Distancing Asylum Seekers from the State: Australia's evolving political geography of immigration and border control

Australia's border enforcement strategies and immigration control policies operate in distant geographies, concealed from human rights groups, media and the public. From offshore detention to militarised maritime defence operations, Australia's exclusion of asylum seekers is increasingly dependent upon geographical processes that ensure asylum seekers do not have access to the state's systems of protection. This article explores a critically overlooked geopolitical strategy of mobility regulation that relies on processes simultaneously expanding geographies of control, while contracting spaces of rights. The outcome of these rapidly evolving bordering practices is the exaggeration of the distance separating asylum seekers from the state, suspending them within a space devoid of an operational system of rights, and emphasising a new and restructured maritime legal geography.     

The slow violence of life without cash: borders,state restrictions,and exclusion in the U.K. and Australia

In the U.K., refused asylum seekers who are considered destitute are provided with subsistence‐level financial support through the Azure card, a cashless technology similar to a debit card. In Australia, identical technology is used to quarantine fifty percent of the welfare benefits of mainly Aboriginal residents of the Northern Territory. In this paper, I explore the underlying state logics driving such punitive financial policies directed at these populations, arguing that cashless technologies represent a form of slow violence that employs financial tactics to undermine the provision of care for populations with precarious citizenship status. Financial tactics enact new forms of border securitization, slowly but permanently excluding people with precarious claims to citizenship from participation in the nation     

Doors and fences: Controlling Indonesia's porous borders and policing asylum seekers

Although the partial outsourcing of state border control to non‐state actors is not a new phenomenon, Indonesia is an interesting case study. Border control in an archipelago consisting of more than 17 000 islands is particularly challenging for state authorities. In addition to contending with the exceptional geography, Indonesia's state authorities are also challenged by the political constellation with Australia in regard to irregular cross‐border movements of asylum seekers that has become a controversial issue in recent history. As an important transit country for asylum seekers and refugees en route to Australia, Indonesia's porous borders have rendered it possible to enter and exit the country relatively easily. Given Australia's political pressure and the financial incentives offered to Indonesia to act as a ‘final bulwark’ and control irregular migration flows more effectively, border control nowadays has gained more significance in Indonesia than in the past. Yet, financial constraints and, more importantly, a lack of political will to host asylum seekers in its own territories for the long term remain as obstacles. Fieldwork observations show that due to ongoing funding restrictions for state‐led border control, state‐society cooperation for border surveillance has increased. Civilians in many hotspots for irregular border crossings have been encouraged to report on ‘suspicious foreigners’. State‐society cooperation for border control, however, offers new opportunities for people smugglers to pay off civilian spies or corrupt border authorities.     

Immigration--mismatches in labour,housing and space: the effects of immigration of several nationalities with regard to the Netherlands

"In the Netherlands, the sharp recent increase of the number of refugee immigrants (asylum seekers) runs parallel to increased numbers of immigrants of other types. Therefore, at least five types of immigrants should still be distinguished (labour migrants, migrants from former colonies, from EU countries, from other rich countries, and asylum seekers). Their spatial orientation in the Netherlands (urban, suburban, rural), by choice or by constraint, is the main focus of this study. The outcomes of the immigration processes have been confronted with general and spatial characteristics of the labour market and housing market. Matches and mismatches are discussed."     

I Do? On geography,marriage and love in Australia

Calls for law reform in Australia reveal marriage as central to the notions of family and citizenship. Attention here is drawn to the recent lack of willingness to debate marriage equality in Australia—from either its advocates or opponents—following a cross-party marriage equality private members bill. Federal Liberal/National Coalition politicians dismiss legislative frameworks that recognise marriage equality in Australia because it is thought to cause the demise of social mores, or is at best unimportant. Advocates for same-sex marriage present promises based on rights, justice and equality, yet fail to reflect on the social implications for those who arrange their sexual lives outside this institutionalised partnership. I argue that the lack of debate is operating to narrow rather than widen understandings about ‘love', drawing attention to geographical understanding of the links between sex, bodies, gender, families and belonging.     

