Kim Rygiel IMRC's Associate Director chats with Alison Mountz, Director of the IMRC, Canada Research Chair in Global Migration & Professor, Geography & Environmental Studies, Balsillie School for International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University about her new book "The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago", published by University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Sean Lockwood: Welcome, listeners, to the first edition of the International Migration Research Centre's podcast, Displacements, our first episode features Alison Mount's, director of the IMRC, and Kim Rygiel, the centre's associate director. Alison and Kim discuss Alison's recent book, The Death of Asylum Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago, which is published by the University of Minnesota Press in the fall of twenty twenty. Let's begin with Alison reading an excerpt from the book, after which we'll join Alison and Kim's conversation.
Alison Mountz: Asylum, an obituary. Border deaths at sea are increasing at alarming rates, while many more in this loss of life. Another death goes unnoticed. The death of asylum itself. This death is visible where money is invested in walls, fences, interception and detention rather than in processing claims and legal avenues to entry. People who are starving or displaced by violence must travel somewhere to survive. If one country locks its doors, they must knock elsewhere. Recent border attacks are therefore not only a European or North American crisis, but part of a relational global geography as Canada, Australia, the United States and other countries close their doors to people fleeing strife and persecution. These countries become complicit in their deaths elsewhere. Amid these moves, the right to asylum is being buried, disappearing in public discourse and in the closure of geographical and legal routes to safe haven. The loss of asylum is a loss to be grieved like any other.
Kim Rygiel: That was Alison Mountz reading a passage from her new book.
Alison, maybe I can just begin by asking you about how your book speaks to something that we're witnessing. It seems like almost daily when I'm looking at the news or reading or watching the news, I'm hearing about shipwrecks. And I think it was just last week there was another shipwreck off the Libyan coast with 74 people dying, according to the International Organization for Migration this was the eighth shipwreck in the central Mediterranean over the past month. How does your book help us to understand what is happening here and why so many lives are being lost at sea?
Alison Mountz: Yeah, Kim, that's a really good point. You know, we know as migration scholars and just as humans living on the planet that human migration is a fairly routine process and that includes what's happening with boat migration at sea. There are always people crossing. There's a phrase I really like from another author, journalist who writes about the tick tock regularity of crossings on the Mediterranean. So it's this churning process that's happening all the time. And yet we only seem to hear about it in those moments that you mention noticing in the news when there's a shipwreck or something tragic happens, a loss of human life. So our our attention is called to this matter when there are deaths at sea, when there are drownings, or sometimes when there are spectacular interceptions that the international media might broadcast to the rest of the world.
Yet we have an international system that really doesn't prioritize or that isn't attentive enough to human life and to the preservation of human life or to the more proactive thought and care that would be needed to govern human migration in a way that preserves human life. Instead, we have a highly politicized response to migration and specifically to migration at sea. So the book really dwells on this issue of death and thinks about its meanings. On the one hand, we hear about physical deaths like you're talking about in the news and at sea. But I started thinking a lot more in the book about the death of asylum itself and the fact that we have a governance system that is itself in crisis, which is to say that the systems and the processes, the resources, everything surrounding migration at sea and border enforcement at sea, I think is profoundly broken. The way that we respond to human migration at sea as a society is, is broken. And it's and so it's a way of calling attention to this matter.
Kim Rygiel: And Alison, is this why I mean, you make this comment, you share with us a reflection in the book. You say that when you started this research and you've been doing this research for many years now. So it's a very it's very rich and very layered. You say that you were thinking much more about the erosion of asylum, but then you said as time went on, you came to see this much more not as an erosion, but death of asylum. And I know about you talk about this death of asylum in sort of multiple ways. Can you tell us a little bit more about sort of unpacking this concept of death of asylum?
Alison Mountz: Yeah, so I've been doing research for a long time, as you mentioned, on what's often called the externalization of borders or the idea that governments are investing resources farther off of their mainland territories, deeper into the transnational migration routes that people are traveling when they, when they are displaced, when they are on the move to try to get somewhere where they can make a claim for asylum and seek protection.
