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Harsha Walia is a writer, activist, and community organizer known for her work on migration justice and border abolition. Author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism and Undoing Border Imperialism, Walia critiques border regimes as instruments of racial, colonial, and capitalist violence.

In issue #115 of The Internationalist, we extract from Border and Rule where Walia lays bare Australia’s horrifying system of mandatory and offshore detention—a system rooted in racial exclusion and settler colonialism.

Mandatory and Offshore Detention

Detention centres should not exist in any capacity.

—RISE: Refugees, Survivors and Ex-detainees, “Our Position”

Ongoing anxiety about maintaining White Australia continues to animate racial settler formation, producing one of the world’s most punitive detention systems. Dating back to 1992 under the Labor government of Paul Keating, Australia mandated that any person without a valid visa be detained, and time limits were removed, thereby permitting indefinite detention. The average length of detention in the Australian onshore detention system is five hundred days, far longer than the US, UK, or Canada. Some people remain in captivity much longer. After being tortured by the Indian army and fleeing the Indian occupation of Kashmir, Peter Qasim was detained for almost seven years. Since 2000, there have been at least 2,026 deaths at sea before reaching Australia’s shores, following deportation from Australia, and in Australian onshore and offshore detention centers, including at least 24 deaths by suicide in detention centers since 2010.

On Manus Island and Nauru in 2019, about 75 percent of refugees had a serious physical health condition and 82 percent suffered from depression. The National Ethnic Disability Alliance notes the disproportionate detention of people with disabilities, as well as the institution of detention itself contributing to disabling people. Children as young as seven years old have experienced “repeated incidents of suicide attempts, dousing themselves in petrol, and becoming catatonic.” During the coronavirus pandemic, detainees in Australia’s onshore and offshore detention centers were identified as one of the populations most susceptible to transmission of the virus, both due to the impossibility of physical distancing and the already-compromised health of many detainees. Further, detention is sexual violence, as captured in the testimony of a woman detained on Nauru: “I went inside. Dogs came in too. Man took off all his clothes and showed me his private parts.” When faced with a government-commissioned review cataloging violence including sexual assault of children and guards coercing sexual favors from women, then–Australian prime minister Tony Abbott disgustingly retorted, “Things happen.” Perhaps most harrowing, yet emblematic, of Australia’s border violence are the struggles of detainees who become pregnant as a result of rape in detention and are nevertheless denied healthcare and reproductive rights in Australia. Amnesty International summarizes these conditions as “a calculated system of neglect and cruelty to increase the hardship suffered by refugees and asylum seekers.”

Australian offshore detention centers (or prison camps, as detainees call them) date back nearly two decades, garnering support from both the Australian Labor Party and the conservative Liberal Party. In August 2001, a Norwegian freighter, MV Tampa, rescued 433 mostly Afghan refugees and entered near the waters off Christmas Island. After a tense standoff, during which Australia refused to accept the refugees, Australia struck a deal with Nauru and forcibly transported most of the refugees there like cargo. Nauru, whose ecology and economy was devastated through extractive colonialism, received a sizable thirtymillion- dollar aid package in exchange. The following month, instrumentalizing the 9/11 attacks to stir up both warmongering and anti-migrant fervor, conservative prime minister John Howard implemented the Pacific Solution. Thus began the interception of boats, with asylum seekers being sent to offshore camps rather than landing on Australian state territory. Under a new Border Protection Act, the Australian Navy was also deployed to interdict and forcibly return any “suspected illegal entry vessels” near Indonesia. Within just a few weeks, these concerted militarization efforts led to risky sea journeys, and, on October 18, 2001, a boat carrying mainly Iraqi and Afghan passengers sank. Approximately 353 people, including 150 children, died. Yet Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock crudely commented, “This tragedy may have an upside” in terms of deterring future arrivals.

The Pacific Solution also excised external territories such as Christmas Island from Australian migration policy, meaning that refugees arriving at these locations were considered not to have officially entered Australia. They were denied access to Australian asylum protection and were instead detained on Nauru and Manus Island, where their claims were processed. Offshore detention thus serves not only to isolate refugees and as a racist deterrence strategy, but also to create “interstitial legal categories.” The first two years after the implementation of the Pacific Solution, Australia interdicted and detained 1,544 refugees on Manus Island and Nauru and also increased aid to Nauru, amounting to one-third of the country’s GDP. When Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd briefly ended offshore detention in 2007, there was swift backlash from both his own party and the opposition. Under the subsequent Labor leadership of Julia Gillard, detention centers on Manus Island and Nauru were reopened in 2012, in addition to several new detention centers, including “the Gitmo of Australia” on Christmas Island. Gillard also extended the Pacific Solution to include migrants arriving on the Australian mainland by boat, who could then also be sent to offshore detention centers. Shortly after Rudd returned as prime minister, this time blatantly playing to a racist base, he shamelessly announced that any asylum seeker arriving by boat— even if legally determined to be a Convention refugee—could never become a resident of Australia. In this way, excising more territories and expanding offshoring functioned to circumvent Australia’s international legal obligation to offer asylum protection. Since these announcements by Gillard and Rudd, more than 4,177 refugees have been forcibly transferred to either Nauru or Papua New Guinea.

In addition, Australia began funding efforts to prevent boats from leaving Indonesia. In yet another example of Australia’s “incentivised policy transfer,” Indonesia was pulled into the geopolitical orbit of White Australia and colonial carcerality. Like Nauru and Papua New Guinea, Indonesia receives ongoing financial incentives and training to construct detention centers and enhance its border control measures. Australia consistently deflects responsibility for those preemptively detained in Indonesia or for refugees incarcerated on Nauru and Manus Island. However, it is Australian⁠—and not Nauruan or Papua New Guinean⁠ or Indonesian—refugee policy that is warehousing refugees. Australia also presents offshore detention as an economic partnership between sovereign countries, when in fact aid to impoverished countries is used as a bargaining chip in the outsourcing of Australia’s border policies.

Since 2002, Australia has invested significant resources into combating irregular migration through the criminalization of human smuggling. While criminalizing smuggling is often presented by state actors as a measure to “protect” migrants from “evil” human smugglers, enforcement measures serve to multiply border controls and further constrain the mobility of migrants and refugees. Under Australian domestic law, a number of new criminal offenses, mandatory sentences, and interdiction measures have been introduced to combat “people smuggling.” At the international and regional level, the Australian government has linked the smuggling of migrants to national security and pressured Indonesia and other neighboring countries into a regional anti-smuggling and anti-trafficking forum. Through the multilateral “Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime,” irregular migration networks are now criminalized as “smuggling” and “trafficking” to prevent refugees from migrating with the necessary assistance of others. The recent Operation Sovereign Borders is a “zero-tolerance policy” to prevent, through military-led interdiction and turnbacks, any and all refugees arriving in Australia by boat. Government officials tout the operation as an effort to protect refugees from “crime networks” and prevent drownings at sea. Because migration assistance is criminalized as smuggling, state interdiction perversely becomes rescue.

Excerpted from Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia, published by Haymarket Books (2021). Used with permission. All rights reserved. 

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