Citizenship Studies, 2014 Vol. 18, No. 2, 208–223, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2014.886440 Faces of globalization and the borders of states: from asylum seekers to citizens Paul James* Intensifying processes of globalization have led to a series of tensions around the way in which even the most cosmopolitan democracies now treat people who move across their borders. Non-citizens have become problems. The postcolonial settler nationstates – Australia, Canada, the USA and others – were ‘founded’ by immigrants and refugees who moved globally to become citizens in these ‘new lands’. Such countries were made by migrants displacing indigenous others. However, in a conflict-ridden world in which the displacement of persons has become endemic – and in a mediaconnected world where the possibility of finding a better place to live has become increasingly imaginable and desired – these countries are now attempting to manage that global flow of people by stringent homeland security measures that are becoming increasingly problematic. While they are constituted through the modern imaginary of liberal democratic norms, human rights and rule of law, in each country over the last few years, rules have been bent, breached or bolstered in order to keep people out. The essay argues that given the globalization of people movement, the nation-state has reached the limits of responding though unilateral or even regional multilateral arrangements. Keywords: refugees; non-citizens; globalization; faces; borders; nation-states 1. Introduction Intensifying processes of globalization have led to a series of tensions around the way in which even the most cosmopolitan democracies now treat non-citizens who move across their borders. The postcolonial settler nation-states – Australia, Canada, the USA and others – were ‘founded’ by immigrants and refugees who moved globally to become citizens in these ‘new lands’. Such countries were made by migrants displacing indigenous others. However, in a conflict-ridden world in which the displacement of persons has become endemic – and in a media-connected world where the possibility of finding a better place to live has become increasingly imaginable and desired – these countries are now attempting to manage that global flow of non-citizens by stringent homeland security measures that are becoming increasingly problematic. Historically, as these communities-polities formed as nation-states, they moved away from the ideology of blood as the basis of citizenship ( jus sanguinis) to espouse a counterideology – territorial placement as the basis of national political rights ( jus soli). The enacted practice of jus soli was never straightforward. Having a white face or at least being European continued to have a legalized or implicit predominance in the settler states, at least for the first half of the twentieth century. For example, Australia had an explicit *Current address: Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, Australia. Email: p.james2@uws.edu.au q 2014 Taylor & Francis Citizenship Studies 209 ‘White Australia’ policy up until the middle of the twentieth century. It was implicitly based on race and blood, and particularly concerned to keep out the Chinese, even if its explicit expression was a literacy test. Across the second half of the twentieth century, these states indeed endeavoured to become more cosmopolitan. However, more recently, as significant numbers of migrants and refugees have come actively to seek relocation and citizenship, Australia, Canada and USA have by various means hardened their border protection against particular categories of such placements. The debates have been ferocious. These countries may be concerned to play a humanitarian role in the world; however, they have struggled to maintain this role in relation to refugees. They are constituted through the modern imaginary of liberal democratic norms, human rights and rule of law; however, in each country, over the last few years, rules have been bent, breached or bolstered in order to keep out those people who either do not come in an accepted way or do not fit the accepted criteria for enhancing the national interest. In Australia, the Howard government in 2001, for example, established a tortuous legal precedent that continues to apply in the present. The government effectively defined certain Australian islands as non-Australian territory for the purpose of those applying for visas or seeking refugee status. Simply put, those islands that allow easier access to Australia for refugees coming by boat from countries were excised and denationalized as ‘off-shore places’. From these excised places, outsiders who arrive cannot apply for visas in the same way as other refugees – read: ‘cannot be afforded refugee status except after extraordinary processing and extended incarceration’. For all other purposes the islands are fundamentally part of the nation-state. Apart from its practical significance, this excision goes against the historical nature of national territoriality, namely that nationstates neither treat their territory as fading off at its edges nor define different parts of that territory as having variable ontological status. Weasel words have been developed to confirm that these islands remain Australian territory. Under the Act, to ‘enter Australia’ is carefully defined to mean ‘to enter the migration zone’, and given that these islands remain part of the migration zone they legally remain part of Australia.1 But whatever the final adjudication on the sovereignty question, the political-legal twists and turns are indicative of the complexity that boundary-crossing holds for Australians and the lengths that the Australian state is prepared to go to deter border-crossers of a certain kind – a group of non-citizens who have now been formally named as ‘asylum seekers’. In the USA, the funding of their border patrol has increased significantly with radars, sensors, robotic aerial vehicles and newly constructed fence lines constructed along the borders. This was part of a new and very expensive plan called the Secure Border Initiative. The budget for border control doubled over the five years from $1700 million in 2005 to $3600 million in 2010. Campaigns such as Operation Hold-the-Line in the El Paso area and Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego resulted in increasing numbers of ‘deportable aliens’ being located, but overall the operations have been of mixed success. The flawed SBInet virtual fence-line initiative was finally cancelled in 2011 (Koslowski 2011). This does not mean, however, that the issue of border control has diminished nor that a liberal globally oriented president is changing the mode of operation. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Southwest Border Security Act into law. This appropriation of $600 million supplemented the deployment a month earlier of 1200 National Guard troops to the Mexican borderlands. In Canada, laws on movements across the border have significantly tightened. Unlike Australia, Canada has not until recently had a mandatory detention system for asylum seekers, but in 2010 the state passed Bill C-49 into law. That legislation creates a new class of aliens, ‘designated foreign nationals’. Such foreign nationals have to be placed in detention upon arrival. Such a designated foreigner is defined as any non-citizen arriving 210 P. James in Canada in relation to whom the Minister declares either that their claim to stay cannot be processed ‘in a timely manner’ or that they may have been assisted in their passage by a person who may have profited by the boundary-crossing. Under this new regime, in 2010, the number of applications for asylum decreased by 30%. Overall, increasingly restrictive rules and regulations have come to be presented as the natural order of things. Intriguingly, by a clever technocratic definition, the government website presents the rules of immigration as if they are primordial. In the following passage, note the shift from the first sentence to the second set of sentences: Canadian immigration is the set of rules, regulations, directives, policies and the Act of Parliament that regulates the entry of each person in to Canada. Immigration, the entrance of people into a country for the purpose of settling there, has always played a central role in Canadian history. It was as much a feature of ancient times, when the ancestors of Canada’s native peoples migrated from Asia by land via Beringia or by sea via the Japanese current, as it is of the present day, when immigrants from around the world come to this country in the thousands.2 This is the context. While the rhetoric differs, the borders of liberal-democratic nationstates are increasingly hardening, at least for certain categories of non-citizens. 2. The faces of the other I begin with these contextualizing examples not simply as critique, but in the first instance to note that the practices and projections have become more vexatious and contradictory, both for those who move and those who administer their moving. Whatever the intentions or national ethos of the countries in question, their treatment of asylum seekers as a category has become simultaneously more abstract, more ugly and more concerned to project an image of the state as being a ‘good international citizen’3 – a fascinating metaphor in this instance that extends the concept of ‘citizen’ beyond the homeland or polis. In the second instance, developed further into the essay, the same examples will be used to argue that given the globalization of people movement the nation-state has reached the limits of responding though unilateral or even regional multilateral arrangements (á la Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ‘Malaysia Solution’). Without having a way of adequately responding to the contemporary movement of people, the settler states are caught between humanitarian self-projection and bureaucratized self-protection. That is, for all of their humanitarian concern – some of which is deeply believed in relation to actual individuals who are seen to suffer – when it comes to categories of persons, the countries of the USA, Canada and Australia have become caught up in an instrumentally rational process of desperately defending their borders against certain kinds of embodied movement. Border control is now given effect by a mode of organization framed by instrumental rationality, even as the vision of engagement is projected by a rhetoric of humanitarian concern and good policing.4 The effect is brutal; the affect is intended to be comforting – at least to those citizens already at home inside the borders. Underlying that theme about the framing dominance of a more abstract mode of organization is a further theme. In the context of this tightening of rules in the settler nation-states, the present essay begins to open up an exploration of the relationship between what might be called embodied globalization and the different ways in which the various categories of people who move across borders are represented symbolically, photographically, textually and practically. Here the context is important to understanding the tensions between the various forms of representation. Why is it in the cases of Australia, Canada and the USA that, while intimate photographs of those who stand as Citizenship Studies 211 exemplary figures of the nation are everywhere in the media and on websites, the faces of asylum seekers are relatively absent in contemporary state projections? Facial images of citizens are everywhere. In the public spheres of the USA, Canada and Australia, national imagining predominantly takes the form of images of landmarks or photo-mosaics of faces that signify the historical, multicultural or melting-pot nation. There are regular state-projected events and national day celebrations for those migrants accepted as national citizens. The cameras are invited in. By contrast, with rare exceptions, there are no state-organized public ceremonies to welcome refugees to the country. For their citizens – or for legal border-crossers – passport photographs, face scans, identity documentation, vox populi and street surveillance have become naturalized as either virtues or necessities. The US program US-VISIT, for example, collected biometric scans of the faces of 113 million people crossing its borders between 2004 and 2008. Photography of faces for security reasons is now almost as naturalized as the requirement that ‘aliens’ go through a naturalization process to become citizens. By comparison, the depiction of the faces of asylum seekers has, at least across the last three decades, become much more ambiguous. It is now the stuff of contention. Counter-journalists seek to expose the truth of pain by showing the faces of those who suffer. Alternatively, increasing numbers of politicians and critics of reception policies dehumanize such persons with talk of queue jumpers (Australia and Canada), boat people (Australia and the USA) and illegals (the USA and Canada), none of which, it is claimed, should get special treatment.5 Indeed, in the case of Australia, the government has developed legal statute and human-rights rhetoric to argue that exposing the identity of refugees through photographic images is a breach of their privacy. Given that it is not uncommon to project photographs of refugees who are not seeking asylum – that is, refugees who are safely located away from the possibility of seeking homeland entry in ‘our’ country – the effacement of asylum seekers cannot be just because of concern for the privacy of strangers in danger. For example, there are numerous contemporary photographs of refugees on the US Defence Information Directorate website, even close-ups of young children or refugees being airlifted across other national borders – but there are few images of asylum seekers that might come to the USA. The only exceptions over the last couple of decades are photos of some Kurdish children in 1997 and a couple of Soviet defectors in 1989, Anatoly Kachenko and Alexander Kendr.6 These exceptions are instances with very direct political implications. The evidence that asylum seekers are being effaced remains necessarily circumstantial. It is much harder to explore an absence than a given pattern of representation. Nevertheless, the evidence here, and as further developed below, suggests that governments would prefer that asylum seekers are effaced and turned into abstract Others. For the most part, asylum seekers who are being processed are detained away from public areas in places where their faces cannot be readily seen. They tend to be out of sight and, therefore (by design or otherwise), out of mind, except for moments of individualized embodied sympathy. The next section of the discussion responds to the question as to why it is important to talk about faces in the context of globalization. The argument here is that faces of those who move are an important subjective