Singled Out: Scaling Violence and Social Groups as Legal Borderwork in U.S. Asylum Law

Through legal interpretation of immigration categories, such as the refugee definition, signatories to the UN Refugee Convention restrict access to political asylum. This paper examines how scalar logics are used in legal interpretation to filter out particular people from national space and control the number legally entitled to enter and remain in the U.S. Scalar logics shape access by requiring asylum seekers to prove they have been ‘singled out’ for persecution and by steering the meaning of the ‘particular social group’ provision of the refugee definition. The restrictive effects of these scalar logics are analyzed in relation to case law involving Central American asylum seekers fleeing gang‐related violence. These cases are often rejected on the basis that the asylum seekers possess identities and experiences exceeding the limited protection offered by asylum. Through analysis of these scalar logics, the paper highlights how interpretations of the refugee definition are an ongoing site of struggle over the scope of asylum protection.     

基于态度与行为的我国旅游地居民的类型划分——以西递、周庄、九华山为例

利用社会调查和市场细分方法 ,对西递、周庄和九华山三个旅游地的居民态度与行为进行实地调查 ,采用分层聚类法将旅游地居民分为四种类型。老年、居住时间较长和文化程度较高的居民多数为矛盾的支持者或理性的支持者 ;对于旅游业联系和依赖较少的居民多属于淡漠的支持者 ;而青年、旅游部门、家人或亲戚有人在旅游部门工作、家庭收入主要或部分来自旅游业的居民在热情的支持者中占较大比重。比较研究的结果表明 ,国内外旅游地居民对旅游发展的态度与行为都存在明显分化 ,但国内旅游地居民较国外旅游地居民对旅游发展表现出更为积极的态度和支持行为 ,尚未形成反对者。     

Permits to burn: weeds,slow violence,and the extractive future of northern Australia

ABSTRACT

This essay narrates the ‘slow violence’, or creeping environmental harms taking place within contemporary environmental governance. It centres on a tall, dense and highly flammable introduced pasture species Gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus), which was listed as a weed across north Australian jurisdictions in 2008. Since this time, it has continued to expand its reach across the Northern Territory (NT). With a potential invasion range of over 380,000?sqkm², this grass is a serious threat to many more-than-human worlds in the north, including Indigenous-led and Indigenous-owned environmental service economies and multimillion-dollar projects engaged in savanna fire management for carbon credits. Drawing upon fieldwork and interviews with a range of public servants, landholders and researchers in the NT between 2015 and 2018, this essay demonstrates how environmental governance is being undermined through specific institutions and practices. Through an ethnographic reading of weed management documents, including several legal permits to grow Gamba grass within the NT’s ‘eradication zone’, this essay narrates the diverse threads of a pressing ‘slow’ disaster. The unfolding story of Gamba grass, we suggest, is instructive for those seeking to understand the present and future of resource extraction or ‘extractivism’ in Australia and elsewhere.     

