The Shifting Frontiers of Migration Control

Abstract

Halfway up the stairs isn't up and isn't down. It isn't in the nursery. It isn't in the town. And all sorts of funny thoughts run round my head. It isn't really anywhere-it's somewhere else instead. A.A. Milne, Halfway Down the StairsEvery nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. George Orwell, cited by Stanley Cohen in States of Denial FOOTPRINTS IN THE SANDJust after midday on November 4th 2003, a 12-metre fishing boat, the Minasa Bone, carrying 14 Kurdish men, landed on Melville Island, 80 kilometres off the northern coastline of Australia. According to eye witnesses, two of the men waded ashore, scooped handfuls of sand from the beach and asked locals whether they had reached Australia (Morris 2004). When they were told that they had, the men are said to have danced for joy. Their elation was to be short-lived. Local police and fishermen initially attended the scene. In the hours that followed, a navy warship was despatched to escort the Minasa Bone out to sea. An air navigation exclusion zone was declared over the island, preventing the arrival of the press or legal advisors. Customs, immigration and Australian Federal Police officers were flown to the scene. And the Governor-General was summoned from his official duties at Australia's most celebrated horserace, the Melbourne Cup, to give royal assent to statutory regulations that had been prepared for just such an occasion as this. 1 With the stroke of a pen, the official memory of the landing of those men on Australian soil had been erased. The 'finishing line', as some newspaper reports put it, had been shifted. The men had never really been in Australia, at least not in any way that could be of benefit to them. These extraordinary events are the culmination of a spiralling cycle of border control measures directed almost exclusively at 'onshore' asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by sea. This reaction is rooted in Australia in an historical fear of invasion from the Asian north, but is also part of a larger story about the failure of governments around the developed world to deal constructively with the reality of contemporary migration. In their efforts to control unwanted arrivals, these governments have taken increasingly extreme measures to barricade their borders. But despite these efforts, people continue to do what they have always done, that is, to 'burst

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