part of the process of embodied globalization, and that this remains crucial to understanding the contemporary human condition despite the emphasis in the literature on global flows as financial and trade-based. Following on from that, the essay examines transformations in the way in which those who move – refugees and other entrants (usually citizens of another state) – are constituted and managed. Here the underlying argument is first that there is a split between the subjective meanings 212 P. James afforded asylum seekers (they are constituted as a risk or intrusion) and the objective processes of their management (they are constituted as an in-between category to be regulated). Second, it is suggested that those objective processes of state management of the movement across the borders of liberal democracies can neither be described adequately as open to a global flow (akin to open markets) nor as bounded by a set of restrictive enclaves (constituting closed nations). In one important sense, the process that I have begun to describe brings together both features at the same time. That is, linking the two points together, the pattern is clear. Liberal democracies, for all their proclamations to being receptive, humane and welcoming ‘open societies’, are most receptive to those who move in ways that support the market or contribute to the national interest, and least receptive to those who are a risk. As a way of responding critically to these developments, the last section of the essay suggests the need for a global covenant on the movement of peoples (Held 2004). It argues for a negotiated global governance process responding to the question of asylum seekers. 3. Why is it important to talk about faces and actual bodies? The embodied movement of people is the oldest form of globalization. If globalization is understood as the extension of social relations across world-space, then, despite the tendency in much of the literature to emphasize extensions of relations in the abstracted realms of financial exchange and disembodied communication technologies, it remains the case that embodied globalization is a continuing and fundamental feature of the present. While there are many ways of delineating different forms of globalization – the classic delineation being by domain: economic, ecological, political and cultural – different forms of globalization can usefully be distinguished for our purposes through an emphasis on levels of integration/differentiation: from embodied globalization through to agencyextended globalization, object-extended globalization and most abstractly to disembodied globalization. Embodied globalization, meaning simply the movement of bodies across world-space, was a dominant characteristic of traditional extensions globally. Since the time of the early empires and population upheavals, people carried their stories, sensibilities and practices of community over vast distances. This intersected with other forms of globalization. Agency-extended globalization refers to the way in which agents of polities, corporations, religious sodalities and other organizations became central carriers of processes of global extension. Object extension refers to the way in which objects such as commodities, traded goods, museum artefacts and icons moved across the world also carrying social relations. Finally, disembodied extension refers to processes of interchange where the actual bodies of persons become irrelevant to the dominant mode of integration/differentiation, at least at one level. This approach allows us to understand what is happening to the borders of nation-states. Contra all those arguments about a borderless world, global flows and a flat earth, the global movement of people is differentiated and complex (Bude and Durrschmidt 2010). In any one situation today we tend to send a complex intersection of all these forms of globalization, even if disembodied globalization has become the organizing form. Nevertheless, while embodied globalization has today been overlaid by other far more powerful modalities of global extension – commodity exchange, the transmission of electronic symbols of capital or satellite-connected communication of culture – the objective movement of people remains an important global phenomenon. It is both a global phenomenon and a process to which broader processes of globalization contribute locally. The manifold processes of globalization contribute to unsettling existing local Citizenship Studies 213 life-worlds, accentuating past and present cleavages of identity politics, intensifying the communicative bases for making economic and cultural comparisons, increasing the objective divisions of wealth or disrupting older authority structures, and putting pressure on modern state operations, particularly postcolonial states. These are factors that induce people to move. And, in turn, the staccato and hyper-regulated movements (not flows) of refugees and migrants are crucial to making new communities in new places and to challenging nation-states with basic questions of who is to be allowed to cross their borders and in what manner. Embodied globalization may not be able to generate more than negative expressions of political power in this world, but it affects the way states manage their borders. And as those states – the USA, Canada and Australia included – change their policies and subjective projections into the world, so too do the people who move change the way in which they respond. The embodied dimension of globalization also continues to have an important subjective dimension. It is evidenced in artistic expressions, photographs and other visual representations, going back most prominently to Edward Steichen’s ‘Family of Man’ exhibition in 1955, which toured the world for nearly a decade (object extension supported by institutional agency extension). While photos and advertising renditions of planet earth have over the past few decades come to be the predominant visual coding for the global, images of faces have become the most intriguing, ironically now carried predominantly by disembodied extension through the mass media and Internet. National Geographic’s composite image of ‘the world’s most typical person’ was created from combining 190,000 photographs of faces is one version. The face is quite particular – a 28-year-old Han Chinese man – but it is also global-generic, computer-generated and highly pixelated. More typically found in advertisements, the global face often takes the form of an androgynous Eurasian with an enigmatic Mona-Lisa-like expression representing the diversity of the global community. The face of Benetton generated in 2000, for example, was made up of a sociologically calculated Eurasian mix of the world’s population to form an Every Woman. In parallel, the global ‘Face of Tomorrow’ comes in male and female, and looks Euro-South Asian.7 The other figure who reinforces the condensation of meaning around faces is the veiled female face. As a legal insider, she is the other side of the effacing argument. In states such as France, which also tends to efface its Others, she is forced to reveal her face to show that she is part of the Republic. Arthus-Bertrand’s ‘6 Billion Others’ Project goes back to the Family-of-Man approach to photograph actual persons from around the globe, including veiled faces: ‘Flying over the planet to make the book Earth from Above’, he says, ‘I often wondered what I could learn about the men and women that I saw beneath