Tectonics and landscape evolution in southeast Australia

In southeast Australia the history of river development, basin sedimentation and the evolution of major divides can all be related. The region has a basement of Palaeozoic rocks eroded to a palaeoplain. Two sedimentary basins are separated by a system of tectonic warp axes that correspond closely to drainage divides. The Great Artesian Basin (GAB) is Mesozoic; the Murray Basin is Cenozoic. The Cretaceous-Cenozoic Gippsland-Otway Basin lies to the south, and a Cenozoic sedimentary wedge on the continental shelf to the east.In the Jurassic, before the breakup of Gondwana, Australia extended further east and south. Rivers from the south and east provided coarse sediment to the GAB.The catchment of Jurassic drainage was bounded to the east by the Tasman Divide. Downwarping of the palaeoplain formed the east-west Victoria Divide and the Gippsland Basin in which Cretaceous sediments accumulated. Rifting and seafloor spreading formed the Tasman Sea, starting about 80 m.y. ago. The palaeoplain was downwarped, creating the Great Divide and a new continental shelf on which marine sediments accumulated. Drainage from the Victoria Divide and the Great Divide continued to flow to the GAB until the Murray Basin started to subside in Paleocene times. A new warp axis, the Canobolas Divide, appeared between the GAB and the Murray Basin. Basically west-flowing drainage developed across the Murray Basin, Cenozoic sediments accumulated, and sediment supply to the GAB was further depleted.Ancillary features consistent with this morphotectonic history include: Ancient channels with gravels cross the Victoria, Great and Canobolas Divides. Volcanicity follows the warp axes. Reversed rivers are found on the coastal side of the Victoria and Great Divides. Deposition on the continental shelf is roughly equal to erosion on land. The change from coarse to fine sediment which gives the GAB its artesian character fits with the shrinkage of its catchment. The Divides are in different stages of erosion consistent with their ages.The morphotectonic development of southeast Australia, with responses to non-cyclic unique events on the time scale of global tectonics, is an example of evolutionary geomorphology.     

Space,Place, Population and Census Analysis in Australia

The Australian Census of Population and Housing is a census of people not places. However, where people live and work can be of major relevance in our search for explaining and understanding their behaviour. This paper argues that the place dimension in the Australian census has not been exploited very effectively in this respect. Three dimensions of the issue are addressed. Firstly, the spatial units commonly used for analysis of census data often are not appropriate to the problem being investigated. The spatial units in the Australian Standard Geographical Classification (ASGC) used for census data rarely represent meaningful social, economic and environmental regions. Secondly, the use of a simple urban/rural dichotomy is criticised as being a very blunt instrument to differentiate settlement types. Thirdly, the relationship between people and place in the census is discussed. While for the most part the census relates people to a single location—their place of usual residence—this is only one of the places with which people regularly interact. It is suggested that there is a need to adopt practices in the census which allow a range of population geographies to be defined. In conclusion it is argued that innovation in the Australian census, especially with the introduction of meshblocks and contemporary methodology and technology in Geographical Information Systems, makes it possible to analyse spatially referenced data in ways that can address these three issues.     

Funding and Facilitation: implications of changing government policy for the future of voluntary Landcare groups in Western Australia

Landcare groups in Australia work to increase biodiversity, eliminate invasive species and promote sustainable land-use practices. With the implementation of the Rudd government's ‘Caring for our Country’ policy during 2008–09, financial and organisational resources available to these groups diminished. This paper examines whether the National Landcare Program's initial intentions—that agency support could be provided to ‘kick-start’ the community groups into action with the Landcare groups quickly becoming independent bodies—are ultimately realistic. The results show that the majority of Landcare groups continue to be reliant on government-sourced funding and Landcare facilitators, and that those groups which do not have access to support have reduced their activity levels accordingly. Landcare groups were suffering from a reduced volunteer base, with static or decreasing numbers of participants, an inability to set regular meetings and a lack of volunteers to take up leadership positions. The reliance of Landcare groups on government support suggests that Landcare was an unsuccessful form of state-sponsored community participation, making Landcare groups similar to other volunteer organisations in terms of their functional characteristics and reliance on externally sourced funds.     

Fitting refugees into the normative narrative of Australian multiculturalism

Australia publicly espouses its multiculturalism as a key component of its national identity. In this paper, I argue that despite the importance of multiculturalism to Australia’s identity, political decisions and discourse has muddied its remit with respect to humanitarian migrant intake programs and outcomes. Australia’s history of selective migrant intake and restrictive refugee policy continues the Othering of past policies into contemporary settings. Refugee policy has become a political football. During the most recent national election campaign (May 2019), the plight of sick and ill refugees, currently housed offshore in detention centers, was used as a political pawn. Lost amid this political rhetoric were the traumatic narratives of forced migrants resettling in Australia’s cities. Without possibility for a loud voice in public discourse, there is little opportunity for more Australians to understand how refugees experience detention centers, struggle to attain residency visas, and make “home” in multicultural Australia. I draw on research with Sri Lankan refugees in Sydney to give voice to these micro-level, place-based experiences of vulnerable arrivals. These stories, I think, can (re)shape and enrich Australia’s multicultural identity because they challenge us to not only accept difference but recognize the circumstances through which Australia’s diversity seeds its narrative.     