And so a lot of this offshoring, what's often called offshoring or externalization of border enforcement, is related to asylum seeking and other forms of migration. It's about stopping people en route and preventing them from landing on sovereign territory where they accrue certain human rights, including the right to seek asylum. So all of this interception is really premised on thwarting people's migration, thwarting their mobility or their access to mobility and other resources, including livelihood, because, of course, not just people moving to seek asylum, but for to seek livelihood as well.
And so I thought a lot about, in the beginning, about the idea of what these actions were doing. And part of it was an erosion of access and erosion of access to asylum by using geography, right? So using geography to erode or thwart people's access. But as I continued to do the research, and particularly as I developed this project to research the detention of people on remote islands, I saw the extremes that governments were traveling to, the incredible resources that they were putting into not only intercepting people at sea, but holding them in detention facilities on remote islands, which is a harmful thing to do for many reasons and also a very expensive thing to do. And so I started to think through again this relationship between what all of these investments offshore told us about what was happening with access to asylum. And I arrived in conversation with many different scholars work, scholars like Judith Butler and her writing about precarious life, scholars like Lisa Cacho and her writing about social death. And I started to think about the different kinds of deaths that were unfolding, not only the physical deaths that we talked about already, but also the idea of ontological death and the notion that it's becoming more difficult, sometimes impossible, to even occupy, inhabit the category of asylum or asylum seeker and also the political death, which is to say so much of this carries on without a national or international public even being aware of it. And therefore, there's very little in the way of people able to fight this death of asylum, very little political will.
And in fact, we find often the opposite, that governments take these extreme measures against asylum seekers, against migration at sea because in fact, there's popular support for anti migrant or anti asylum seeker measures. There's political will for more xenophobic and aggressive enforcement at sea.
Kim Rygiel: That's so true. And, you know, you mention islands just now. And I think, you know, maybe part of that has to do with the fact that a lot of what's happening is made to be more invisible because it's on islands. And so I'm wondering, islands in your book play such an important part of the story here in terms of thinking about the death of asylum. How did you become interested in studying islands, an island detention? And maybe you could just speak a bit more about the particularity of islands as a as a space and a sight in this picture of making it increasingly difficult to access asylum?
Alison Mountz: Yes. Thanks for that question. I didn't start out as an island studies scholar. There's this wonderful, thriving field of island studies that I arrived at through my research on migration. I really started out as a migration scholar and a border studies scholar. But what I found when I was researching externalization and how governments were pushing their border enforcement offshore and increasingly people were talking about what was happening on islands.
And so it was really through field research, through talking to people that I arrived at my own interest in what was happening on islands. And this was especially the case when I was doing research in Australia in 2006. And people were talking a lot about, of course, what had happened in the in the wake of the MV Tampa interception in 2001 when the government came up with the so-called Pacific Solution that ships intercepted at sea carrying people seeking asylum, that those people on the ships who are intercepted would no longer be allowed on Australian sovereign territory, but would be detained on other islands, including Australian overseas territory, Christmas Island, which is one of the places where I did research. So the island detention project really came about as a result of following the practices of states, including especially Australia, but not only Australia and their use of islands. And to speak to your broader question about why islands are so significant is twofold. First of all, islands are a material geographical location where people are detained remotely when they're intercepted. And it's not only that they're detained there. Islands, sometimes, like the example I just gave at Christmas Island are bits of territory that people might be able to reach by boat where they can land to make a claim for asylum. So many of the islands that I studied actually started out as spaces of safe haven or passage to mainland territory where people would land and then get transferred over. But over time, as more people land there or as governments build up their infrastructure to detain there, those islands become more carceral spaces and the arrivals there become more heavily politicized. And so islands are not only just a geographical or material location where people land or where they're detained or where their claim is processed. But in fact, they become a prism, a prism. And they became, for me, a prism or a lens through which to understand trends in global governance of migration more broadly. So on islands, we see the convergence of trends that are happening around the globe, including the global increase in the use of detention of people on the move, the increase in seeking asylum, and also that intense externalization of border enforcement that I talked about.