me’. In the romantic words of an abstract outsider, he dreams of ‘being able to hear their words and comprehend what it is that unites us’. Hence, he publishes a book of portraits and voices. However, in the same paragraph Arthus-Bertrand’s sentiments express a reverse but analogous tension to that described in this essay: ‘But as soon as I returned to the ground, the problems began. I found myself faced by bureaucratic rigidity in each country and, above all, by the rigidity of the borders’ (Arthus-Bertrand 2009, 5). This links to the argument of this essay. It is not an argument against borders (quite the opposite), but it is a plea for being reflexive and ethical about how we manage those borders and the movement of non-citizens. Here the concept of the queue returns in an intriguing way. We have all become so concerned about the practice (or political invention) of queue jumping, arguing for or against the notion, that we sometimes forget that the queuing itself, like the categories of people that it describes, has been split objectively and subjectively. Objectively, it has become a taken-for-granted (increasing 214 P. James disembodied) practice of linear abstract justice that has as its main objective the slowing down of actual bodies. Queuing thus maintains real connections to questions of fairness, but it has increasingly become part of an abstract calculus of minimal compliance with rules of justice. At the very same time, subjectively, we feel sorry for those people who wait. The concept recalls lines of tired individuals, sagging at the knees, standing, waiting their turn. It is a concept which came into common use in mid-twentieth-century England, referring to hungry people waiting on post-war rationing handouts. However, for all the subjectively framed images in our mind of poor people standing in queues, such pictures now mask a massive apparatus of abstracted adjudication that deploys rules and ‘point systems’ to mediate or defer the intense difficulty of making ethical judgements. As Fuller (2005) writes: Queues are a form of control. They are material abstractions that structure relations between one and the many. They are both ‘stateless’, inasmuch as that they can form anywhere and that each server request is considered independently (this is certain true technically for TCP/IP, but also ‘in principle’ true for embodied lines – although queues in both contexts are not without affective residues, the most visible being server burnout and queue-rage). They are also ‘state’ structures, in the way they produced ‘territory’, marking out the borders between the orderly queue and unruly and unpredictable mob, and in the way they reproduce across all levels of social interaction – limiting potential into algorithms of probability. Queues, used in the context of the movement of non-citizens, are material abstractions. This is the key to understanding their dominant contemporary nature. It is no coincidence then that the different faces/bodies of globalization queue to cross borders in different ways according to specified and codified (abstracted) differences of risk and financial cost or return. The Citizen – now the globally taken-for-granted base condition of political normalcy in the world – is allowed to cross the borders of their own nation-state in a prioritized or facilitated fashion. This goes back to the eighteenthcentury European notion of ‘the people’ as the body of citizenry. To be a citizen is to have state-recognized membership in a corporate body, and it is from this notion of an abstract body politic that states claim the right to facilitate the passage of some bodies without counting the cost – citizens – and to regulate or close their borders against others. The Migrant or The Tourist, a documented citizen from somewhere else, has regulated rights. But like the national citizen, as long as each individual has the required documentation that proves that she or he will enhance the national interest, they move across alien nation-state borders in a facilitated state-sanctioned way. This is based on a person-by-person assessment of what state they come from, whether they will bring money or skills with them, and whether they will draw on public resources for more than a brief period. However, after that it gets more difficult. The Irregular Migrant is a person who finds him- or herself with a structurally changing, legally defined status in relation to bordercrossing. Such a person becomes irregular because something else happens to make them irregular. Sometimes it is because, as a non-citizen who once crossed the state border legally, the individual now remains within the state territory for too long and without the explicit and continuing sanction of the host state. For example, persons who overstayed their visas in Arizona have since 2004 become subject to harsher and harsher laws, including the Legal Arizona Workers Act and S.B. 1070. In some cases, the irregular migrant is a person who was once welcomed and now is not wanted, simply because a state changed their rules of residency (McNevin 2011). For example, the annulling of automatically renewable 10-year residency permits in France rendered many migrants as illegal sans-papiers – and, even more problematically, their children as stateless until they Citizenship Studies 215 are legally called otherwise (thus qualifying historical principle of jus soli upon which French citizenship has been formed). The Asylum Seeker is a stateless person seeking asylum but not yet accepted by another nation-state as a ‘refugee’. This is an in-between position that makes meaningful such bizarre designations as a person having no status in excised offshore places. By comparison, The Refugee is a displaced person who is outside their original state of citizenry, is a forced migrant and is recognized as such. She or he is a person who now has a legally recognized place in a new state, or at least a right to have such a status. In legal terms they have a new place to reside, however constrained or appalling that place might be, while in colloquial terms they are people at a distance for whom we should feel sympathy. Of those many faces of globalization – and here we are talking of embodied faces rather than the disembodied faces of Facebook and the mass media – it is then the irregular migrant and the asylum seeker who are the most contentious, and of central concern to this essay. 