Illegal maritime migration. Coast Guard News/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Over the last few decades, the Mediterranean and the Pacific seas have been crossed by the arcing trajectories of hundreds of thousands fleeing war, violence and persecution. Italy and Australia are two major destinations for migratory flows, mainly from African and Asian countries respectively. Governments in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region have tried over the years to introduce more coordinated and centralized measures to help stop ‘irregular’ migration and prevent the increasing number of deaths at sea. But Italy and Australia, in particular, have rarely used their diplomatic and economic power to directly address the causes of these flows. In many cases their actions have actually had the opposite effect, contributing to or even perpetuating the conditions that cause people to move.
They are described as ‘waves’, ‘illegals’, ‘terrorists’.
The Australian and Italian approaches towards asylum-seekers should be viewed in their proper context by deploying theories on the use of ‘emergency’ as a frame for political action. Individuals are constructed as ‘permanent migrants’, becoming ‘abjects’, neither subjects, nor objects, living ‘inexistent states of transient permanence’. This conceptualization clearly matches what William Walters calls the ‘emergence of the humanitarian border’. As Walters argues, the humanitarian construction of measures taken towards asylum-seekers turns them into something acceptable within strategies of control. The fact that Australia and Italy put in place increasingly restrictive policies regarding these people, such as the practice of repelling boats carrying asylum-seekers, envisages a clear shift from ‘democracy’ to ‘security’ in a world of citizenships and circulation.