Kim Rygiel: You know, when you're speaking about trends, you know, I think many people, when they hear about migrant deaths immediately, what will come to mind will maybe be some of the media images we've seen of late of people crossing in rubber dinghies between the Turkish coast and the Greek islands, for example. We can think of the the photo that made the news about the tragedy of the little boy, Aylan Kurdi, for example, dying off the coast of, upclose or people might think about people dying in the Arizona desert between Mexico and the U.S. But you suggest that the story begins much earlier in the 1980s and elsewhere in the Caribbean. And I'm wondering if in tracking these trends, if you can just tell us a little bit more about the starting point of this history of how island asylum detention really begins at sea in the Caribbean in the 1980s.
Alison Mountz: Yes, these contemporary forms of maritime enforcement and interceptions at sea can be traced back to US interception of people traveling through the Caribbean as early as the 1960s and 70s, but really intensifying in the 1980s and 1990s. And this is a history that Jenna Lloyd and I trace in in much empirical detail, doing archival research across the US in our book Boats, Borders and Bases, which traces out a history of the US detention system. And there's this dynamic that you point out, which is that land border crossings are more readily accessible or visible to the public. We can see more easily, maybe not because we live near the border, although in Canada, most of us do live close to the border. But in a place like the United States, for example, you know, it's easier for the media to access crossings that are happening, as you mentioned, between Mexico and the United States along the land border. Whereas interceptions and migrations at sea are less readily accessible or visible to global publics or national publics through the media. It's harder for us to know what's going on at sea and in fact, the kind of spectacle that happens at land border crossings. To borrow and call attention to Nick De Genova's work, he talks about the spectacle of what is happening at Borders really distracts us from what is happening at sea. So at the same time that border enforcement was being built up, for example, along the US Mexico border, there was also infrastructure being built up around enforcement at sea in the Caribbean. But that was much less talked about it, even in official government reports and certainly in the media. You just didn't hear about this as much. And yet what we found in our archival research was that so much of US detention policy and also policies responding to migration of asylum seekers by boat really go back to that period and and can trace anti-black racism as being at the roots of so much border enforcement and at the criminalization, the root of criminalization of asylum in the United States. And what I trace in the first chapter of the death of asylum, I map out a genealogy of border externalization that goes back to that period and then looks at how those what what governments often call best practices from the US were exported to other countries. And so we can we can trace that model of maritime enforcement being deployed by Australia or off the southern shores of the European Union. And this model of offshoring or enforcement at sea and the use of islands continues today to move about to other regions in the world where governments are interacting with human smuggling routes to stop people from traveling and also building up detention facilities on islands.
Kim Rygiel: And speaking about best practices and moving this model to other countries. You note that in your book, the story of his son's death begins in the Caribbean, that it also ends in Canada. And I think this might be counterintuitive to many of our listeners because Canada is usually held up as a model for asylum policies. Canada is fairly geographically isolated. We share a border with the US, obviously, in terms of security, but we're not an island and we have few boat arrivals. I think, you know, maybe we've had about four since nineteen ninety nine. So how then does the boat arrivals that happened in 2009 and 2010 and then the specter specter of boat arrivals afterwards, the idea of boat arrivals really fuels such a drastic change in Canadian policies towards what we call irregular arrivals and Canadian asylum policy more generally.
Alison Mountz: Yes, Canada is an interesting case, and you're quite right, a surprising one to include in the story of what's happening to political asylum globally, particularly when I'm building this argument around the use of islands for detention. But here, Canada has a really interesting role in relation to the trends that I that I map in the book. As you mentioned, there are very few boat arrivals in Canada compared to, say, European countries or Australia. In fact, I think there have been six boat interceptions since nineteen ninety nine for all off the West Coast for people traveling from Fujian, China, that you noted in ninety nine in two thousand and then two more, I believe, in 2009 and 2010 from Sri Lanka. And so Canada, empirically speaking, does not face the same landscape of boat migration and yet has in response to each of these sets of interceptions, those two different time periods that I just mentioned, dramatically changed legislation and policy in response to asylum seeking that has broad implications for all people making refugee claims. And so we see the ways that this is politicized in Canada as well, through the ways that this migration by boat makes its way very quickly into public awareness and then into legislation and legislative changes. We see how these policies and responses are racialized and politicized, the relationship between highly visible interceptions. So in this case, we did see, you know, the spectacle of interception playing out at sea because these were boats that were intercepted quite proximate to the Canadian shores. So it's a little bit different from what I was talking about earlier, where things are hidden from view in this case.