'Totally Wild'? Colonising discourses,indigenous knowledges and managing wildlife

This paper offers a critique of politically dominant Eurocentric notions of culture and nature in Australia. In particular, it interrogates Eurocentric concepts of animals, wildlife and management, and seeks to unsettle these concepts by considering some of the diverse ways in which indigenous people in Australia know country, animals and wilderness. Using the metaphor of Eurocentric ontology in a hall of mirrors, the paper argues that Eurocentric claims of universalism for naturalised discourses that assume the adequacy of a nature-culture binary form a very fragile circular argument. Self-justifying the imposition and assertion of Eurocentric concepts and practices is a mechanistic reflection of the particular terms of reference set by Eurocentric knowledges and a denial of multiple ways of knowing. The dangers this presents are illustrated by examining how concepts and practices underlying wildlife management have self-justified (continuing) colonising processes in Australia. Finally, the paper attempts to open up spaces that address these dangers. Situated engagement is introduced as an approach which could shatter the hall of mirrors--by clearly embodying and emplacing all thought and action, universalised boundaries can be recognised and breached and new possibilities imagined and realised.     

The Practices and Process of Neighborhood: the (Re)Production of Riverwest,Milwaukee, Wisconsin

This article examines the practices and process that (re)produce neighborhoods. I argue that the practices producing neighborhoods in the 1970s inform the practices (re)producing neighborhoods today. Drawing upon Lefebvre's concepts of social space and spatial practice, Bourdieu's concepts of practice and habitus, and Pred's concept of place as a historically contingent process, I examine the (re)production of Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood as a process. Practices of institution building and protest were central to the production of this relatively socially inclusive and activist neighborhood. Over the past 30 years, through what could be defined as the habitus of place, the process of neighborhood (re)production continued many of the practices first established in the 1970s, as new practices addressed social and cultural changes. A focus on practices and process draws our attention to the (re)production of a relatively stable, consistent, long-term neighborhood identity.     

GIS在地貌实验与模拟中的作用,困难和对策

目前地貌学的研究方法可归纳为三种：①野外实地考察和记录方法；②定位观测和实地实验方法；③室内实验与模拟方法。地貌学的发展历史表明，地貌实验与模拟是地貌学今后发展的主要方向。     

Globalisation and Border Dynamics: impacts on the urban development of Darwin,Australia

National boundaries and border cities have been transformed globally. This is partly due to neoliberal globalisation, the continuous formation of a ‘borderless world’ and partly to the global ‘war on terror’. Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory (NT), is on the northern coast of Australia, bordering its overseas Asian neighbours. Far away from the main Australian population centres in the south, the city grows slowly, relying mainly on Australian government investments, infrastructure, and the incorporation of defence programs in the north. The rise of Asia, as well as Australia's increasing economic reliance on Asia, has created new opportunities for Darwin's growth. The development of Asian economies has resulted in growing global investment in resource extraction in NT. Asia, though, has been seen as a key threat in the modern history of Australia. This national sensitivity is underpinned by the global ‘war on terror’ in which Australia is deeply involved. Australia has tight border control regimes and a growing military presence on the northern border area. This paper examines how these co-existing but contradictory dynamics have reshaped the urban development of Darwin City. The consequential social and spatial patterns are identified and discussed.     