4. What has happened in the shift towards the dominance of disembodied globalization? The intensification of globalization and, in particular, the increasing dominance of disembodied globalization has, in association with the ideology of neoliberal or market globalism (Steger 2004, 2008), thrown basic questions of political identity and nationstate-based belonging into turmoil. In this context, writers who suggest that the turmoil can be understood in terms of continuing dominant ideologies of sedentarism, a bias towards staying in place rather than moving, or deep ambivalence towards mobility, have simply got the wrong end of the stick (Malkki 1992; Papastergiadis 2010). The undercurrent of their analysis reveals more about their own postmodern biases towards mobility as a good thing. More pointedly, they have missed the dominant changes in global sensibility over the past two decades, which has gone the same way to extol the virtues of movement. Most conceptions of mobility now carry a positive valency. Just compare the imperative of words such as ‘mobility’ and ‘interconnectivity’ to the mixed meanings of other words including ‘rooted’, ‘stagnating’, ‘parochial’ and ‘static’ to get a sense of how in the Global North we now value the freedom to move. Currently, for example, between 5% and 6% of people in the USA move their residence across a municipal boundary. Less than one-third of the population of the USA live in the same area in which they were born (Molloy, Smith, and Wozniak 2011). The people we want to slow down or restrict are those who move ambiguously and require resources from us – specifically, asylum seekers and irregular migrants. It is they who are at the centre of this turmoil, while financial capital and electronic communications move in relatively unregulated ways, and business people, tourists and assimilating (good) migrants are beckoned to our shores. Over the course of the twentieth century into the present, the relation between the citizen and the refugee has become increasingly vexatious, but it is specifically asylum seekers and irregular (bad) migrants whom we have come to fear. A second misapprehension is that this xenophobia is coming back into contention because more people are moving across borders. In fact, since the early 1990s, increasing state regulation, which makes it harder for certain categories of people to cross borders, has meant that the number of those defined technically as refugees has gone down by at least a third. This is all the more dramatic because the numbers counted include people whom the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has found it necessary after 2007 to call ‘people in refugee-like situations’. It also includes refugees who have been living in camps for more than a generation. According to UNHCR data, the 216 P. James numbers of asylum seekers have also been diminishing significantly. Across the last decade, applications globally for asylum have gone down by about 40%.8 The reason for this is not readily apparent, but it seems to be in part simply because the process of applying has become harder. In more technical terms, we can say that because the standing of different categories of persons has become increasingly rationalized, objectified and codified, states can present to themselves data which suggest that the numbers of refugees (the numbers of deserving people in need) are not going up. At the same time, however, those individuals called ‘internally displaced persons’ or IDPs – that is, those who are displaced but do not cross a national border – have been increasing (Birkeland, Halff, and Jennings 2010), as have been the number of irregular migrants. In summary, the number of displaced persons is going up while the numbers of persons who cross borders is going down. Since states began to define the limits of their citizenry, the insider (the citizen) and the outsider (the refugee, the stranger) have long been constituted in relation to each other – and they continue to be mutually defining – but the tension between them is becoming increasingly acute. However, with that intensifying tension, new terms of identification have been interposed to name those people who do not quite fit – again it is the asylum seeker and irregular migrant. ‘We’ cannot blame refugees or exclude them from the blessings of our citizenship, but ‘we’ can exclude or remove undeserving boundary-crossers from our homelands. And, in this view, asylum seekers and irregular migrants are potentially and probably those who are most acutely part of the categories of ‘the undeserving’ or ‘the queue jumping’. In summary, there have been a series of political transformations that have been part of this process of global change. First, the movement of persons across borders (whether it be tourists, migrants or refugees) is more intensely managed than ever before. There has been a globalization of the process of managing the movement of people with different nationstates, including the USA, Canada and Australia, learning from each and employing common techniques. Second, the definition of refugees has been lifted out of the human sense of strangers-in-need to become technically framed. In Australia the technical term ‘asylum seekers’ and the colloquial term ‘boat people’ have become linked together as objects of risk. Responses to them have become increasingly rationalized (in both senses of the word). Third, the status of persons inside borders – both citizens and irregular migrants – is more intensely managed that ever before. There has been a refinement of naturalization processes, and the legal standing of persons (complicated by dual citizenry in a globalizing world) is more contingent. We are seeing instances of denationalization, deporting and the revocation of citizenship including the singling out of previously naturalized or dual citizens. In some countries we are witnessing the redefining of citizenry status, usually in relation to labour migration and so-called guest workers. In the case of the Arizona S.B. 1070 Act (2010) – gently projected as the ‘Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act’ – this has been extended and deepened, and despite legal challenges it is currently being used as a model in a number of state legislatures across the USA. Fourth, as I began to argue earlier, asylum seekers are being effaced. This too, of course, is being contested, but a few examples should carry the sense of the pattern of change. It is, for example, possible to find numbers of official Australian and US government photographs from the 1970s and early 1980s of asylum seekers from Vietnam. One photo from 1979 (US National Archives, ARC Identifier 558538/Local Identifier 428N-1176806) shows a close-up of a family with three small children on the deck of USS Wabash, AOR-5 in the South China Sea. They are now safe ‘after twenty-eight boat people Citizenship Studies 217 were picked up from their wooden boat by a whaleboat from the oiler’. Another shot in 1982 shows the expectant faces of Vietnamese refugees aboard the guided missile cruiser USS FOX (CG-33). Another from 1984 depicts Master at Arms First Class Jose Morillo wearing white gloves and holding a baby, ‘one of 35 Vietnamese refugees rescued by the amphibious command ship USS BLUE RIDGE (LCC 19) 350 miles northeast of Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. They had spent eight days at sea in a 35 foot fishing boat’.9 There is no embarrassment here, no sense that we are infringing on their right to anonymity, no sense that children deserve protection from being used for state propaganda about its bounteous mercy. The only contemporary examples from that same archive which depict refugees moving across borders show individuals from the 2011 Tunisian airlift: these refugees were being airlifted from Djerba to Cairo under a standing request with the Egyptian government.10 There is no chance of those individuals crossing into the US homeland. From my exploration, there are no recent photos on the website by US military personnel of any non-citizen crossing into US territory. Australia provides us with a shameful example of a period of (possibly intentional) effacement of asylum seekers. It was the time of the Border Protection Bill discussed at the beginning of my essay. At the centre of the controversy was a verbal image that the Immigration Minister used for broadcasting on 7 October 2001, describing anonymous asylum seekers as throwing their children overboard in an attempt to get the Australian navy to rescue them. There were photographs, he said: ‘I have not seen