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Refuge beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers
Media pundits, politicians, and the public are often skeptical or ambivalent about granting asylum. They fear that asylum-seekers will impose economic and cultural costs and pose security threats to nationals. Consequently, governments of rich, democratic countries attempt to limit who can approach their borders, which often leads to refugees breaking immigration laws.
In Refuge beyond Reach, David Scott FitzGerald traces how rich democracies have deliberately and systematically shut down most legal paths to safety. Drawing on official government documents, information obtained via WikiLeaks, and interviews with asylum seekers, he finds that for ninety-nine percent of refugees, the only way to find safety in one of the prosperous democracies of the Global North is to reach its territory and then ask for asylum. FitzGerald shows how the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia comply with the letter of law while violating the spirit of those laws through a range of deterrence methods -- first designed to keep out Jews fleeing the Nazis -- that have now evolved into a pervasive global system of "remote control." While some of the most draconian remote control practices continue in secret, Fitzgerald identifies some pressure points and finds that a diffuse humanitarian obligation to help those in need is more difficult for governments to evade than the law alone.
Refuge beyond Reach addresses one of the world's most pressing challenges -- how to manage flows of refugees and other types of migrants -- and helps to identify the conditions under which individuals can access the protection of their universal rights.
In Refuge beyond Reach, David Scott FitzGerald traces how rich democracies have deliberately and systematically shut down most legal paths to safety. Drawing on official government documents, information obtained via WikiLeaks, and interviews with asylum seekers, he finds that for ninety-nine percent of refugees, the only way to find safety in one of the prosperous democracies of the Global North is to reach its territory and then ask for asylum. FitzGerald shows how the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia comply with the letter of law while violating the spirit of those laws through a range of deterrence methods -- first designed to keep out Jews fleeing the Nazis -- that have now evolved into a pervasive global system of "remote control." While some of the most draconian remote control practices continue in secret, Fitzgerald identifies some pressure points and finds that a diffuse humanitarian obligation to help those in need is more difficult for governments to evade than the law alone.
Refuge beyond Reach addresses one of the world's most pressing challenges -- how to manage flows of refugees and other types of migrants -- and helps to identify the conditions under which individuals can access the protection of their universal rights.
- GenresPoliticsNonfiction
376 pages, Hardcover
Published April 12, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 7, 2021
State disengagement with international refugee law is something I have been considering fairly extensively for university-based assessment of late. Indeed, this was a book I took out to assist me writing an assessment piece. I thoroughly enjoyed the bits I skimmed and decided to read it through. Refugee law is quite clearly very complex and literature on the subject is very dense. FitzGerald's book was refreshingly engaging. His use of various metaphors - 'dome', 'moat', 'cage' and 'barbican' - greatly assisted me in better conceiving of how states try and control migratory flows through land, sea and air policies. Would recommend :)
October 25, 2019
Assigning this one for a new course on comparative Partitions. A rich and well-organized work on border externalization policies/ "remote control." Definitely recommend.
July 20, 2019
David Scott Fitzgerald’s book is an excellent and urgent discussion of how wealthy democracies repel refugees and asylum seekers through mechanisms of “remote control” and architectures of repulsion. He argues that because international and domestic laws (especially since the 1951 Refugee Convention, the 1967 Protocol, and the 1984 UN Convention against Torture) have mandated a right to seek asylum once a refugee enters a country’s territory and prohibited refoulement (return to the country of persecution), governments have found ways to prevent arrival. He focuses on four key cases: the United States, Canada, the European Union and Australia. The book extends our historical and analytic understanding of disturbing contemporary developments.
Repulsion strategies employed by wealthy democracies include caging (keeping displaced persons in or near their point of origin through camps, publicity campaigns discouraging travel, military interventions), constructing virtual domes over rich countries (restricting access through airspace, using visas, carrier sanctions, pre-clearance in remote airports), buffering (using neighboring countries to repel unauthorized migrants), using the sea as a moat (intercepting boats), and constructing anomalous zones at or near entrances to their territories (including territorial excisions, airport zones) where the rules don’t apply. Since the end of the Cold War, which provided a foreign policy rationale for asylum, since the broadening of the refugee definition to include non-Europeans, and since the securitization of the immigration issue, repulsion strategies have intensified. In addition, the rise of radical right-wing populist movements and large visible migration streams have contributed. However, control at a distance from territorial borders precedes the introduction of international asylum law and its core non-refoulement principle (that governments may not send refugees who reach their territory back to the countries in which they were persecuted).
