The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago

by Alison Mountz

Investigating the global system of detention centers that imprison asylum seekers and conceal persistent human rights violations

 

Remote detention centers confine tens of thousands of refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants around the world, operating in a legal gray area that hides terrible human rights abuses from the international community. Built to temporarily house eight hundred migrants in transit, the immigrant “reception center” on the Italian island of Lampedusa has held thousands of North African refugees under inhumane conditions for weeks on end. Australia’s use of Christmas Island as a detention center for asylum seekers has enabled successive governments to imprison migrants from Asia and Africa, including the Sudanese human rights activist Abdul Aziz Muhamat, held there for five years. 

In The Death of Asylum, Alison Mountz traces the global chain of remote sites used by states of the Global North to confine migrants fleeing violence and poverty, using cruel measures that, if unchecked, will lead to the death of asylum as an ethical ideal. Through unprecedented access to offshore detention centers and immigrant-processing facilities, Mountz illustrates how authorities in the United States, the European Union, and Australia have created a new and shadowy geopolitical formation allowing them to externalize their borders to distant islands where harsh treatment and deadly force deprive migrants of basic human rights.

Mountz details how states use the geographic inaccessibility of places like Christmas Island, almost a thousand miles off the Australian mainland, to isolate asylum seekers far from the scrutiny of humanitarian NGOs, human rights groups, journalists, and their own citizens. By focusing on borderlands and spaces of transit between regions, The Death of Asylum shows how remote detention centers effectively curtail the basic human right to seek asylum, forcing refugees to take more dangerous risks to escape war, famine, and oppression.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Immigration, History

304 pages, Paperback

Published August 4, 2020

Reviews

[Nikhil · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book attempts to trace the shifting patterns and strategies of immigration enforcement and the decline of old standards of asylum (as understood under international law). It considers the ways asylum seekers and other migrants are subject to control, and how different spaces relate to this control. For example, with the offshoring of immigration control to other countries, Mountz points to the rise of islands as centers of immigration control as opposed to the traditional border ("lines in the sand"). We move from the story of boats in the Caribbean to islands in the Mediterranean in a fairly convincing sweep.

I believe there is much valuable information here, but it suffers from two significant flaws.

First, the reliance on overly theoretical jargon and Agamben citations does the work a disservice. One doesn't need to talk about "states of exception" and "domination" to demonstrate the extent of control. The description of the methods of controls and the actual conditions of migrants suffices on its own. The Association of American Geographers awarded this book their award for "Public Understanding of Geography" for the year 2020, but this book is obviously geared exclusively for academic readers. This is a massive missed opportunity given the importance of the subject and the rarity of books which attempt to take a global view of this subject.

Second, Mountz is overly focused on the set of "Global North" countries in telling the global story of the death of asylum. These are not the only destinations of refuge and migration in the world. One should also tell the stories of immigration control in South and Southeast Asia and the Arabian peninsula, as there have been sizable migrant flows and state efforts to restrain, temper, or control them there in the past decades. These have moved in parallel with the Northern narrative sketched by Mountz. Notably, the international right of asylum was never fully accepted by states in these regions, unlike in the rest of the world. Was asylum ever "alive"? That is something worth asking in a fuller examination of the topic. More broadly, there are also Global South destination states like South Africa with their own regimes of control and political disputes relating to migrant policy, which do formally recognize asylum but are ignored.

I had high expectations perhaps, but maybe this attempt will inspire something greater in the future. For readers who have a particular and deep interest in the subject, there is much to commend here. But I would not recommend this book to the average person unfortunately.

[Ana Laura Mendoza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mountz’s insightful account on asylum and the destruction of international migrant protection is truly impactful. She portrays the death of asylum in three manners: physical death of migrants, political death and ontological death. Her acknowledgment of various colonial countries, besides the US, and their contribution to migrant violence was profound.