it myself and apparently the quality is not very good and it’s infra-red or something but I am told that someone had looked at it and it is an absolute fact, children were thrown overboard’ (Reith quoted in Weller 2002, 2). According to evidence presented to a later Senate Enquiry, within hours this was known at high levels to be untrue, but it became the centrepiece of an election campaign a month later which the government used to sweep back into power. The year significantly was 2001. It was two months after the attack on the twin towers, and the Australian government sought to suggest that groups of asylum seekers might possibly provide a cover for terrorists to enter the country. In the background was another event called the Tampa Crisis. In August of the same year, the government had refused landing rights in Australia for a Norwegian freighter carrying 438 rescued Afghan asylum seekers. The Australian government sent a Special Air Services elite force to make sure that it did not land, and part of the role of that contingent was to make sure that journalists did not get any photographs of the faces of the Afghan men, women and children. The evidence is not conclusive, but my argument that the basis of this effacement was instrumentally political rather than human rights concerns is strongly supported by circumstantial evidence. Leach (2001, 29 – 30) describes the situation thus: In a positively Orwellian twist, the level of government agency and intent was revealed in the Senate inquiry. Under cross examination, the director of defence communication strategies, Brian Humphreys, told the hearing that Ross Hampton had directly instructed defence photographers not take pictures of asylum seekers. The Navy was apparently given explicit guidelines to ensure ‘no personalising or humanising images’ were to be taken. Defence officials said Mr Reith’s staff did not want to allow photographs to create sympathy for asylum seekers. Subsequently, defence media liaison director Tim Bloomfield described Government restrictions preventing any military comment on asylum seekers operations as ‘a form of censorship’. Similarly, Department of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) restrictions on journalists prevent them from interviewing any person detained under Australian immigration law. This effective gag on the press requires that ‘[a]n Immigration Officer will accompany journalists at all times’, and further that ‘[r]epresentatives of the Department will view the photographs/film for use with the resulting report/s’. Ostensibly, these provisions are meant to ensure that staff or people detained are not 218 P. James identifiable. Effectively, they also ensure that the Australian press cannot respond to pleas to be heard. Taking photographs of the faces of asylum seekers is certainly complicated. The Charter of Rome, launched in 2008 by the National Council of the Journalists’ Association (Consiglio Nazionale dell’Ordine dei Giornalisti) and the Italian National Press Federation (Federazione Nazionale della Stampa Italiana) presents the human rights concerns well. It aims to Safeguard those asylum seekers, refugees, victims of trafficking and migrants who choose to speak with the media by adopting solutions as regards their identity and image so as to ensure that they are not identifiable. Asylum seekers, refugees, victims of trafficking and migrants who are identifiable – as well as the latter’s relatives – may face reprisals on the part of the authorities in their country of origin, of non-state entities or of criminal organisations. Moreover, individuals who belong to a different socio-cultural context, where the press plays a limited role, may not be aware of global media dynamics and may thus not be able to foresee all the consequences of their decision to appear in the media.11 However, most human rights advocates argue alternatively that refugees and asylum seekers should have the right to choose whether or not they are photographed. This takes us to the heart of the human rights theme. 5. In this context what has happened to the definition of a refugee? The penultimate step in my argument is to now reverse the point of focus and turn the spotlight on the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees as a core example of the limits to liberal human rights. If I can show that even in this important area of humanitarian concern – in the very source of the current definition of what is a refugee – that processes of codification and rationalization have come to efface the meaning of being a stranger in need of asylum, then the comprehensiveness of the process can be fully seen. There is no doubt that the apparently simple concept of ‘refugees’ needs clarifying. This has become particularly necessary in the context of the dogmatic legalizing of terms such as ‘asylum seekers’ or the modern narrowing of the term ‘refugee’ to only refer to political refugees. Refugees, in the way that I have been using the term, are forced migrants who seek refuge in another place. They are people who feel compelled by threatening cultural, economic, political or ecological reasons to leave the place that they call home and feel the need to find refuge elsewhere. The related term ‘asylum seeker’ simply refers to those who by one means or another communicate a desire for that refuge. Being an asylum seeker in this definition does not require actually arriving at the border of a nation-state as the legalized definition of asylum seeker would have it. The terrible perversities that have been visited on asylum seekers to Australia over the last decade have been in the name of a legal definition. Similarly, being a refugee in this definition is not contingent upon the crossing of national borders. This is consistent with the original use of the term refugié, from the Old French term refuge, used to describe the thousands of Huguenots who in 1685 migrated after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The definition used in this essay is thus significantly simpler and much broader than spelt out in the most influential definition of a refugee, the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. According to the source document from 1951: the term ‘refugee’ shall apply to any person who: (1) Has been considered a refugee under the Arrangements of 12 May 1926 and 30 June 1928 or under the Conventions of 28 October 1933 and 10 February 1938, the Protocol of 14 September 1939 or the Constitution of the International Refugee Organization; Citizenship Studies 219 Decisions of non-eligibility taken by the International Refugee Organization during the period of its activities shall not prevent the status of refugee being accorded to persons who fulfil the conditions of paragraph 2 of this section; (2) As a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.12 Most of the writings on refugees today extract a neat, potted and misleading summary from this passage to say that the term ‘refugee’ refers to a person who ‘owing to wellfounded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his [or her] nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country’. It sounds impressive and precise, but this rendition is self-serving. It props up the politics of those who framed the Convention and were scared of the potential consequences of the world on the move. What the potted definition misses out on is first that refugees have been defined in terms of those moving across nation-state borders, as if national