The Better Way will not
compromise Australia’s security,
health or community values, and
will actually be cheaper”

— Introduction to “The Better Way: Refugees, Detention and Australians” produced by the Justice for Asylum Seekers Alliance.

John Howard’s statement “we will decide who enters this country and the circumstances in which they come” is often seen as representing a shameful development in Australia’s history: a time when immigration control was ‘politicized’, and state brutality dominated the response to asylum-seekers. Yet this statement is neither new nor confined to the current Government. Howard’s assertion simply reveals the logic that has always typified Australia’s immigration regime, and which is shared by all parliamentary parties, and most refugee advocacy groups. This statement reveals a commitment to national sovereignty, and the link between this sovereignty and an increasingly violent form of border policing.

Currently, the arsenal used to ‘protect our borders’ includes detention camps, pushing back boats, temporary visa regimes, and the deaths of hundreds of asylum seekers, whose boat, the SIEV X, was allowed to sink because a boat that didn’t arrive was seen not as a cause for concern, or for rescue crews, but as a victory. This arsenal has, unsurprisingly, led to protest – beginning inside the camps. Yet, in opposing this regime, many groups attempt to contrast the ‘inhumanity’ of the Government’s approach, with the myth of a ‘humane’ sovereignty, which would protect Australia’s borders yet do away with the brutality of the current system. This approach is not only naïve, but dangerous.

State sovereignty has always been founded on violent exclusion. What we see today is the lengths necessary to maintain this sovereignty in an age of unauthorized migration. Today the consolidation of this sovereignty must necessarily be brutal if it is to repel those who have been forced to leave states that are often war-torn states, poverty-stricken states, or in today’s terminology, simply ‘failed states.’ Detention camps, razor wire, racism, deaths and brutality are not unnecessary aspects of state sovereignty: they are the truth of this sovereignty. In an era of capitalist globalization, the role of the nation-state is increasingly a pure policing role. If the nation-state is to survive, it will only do so by demonstrating its ability to maintain control over a nationally demarcated population. If it can’t do so, it risks the same fate as the regimes of the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, who were not deposed for humanitarian reasons, but because they could no longer be relied upon to adequately control and suppress their populations. Today the stakes for the nation-state are high. The global, unauthorized movement of people can’t be tolerated by states that recognize that their power lies in their ability to construct and control a national people.

This is precisely what much of the ‘refugee movement’ can’t recognize. As long as supposed opponents of today’s border control regime maintain a commitment to state sovereignty, they will be unable to effectively contest even the most brutal aspects of this regime. We see this in the numerous groups, epitomized by the Justice for Asylum Seekers Alliance, and Just Australia who portray themselves as opponents of detention while proposing only a more ‘humane’ detention, or as the JAS pamphlet describes it, The Better Way. Calls for such alternative detention models are invariably prefaced with statements supporting the state’s right to determine who enters Australia. JAS even go as far as to state “The Better Way doesn’t propose changes to Australia’s border protection policy” In fact the best JAS can propose is a model based on the Woomera Alternative Detention Pilot, which they describe as “a more humane model”. In the alternative detention model, women and children are separated from male family members, may only receive visitors in the presence of detention guards and fundamentally, people are still detained and deprived of their freedom. The truth of this model is found in The Better Way in the heading: “Managing people better.” This ultimately, is the role those like JAS, intend for themselves. They cannot oppose state sovereignty, as they have an interest in its continuation – with themselves as more humane managers of a national population. Not just those who cross borders, but all of us must oppose this logic, and refuse to be defined as national subjects, with an interest in managing a national people by retaining a right to exclude. We must continue to cross the borders, tear down the fences and throw our bodies against the camps, not to demand a more humane subjugation and imprisonment, but to create, through our actions, a world without borders in which we are all free to move where we wish.