Australia’s Punitive Borders: Determinants of Its Exceptional Offshore Immigration Detention Policy

Abstract

Australia’s offshore immigration detention policy, through which Australia has sent asylum seekers to the Pacific Island of Nauru, Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, and the Australian external territory of Christmas Island to be detained whilst processing their claims, is exceptional compared to other Western countries’ attempts to offshore for three main reasons. First, it is long-lasting, having been in place for 25 years. Second, it enjoys bipartisan political support, legislative support, and public buy-in. Third, it has served as a model for other Western countries. Despite how institutionalized Australian offshoring is, it has major shortcomings. It is disproportionately expensive for how few asylum seekers are detained offshore, and fails to live up to the policy’s stated rationale of deterring ‘illegitimate’ asylum seekers. This informs this thesis’ main research question: why does Australia offshore and what mechanisms explain the apparent exceptionality of Australia’s offshore immigration detention policy? In the literature, two authors have attempted to answer this question: David Scott FitzGerald and Gabriele Abbondanza. Whilst FitzGerald attributes Australia’s exceptional ability to offshore to its regional hegemony, history, geography and legal systems, Abbondanza attributes Australia’s wish to offshore to its anxiety as a nation. Intervening in this debate, I hypothesize that it is Australia’s anxious hegemony, along with the lack of an Australian human rights charter and a regional Pacific human rights court, Australia’s isolated geography, and Australia’s colonial history, that explains its exceptionality. I come to this conclusion by systematically ruling out all alternative explanations for Australia’s exceptionality, thus increasing the validity of my interpretation and filling this mechanistic gap in these two works. This results in a mixed-methods approach. I first rule out macro-level, ‘supply-side’ mechanisms for immigration detention including economic (GDP growth and unemployment), political (election year, far-right representation, and government lean), and migration-related (share of foreign population, immigration rate, and asylum applications) factors through a panel regression and linear regression analysis of how these determinants interact with detention rate in 32 Western countries and in Australia. I find that there is no difference in how these mechanisms affect the Western model and the Australian model in terms of general detention rate. Since Australia does not seem distinct from the West, this indicates that these supply-side mechanisms do not explain Australia’s exceptionality in offshore detention policy. I then rule out the micro-level, ‘demand-side’ mechanism, public opinion, by conducting an original survey on British and Australian attitudes towards asylum seekers and offshore detention. I choose the UK as a ‘control variable’ for Australia given similarities in culture, geography, and immigration policy, and the fact that the UK has failed to offshore through the UK-Rwanda deal. I hypothesize that if the public opinion of respondents between these two countries are similar, then public opinion is not the mechanism that explains why the UK failed and Australia succeeded. Through data visualization, regressions, and keyness analysis, I find that the British and Australian public have similar levels of support for offshoring, thus ruling out the public opinion mechanism to explain Australia’s exceptionality. Finally, I test my hypothesis that Australia is an anxious hegemon through reviewing the secondary literature, particularly Ontological Security Studies and neo-realism. Through rhetorical analysis of political speeches, textual analysis of primary documents like legal cases, and interviews with Australian policy experts and a policymaker, I make the argument for my main hypothesis on Australia’s geography, history, lack of legal regimes and anxious hegemony. This finding has important implications for policymakers faced with a global race-to-the-bottom for offshore immigration detention policy within an increasingly anxious status quo.