Fitzgerald’s first empirical chapter, “Never Again?” (Chapter 2), documents the development of an early system of remote control in the British effort to keep endangered and persecuted European Jews from reaching Palestine (a British mandate under the League of Nations) in the 1930s and 40s. These techniques pre-dated the 1951 and 1967 conventions, and this episode of persecution without refuge became a key rationale for protective international law. The British toolbox included naval interceptions, visa restrictions, diplomatic pressure on buffer countries, stationing immigration liaison officers abroad, sanctioning carriers, developing publicity campaigns, sabotaging vessels, and offshore detention centers. U.S. readers may be especially interested in chapters on “The Dome over the Golden Door” (Chapter 4), “The North American Moat” (Chapter 5), “Raising the Drawbridge to Cuba” (Chapter 6), and “Buffering North America” (Chapter 7). The work of Jason DeLeon (2015) on the southwest desert border region, a “land of open graves,” complements these chapters.
Fitzgerald argues that these practices employ a sort of hyper-legalism and urges a new long-distance humanitarianism, discretionary and non-specific though it is. He urges an integration of the work of rights-oriented government agencies and transnational advocates outside and in the courts, and he urges monitoring organizations, investigative journalists, legal advocates, scholars and engaged citizens to displace the brutal logics of repulsion and guard the paths to refuge.
Repulsion strategies employed by wealthy democracies include caging (keeping displaced persons in or near their point of origin through camps, publicity campaigns discouraging travel, military interventions), constructing virtual domes over rich countries (restricting access through airspace, using visas, carrier sanctions, pre-clearance in remote airports), buffering (using neighboring countries to repel unauthorized migrants), using the sea as a moat (intercepting boats), and constructing anomalous zones at or near entrances to their territories (including territorial excisions, airport zones) where the rules don’t apply. Since the end of the Cold War, which provided a foreign policy rationale for asylum, since the broadening of the refugee definition to include non-Europeans, and since the securitization of the immigration issue, repulsion strategies have intensified. In addition, the rise of radical right-wing populist movements and large visible migration streams have contributed. However, control at a distance from territorial borders precedes the introduction of international asylum law and its core non-refoulement principle (that governments may not send refugees who reach their territory back to the countries in which they were persecuted).
Fitzgerald’s first empirical chapter, “Never Again?” (Chapter 2), documents the development of an early system of remote control in the British effort to keep endangered and persecuted European Jews from reaching Palestine (a British mandate under the League of Nations) in the 1930s and 40s. These techniques pre-dated the 1951 and 1967 conventions, and this episode of persecution without refuge became a key rationale for protective international law. The British toolbox included naval interceptions, visa restrictions, diplomatic pressure on buffer countries, stationing immigration liaison officers abroad, sanctioning carriers, developing publicity campaigns, sabotaging vessels, and offshore detention centers. U.S. readers may be especially interested in chapters on “The Dome over the Golden Door” (Chapter 4), “The North American Moat” (Chapter 5), “Raising the Drawbridge to Cuba” (Chapter 6), and “Buffering North America” (Chapter 7). The work of Jason DeLeon (2015) on the southwest desert border region, a “land of open graves,” complements these chapters.
Fitzgerald argues that these practices employ a sort of hyper-legalism and urges a new long-distance humanitarianism, discretionary and non-specific though it is. He urges an integration of the work of rights-oriented government agencies and transnational advocates outside and in the courts, and he urges monitoring organizations, investigative journalists, legal advocates, scholars and engaged citizens to displace the brutal logics of repulsion and guard the paths to refuge.
September 27, 2023
This book is informative in some ways and willfully obtuse in others. Fitzgerald strives to show all the ways in which countries like the US, UK, Canada, Australia and the member countries of the European Union shrug off their international commitments to provide for a just asylum process. At the same time, he makes questionable decisions that prevent the work from showing the entirety of this complex situation. The biggest one is refusing to differentiate economic migrants from political refugees, asserting time and again that any attempt to distinguish between the two is a disservice to the latter. This then saves him from having to address how a system overwhelmed by the former could possibly be fair to the latter. Similar decisions make this work feel at best incomplete and at worst willfully disingenuous. Nonetheless the work does serve to highlight the hypocrisy of most countries, not just the ones studied in detail in this book, in committing to an asylum process that they are at great pains to avoid carrying out (which begs the question of why there were no proposals for improvement presented in this work).