identity excludes all other displacements of equal consequence (Gibney 2004, 5– 9). Thus, refugees were defined by the emerging dominance of the nation-state, and, conversely, national responses to refugees began to define what kind of community a nation-state was becoming. More tenuously, refugees were defined as having certain nationalities. The first formal definition of a refugee, the 12 May 1926 Arrangement, for example, defined a refugee as ‘Any person of Russian origin who does not enjoy or who no longer enjoys the protection of the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and who has not acquired another nationality’.13 It is very narrow, to say the least. Second, the neat definition of Article 1 glides over the fine print a little further down the page that allows state signatories to choose to restrict the definition of refugees to only those who have come from Europe, and during a very particular time-period. Some of the signatories to the Convention were fearful that the masses from the Global South might turn up on their doorsteps demanding a different kind of refuge. They were very careful to demarcate who was a legal refugee and what events counted in causing such status. In this process, World War II was treated as a massive aberration in the history of the displacement, not to be repeated or supplanted by other forces of human disruption: For the purposes of this Convention, the words ‘events occurring before I January 1951’ in article 1, section A, shall be understood to mean either (a) ‘events occurring in Europe before I January 1951’; or (b) ‘events occurring in Europe or elsewhere before I January 1951’; and each Contracting State shall make a declaration at the time of signature, ratification or accession, specifying which of these meanings it applies for the purpose of its obligations under this Convention.14 Third, it gives credence to the notion that personal individualized ‘fear of being persecuted’ is the core reason for needing support. War, upheaval, famine and pestilence do not in the conventional definition make for refugee status. It does not matter that civilian deaths as a proportion of deaths in war escalated to 10% in World War I, and to more than 90% of the 40 million killed since 1945. It only matters that persons fear the persecution of their state. Article 1 of the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees took away the geographical delimitation of the 1951 definition,15 however, it does not respond to this problem. Over the last few decades, the UNHCR has in practice broadened this definition to include generalized military upheaval, but it has met with considerable opposition from Global North nation-states and it has been unable to formalize this 220 P. James broadening of its mandate. In effect, the legal definitions still carry all the baggage of the past. Fourth, the definition misses out on the emerging dominance of legal rationalism in defining who is in need. This overt and dominating form of legalism, where legal rationality comes to be pursued for its own sake, grew up with the modern bureaucratic state and became one of its lines of defence. The legalese of the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol turns flesh-and-blood people, individuals in need, into abstracted persons bound by a single moment is history. The Convention was written in response to a moment that forced the generosity of all – World War II – but it left out the generalizing insecurity that was dealt to an increasing number of populations outside the immediate theatre of war. Fifth, the definition does not allow itself to be extended in time. The phrase ‘As a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951’ restricts the definition of refugee status to known events and times. Certainly, the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees took away the temporal limitations of the 1951 definition, but the point remains. For all their concern, nation-states could not anticipate handling the question of people in need without considerable legalized delimitation. Those five points explain how, although official Australian policy was strongly against the granting of asylum becoming a human right, Australia was able to become a signatory to the Convention, all the while maintaining the White Australia policy (Brennan 2007, Chap. 1). Then, and now, the legally enshrined right of the sovereign nation-state to say ‘no’ preceded the rights of those in need. The Australia that says ‘no’ has again become an ugly feature of our time. 6. Towards a new global covenant? The current global/state-based approach to asylum seekers, refugees and irregular migrants is not working. Within constrained political boundaries and limited framing of what is possible, and despite a significant erosion of its power and influence, the UNHCR is doing a laudable job in enjoining states to act, documenting the problems of refugees and supporting people in camps (Loescher and Milner 2011). However, for all of this we have reached an impasse where a crisis of negative politics prevails. Taken together, the numbers of refugees, people in refugee-like situations, IDPs, asylum seekers and irregular migrants have increased dramatically over the course of the last century and into this one, and all that we seem able to do in response is to barricade our borders against more arrivals and to distribute aid to those stuck in camps. The negative politics ironically has not even worked to keep people from continuing to come. A complex mix of globalizing communications and intensifying global tensions compounding problems at the local level are providing the reasons, the motivations and the possibilities for increasing numbers of people to attempt to move across borders. It is not viable in the long run that states are becoming less likely to engage productively and positively with global bodies such as the UNHCR. An extensive process called the Global Consultations on International Protection begun in 2000 did no more in reality than confirm the 1951 Convention. In concluding this essay, I want to join with the many advocates of the need for an enhanced positive regime of global governance in the area of the movement and displacement of persons. We have what Stephen Castles in this special issue calls ‘a global governance deficit’. However, the problem is not simply the lack of institutionalized arrangements – a reconstituted and empowered UNHCR would provide an adequate institutional home for a changed regime. At the core of the problem is how responses are socially framed. Citizenship Studies 221 Among the many problems here is the nature of the ethical framing of the problem. Because currently the problem is countered under a one-dimensional, modern, rightsbased discourse, then like the Millennium Goals, the issue gets reduced to metrics and competing claims. For example, it means that the counter-claim from states that they have a right to decide who comes across their borders and who stays is given an equal ethical standing with the needs of strangers. Within the current reductive regime of modern rights this is an ornery but comfortably abstract philosophical position to hold. However, without suggesting how an ethics of rights can be grounded at two deeper levels – (1) an ethics of care through which fundamental questions of difference/identity, inclusion/exclusion and mobility/belonging are negotiated; and (2) an ethics of foundations through which questions about being human on this