In the Canadian case, although those there were very few boat arrivals, they were incredibly well publicized with high numbers, for example, of front page news stories and lots of press conferences and conversation that meant that they were, Canadians were very aware of these boat arrivals and there was political will in support of taking more punitive measures, for example, expanding the criteria on which to detain people. And so Canada is a curious and interesting case because although it tends not to detain on remote islands like the United States or Australia, it does import some of these best practices and policies into its claimant system writ large. And I think you're right that Canada is a leader and is held up as a model around the world when it comes to both its refugee resettlement processes and its refugee claimant systems. But it's important for that reason for us always to look carefully at how Canada, too, is part of a of a community of states to use some of the language of Hannah Arendt, where governments are sharing practices, sharing language, sharing policies and following one another's trends.
Kim Rygiel: You know, in this Canadian part of the story, you've spoken about both the spectacle of the boat arrivals. But then there's also this idea of I use the word specter, the idea of the boat arrivals that don't happen, but the idea that continues to sort of haunt us in our political imagination. And I had used this word, Specter earlier intentionally, because in your book, you frequently refer to this term haunting, borrowed from Avery Gordon. I just want to ask you about why you use this term haunting to discuss issues around state violence that we're witnessing in relation to asylum seekers dying and around the idea of death of asylum. Can you say a little bit more about how you see this term and how you use this term haunting?
Alison Mountz: Yes. As a Avery Gordon and other scholars develop this concept of haunting sociological concept, the idea that different forms of state violence never go away. They aren't, even though they may seem to be over and done with or in the past, they're always, in fact, present and still with it, with us and making themselves known. And these are some of the ways that Avery Gordon writes about haunting. And I think this is very apt in the research that we need to do about contemporary forms of asylum seeking to really understand more about the role of the past in the present, I think a lot of treatment of asylum seekers and responses to mass migration really suffers from a kind of presentism that includes the importance of the past, for example, histories of colonialism on islands that results in the kinds of economic relationships of dependency that enable more powerful, wealthier states to exploit island communities as spaces of detention, that's one example. Another example is the just the way that the history of antiblack racism that was so central to the US response to Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers in the 1980s and 1990s made its way into these global practices of interception. So we forget the past at our peril, and I think it comes back to haunt in the present. And so I think we need to do more. And I think there are so many wonderful scholars out there now, as one example, Pacific Island scholars who are writing about these histories of colonization and broader geopolitical relations that fuel and enable the contemporary practices of enforcement and imprisonment that we see happening and that are haunting.
Kim Rygiel: I was wondering if there was a particular story or event that you witnessed or heard while doing your research that still haunts you that maybe you would want to share with us?
Alison Mountz: Yeah, this was my first time doing research, as I mentioned, on islands. And one of the more haunting stories that stays with me was from Christmas Islanders themselves, who had witnessed a drowning offshore. So the seas around Christmas Island are notoriously very rough. It's very difficult for boats of any kind to approach the island. And you really need to approach it at the at the port and carefully. So there are frequent drownings. And there was a there was a shipwreck that was so close off the shore that Christmas Islanders were present to see people and hear people drowning and calling for help, but not able to rescue them. And I think that is an experience that continues to haunt people in that small island community. And that really haunted me.
And that represents, again, overall, a community that didn't necessarily want to be part of this entire migration industry, but found itself at the center due to this combination of factors from geography to economics of detention and the the ways that that this process, that migration and asylum seeking and detention and enforcement have altered, that community won't be forgotten, even though the detention of asylum seekers has been dramatically reduced on the island, that those experiences will stay with people forever and have become a part of the social and economic fabric of the of the island community.