Resource Peripheries and Neoliberalism: the Pilbara and the remaking of industrial relations in Australia

How mining companies overcome the problems faced by the fixity of resources and how they might come to exercise influence in societies which appear to be mostly post-industrial are complex questions of political geography. This is not least the case for a region such as the Pilbara—an iron ore site isolated from metropolitan centres—in Australia—a country isolated from many global centres and markets. At the same time, local struggles in this resources site have been profoundly influential in the making of a national neoliberal industrial relations agenda. Building on other scholarship on the Pilbara, but here re-emphasising the local scale and the details of work and regulation, provides a way to assess the place's wider importance. The Pilbara is a site of thoroughly transformed industrial relations, from a union space when export mining began in the 1960s to an employer stronghold today. Policy makers delivered changes to facilitate the remaking of employer power in workplaces in and beyond mining. This resource periphery has therefore been central to the remaking of national policy regimes.     

Demographic response to rural restructuring and counterurbanisation in South Australia, 1981-1991

"Using South Australia as a case study, this paper seeks to trace and demonstrate two processes (counterurbanisation and rural restructuring) whose effects overlap to differentiate and characterise the population geography of...two zones, separated by a transition along the outer fringe of Adelaide's urban field.... In the demographic core zone [rural restructuring] has been partly offset by continued counterurbanisation, resulting in demographic mixing and rural dilution. The 1981-91 population growth in rural communities is shown to be more a function of population density at the outset of the period than of initial population size. Demographic growth...is shown to conform to a simple unidimensional scale, allowing the production of a clear, easily interpretable typology of rural demographic change with few non-conforming statistical areas. At a local level within individual rural communities, demographic decline is shown to be accompanied by increased concentration of the population into small towns, while demographic growth is associated with deconcentration."     

Contemporary Refugee‐Border Dynamics and the Legacies of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference

While the geopolitical legacies of the World War I peace negotiations are widely recognized, this article examines the often overlooked connection between the WWI Paris Peace Conference's spatial and geopolitical logics and contemporary refugee‐border dynamics. We argue that the spatial and geopolitical logics that framed the WWI Paris Peace Conference—the creation of new states, the propagation of the Western ideal of bounded sovereign states, the nationalist goals of self‐determination and homogeneous ethnic nations, and the establishment of a system of international governance—continue to impact refugee‐border dynamics and “crises” today. The categories, ideals, and practices of the international refugee regime that emerged over the last one‐hundred years stem in great part from these logics. In this paper, we urge critical contemplation about how these foundations—including the establishment of the post of High Commissioner for Refugees in 1921, the resultant Nansen Passports, the post‐WWI minority treaties, and lastly the 1933 Convention Relating to the International Status of Refugees—connect to contemporary human (im)mobility and border violence. We also introduce the articles in this special issue and highlight key themes and future directions for research in critical migration studies.     

Social Applications of Geographical Information Systems: technical tools for social innovation

ABSTRACT

The establishment of the National Key Centre for Social Applications of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in 1995, under the directorship of Professor Graeme Hugo, was a turning point in the use of GIS in Australia. The field of GIS, previously dominated by environmental applications, now broadened its focus to include populations, services and the interactions between people and the environment. Social applications of GIS offered a unique opportunity to make service planning, reporting, funding allocations and research both smarter and fairer. Geography and geographic relationships as implemented in GIS became the integrating platform for social spatial information, invigorating social research, planning and policy. A key strength of this approach, recognised by Professor Hugo, was the ability to ‘put people back into the planning process’. Further to being an integrating platform, GIS also offered the ability to generate new information and knowledge, which could facilitate evidence-based decision making. This paper focuses in particular on providing a written record of the development of the Accessibility/Remoteness Index of Australia (ARIA) suite of spatial accessibility indices. The lasting legacy and continued relevance of this work in social applications of GIS is also reviewed in this paper, with reference to key examples of how social research and planning in Australia have been made both smarter and fairer through the contributions of Professor Hugo and his team.