planet are brought into contention – then we will stay with a negative politics of contesting claims (see James 2006, Chap. 12). Some writers have attempted to elaborate an ethics of care through the ambivalent notion of hospitality (cf. Friese 2010; Wilson 2010). This needs to be placed in a larger context of dialogue and policy. A global covenant and a negotiated governance process would provide such a context. Australia, the USA and Canada as major receiving countries of the global movement of people could take a major lead in such a process. In the case of Australia, it would mean a moderated and graduated but fundamental rethinking of its refugee and immigration policy. First, without changing any other policies in the first instance, the government could, instead of effacing asylum seekers, begin by simply acknowledging the humanity of those who move and the importance of responding to the needs of strangers at a distance. As part of this it could, for example, after expedited due legal diligence in relation to those who arrive, negotiate national and local welcome-to-country and welcome-to-community ceremonies for those who have been accepted to stay. At the global level this would signal a change of rhetorical stance. Second, the Australian government could annul the legal contortions over excised offshore places. Third, instead of engaging in deeply instrumental and flawed negotiations over regional and off-shore processing centres (Australia), 16 mandatory detention (Australia and Canada) or fences versus more border guards (the USA), the governments of Australia, Canada and the USA could call for and begin a global process of negotiating how asylum seekers and refugees in general can be handled regionally. This would entail global negotiation over how across the world we might equitably share the burden of the movement of people in various states of need. In this context, regional processing centres might work as the delegated centres of a global governance scheme rather than as instrumentally oriented places to slow down the movement of asylum seekers across borders. In this context, mandatory detention would become a brief stay in a processing centre rather than a means of deterring people smugglers. Refugees would enter these delegated processing centres, located in all signatory countries, knowing that they would be treated fairly, but not knowing in which country of the many in the regional pact they would end up being placed. Given the range of countries in any one regional pact – rich and poor – this would deter economic migrants from using refugee status as a way of bypassing immigration laws without requiring that refugees spend up to five years in detention to slow down the rate of asylum seeking. Fourth, within the country, governments could initiate a long-term deliberated debate over who we will welcome to our country. Will it be predominantly skilled or wealthy migrants that add to the national interest as is currently the case, or might the balance be shifted substantially to those in need for whom we have a responsibility? For all the initial 222 P. James insecurity that it would engender in those who are vulnerable to fear-mongering, it would be the first time for the Australian, Canadian or US people that this question was debated democratically at length and not treated as an ethics to be deferred and handled by selfserving metrics. It would, if handled well, institute a long-term positive politics. And if governments working with civil society were able to do some of these things, then nationstates could again talk of being good international citizens. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. Migration Amendment (Excision from Migration Zone) Act No 127. 2001. See the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship website, http://www.immi.gov.au/ legislation/amendments/2005/050722/lc22072005.htm (accessed July 4, 2013). Amendment No. 128 allowed that ‘An officer may take an offshore entry person from Australia to a country in respect of which a declaration is in force under subsection (3)’. In other words, asylum seekers could be ‘deported’ without the embarrassment of breaching the refoulement provision under the United Nations 1951 Refugees Convention and the 1967 Protocol. For a history of the relationship of Christmas Island, one of the excised places, see Chambers (2011). From the Canadian immigration website, http://www.canadaimmigrationvisa.com/visatype. html (accessed March 19, 2013). See Linklater (2007), Chap. 4, ‘What is a Good International Citizen?’ The central figure to use this term in Australian politics was Gareth Evans. It was removed as an objective of Australian foreign policy by the Liberal National Coalition in the late 1990s. The term comes from Habermas (1987), although the methodological framing comes from James (2006). According to the Vancouver Sun, ‘The Harper government laid out a series of reforms on Thursday that it said would go after “ruthless profiteers” who coordinate illegal peoplesmuggling operations and asylum seekers who “jump the immigration queue”’, October 22, 2010. The significance of this language is considerable. It takes on the rhetoric of Australia’s Howard government from many years earlier. From http://www.defenseimagery.mil/index.html (accessed April 14, 2011). It can be visited by going to the online world ‘Second Life’ and its version of the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Gery. UNHCR Statistical Online Population Database, http://www.unhcr.org/pages/4a013eb06.html (accessed July 4, 2013). US Defence Information Directorate website, http://www.defenseimagery.mil/index.html (accessed April 14, 2011). US Department of Defence website, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx? id¼ 63133 (accessed April 14, 2013). http://ethicaljournalisminitiative.org/en/contents/charter-of-rome (accessed April 10, 2013). Chapter 1, Article 1 of the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, adopted on 28 July 1951 by the United Nations Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Status of Refugees and Stateless Persons convened under General Assembly resolution 429 (V) of 14 December 1950. League of Nations, Arrangement Relating to the Issue of Identify Certificates to Russian and Armenian Refugees, 12 May 1926, League of Nations, Treaty Series Vol. LXXXIX, No. 2004, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3dd8b5802.html (accessed April 14, 2013). Chapter 1, Article 1, subsection B.1. It reads: ‘For the purpose of the present Protocol, the term “refugee” shall, except as regards the application of paragraph 3 of this article, mean any person within the definition of article I of the Convention as if the words “As a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and . . . ” and the words “ . . . as a result of such events”, in article 1 A (2) were omitted’. The irony of the recent Australian High Court decision is that the offshore option may be off the table, and the government might be forced into this position for the wrong reason. Citizenship Studies 223 References Arthus-Bertrand, Y., ed. 2009. 6 Billion Others: Portraits of Humanity from Around the World. New York: Abrams. Birkeland, N. M., K. Halff, and E. Jennings, eds. 2010. Internal Displacement: Global Overview of Trends and Developments in 2009. Geneva: Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the Norwegian Refugee Council. Brennan, F. 2007. 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