Kim Rygiel: You know, I think this is such an important part of the story about how communities position themselves vis a vis the detention industry and you know, as you note, some people, this relationship of employment ambivalence, but then other people and you describe this in your last chapter of your book, take a different position and are able to really protest or draw attention to or engage in different ways around this. And so I wanted to ask you a question about sort of some of the activist reactions that you also have witnessed. I'm reminded of this 2005 article by Eyal Weizman, it's called On Extraterritoriality. And he has this great line where he says, we can set up our own enclaves and we, too, can walk through walls. And your last chapter really discusses this walking through walls aspect. That is the various ways that people have found to draw awareness to all the lives lost in the cost of border controls, whether it's through identifying people who have gone missing or who have died counting and mapping the deaths of people, or through various memorializations through campaigns such as email and letter writing. And you also talk about the whole importance of people actually visiting other people who are isolated on these detention centers. And then you have a nice discussion also really about a range of transnational and more organized projects, whether it be through more larger groups like the Global Detention Project or smaller groups like Lampedusa in Berlin and Lampedusa and Hamburg, groups that are led by asylum seekers who were held in detention in Lampedusa and are now in Europe.
So I wanted to ask you about where you see the potential of such forms of activism and making a difference and perhaps on what scale? And are you optimistic about the potential of such activities to impact change?
Alison Mountz: Yeah, thanks for that question, Kim, and I love that quote that you mentioned by Eyal Weizman, I you're right in the book, the penultimate chapter of the book, really pays attention to the ways that people are fighting the death of asylum. And this is where I find in my own research so much hope and inspiration at the exciting and creative ways forward that activist communities have found to counter the isolation that people experience when they are intercepted and detained and really detention anywhere is isolating. Detention on a remote island is simply a more extreme form of remoteness in the remote part of detention and the isolation. And it's really premised on the geographical imagination, the idea that that that state's policymakers imagine that people can be isolated on islands or that what goes on there can be hidden from view. And in fact, there are histories on all the islands of human rights monitors, for example, or journalists being denied access to the facilities at one point or another. But the truth of the matter is, people cannot be hidden from view. They cannot be isolated. And I think activists work on the premise that we are all interrelated. We are all connected to go back to that quote with which I begin the book, No Man is an Island. And so they're wonderful creative practices happening. You mentioned some of them that are directly designed to counter this isolation or distance. Other examples I would give that are so exciting have to do with different art forms that are coming out of detention that lots of people are paying attention to and writing about. One wonderful example and a film is a film that we hosted at the International Migration Research Centre, "Chauka, please tell us the time" the film that was made by Behrouz Boochani and Arash Sarvestani in collaboration while Behrouz was being held in detention on Manus using social media, using WhatsApp to record small clips in in detention and send them to Arash, where he added them, edited them. And so I think we need to be hopeful and to recognize that although states are putting all these resources into detention, into really quite harmful practices, whether we're talking about the fact that enforcement renders people more precarious at sea or the harm that it causes by detaining people, ultimately, people are incredibly resilient and they need to survive. We all need to live. And so something that really drives a lot of my research over the years is the fact that people's needs and desires are often at odds with the policies that are designed to govern a migration. And so no matter how reactive or impractical or even harmful the policies, people will continue to move for various reasons. And it's there where we find sometimes, I think, the wholesale rejection of a system of governance that is broken. And instead we find alternative ways forward, alternate alternative ways of moving, of building community of recognizing what's happening in the world. And I think we need to pay more attention to these.
Kim Rygiel: Well, that seems like an excellent ending point for our discussion, and I just want to thank you so much. It's really been a pleasure speaking with you.
Alison Mountz: Thank you, Kim. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.
Kim Rygiel: We've been listening to my conversation with Dr. Alison Mountz about her new book, The Death of Asylum, part of the International Migration Research Centre's new podcast series, Displacements. Please join us for our next conversation when the tables will be turned and Alison will interview me about my new book, Fostering Pluralism Through Solidarity Activism in Europe, co-edited with Feyzi Baban. Thanks for listening.