July 25, 2022
Important and eye-opening read
September 11, 2020
David Scott Fitzgerald’s book is an excellent and urgent discussion of how wealthy democracies repel refugees and asylum seekers through mechanisms of “remote control” and architectures of repulsion. He argues that because international and domestic laws (especially since the 1951 Refugee Convention, the 1967 Protocol, and the 1984 UN Convention against Torture) have mandated a right to seek asylum once a refugee enters a country’s territory and prohibited refoulement (return to the country of persecution), governments have found ways to prevent arrival. He focuses on four key cases: the United States, Canada, the European Union and Australia. The book extends our historical and analytic understanding of disturbing contemporary developments.
Repulsion strategies employed by wealthy democracies include caging (keeping displaced persons in or near their point of origin through camps, publicity campaigns discouraging travel, military interventions), constructing virtual domes over rich countries (restricting access through airspace, using visas, carrier sanctions, pre-clearance in remote airports), buffering (using neighboring countries to repel unauthorized migrants), using the sea as a moat (intercepting boats), and constructing anomalous zones at or near entrances to their territories (including territorial excisions, airport zones) where the rules don’t apply. Since the end of the Cold War, which provided a foreign policy rationale for asylum, since the broadening of the refugee definition to include non-Europeans, and since the securitization of the immigration issue, repulsion strategies have intensified. In addition, the rise of radical right-wing populist movements and large visible migration streams have contributed. However, control at a distance from territorial borders precedes the introduction of international asylum law and its core non-refoulement principle (that governments may not send refugees who reach their territory back to the countries in which they were persecuted).
Fitzgerald’s first empirical chapter, “Never Again?” (Chapter 2), documents the development of an early system of remote control in the British effort to keep endangered and persecuted European Jews from reaching Palestine (a British mandate under the League of Nations) in the 1930s and 40s. These techniques pre-dated the 1951 and 1967 conventions, and this episode of persecution without refuge became a key rationale for protective international law. The British toolbox included naval interceptions, visa restrictions, diplomatic pressure on buffer countries, stationing immigration liaison officers abroad, sanctioning carriers, developing publicity campaigns, sabotaging vessels, and offshore detention centers. U.S. readers may be especially interested in chapters on “The Dome over the Golden Door” (Chapter 4), “The North American Moat” (Chapter 5), “Raising the Drawbridge to Cuba” (Chapter 6), and “Buffering North America” (Chapter 7). The work of Jason DeLeon (2015) on the southwest desert border region, a “land of open graves,” complements these chapters.
Fitzgerald argues that these practices employ a sort of hyper-legalism and urges a new long-distance humanitarianism, discretionary and non-specific though it is. He urges an integration of the work of rights-oriented government agencies and transnational advocates outside and in the courts, and he urges monitoring organizations, investigative journalists, legal advocates, scholars and engaged citizens to displace the brutal logics of repulsion and guard the paths to refuge.
Repulsion strategies employed by wealthy democracies include caging (keeping displaced persons in or near their point of origin through camps, publicity campaigns discouraging travel, military interventions), constructing virtual domes over rich countries (restricting access through airspace, using visas, carrier sanctions, pre-clearance in remote airports), buffering (using neighboring countries to repel unauthorized migrants), using the sea as a moat (intercepting boats), and constructing anomalous zones at or near entrances to their territories (including territorial excisions, airport zones) where the rules don’t apply. Since the end of the Cold War, which provided a foreign policy rationale for asylum, since the broadening of the refugee definition to include non-Europeans, and since the securitization of the immigration issue, repulsion strategies have intensified. In addition, the rise of radical right-wing populist movements and large visible migration streams have contributed. However, control at a distance from territorial borders precedes the introduction of international asylum law and its core non-refoulement principle (that governments may not send refugees who reach their territory back to the countries in which they were persecuted).
Fitzgerald’s first empirical chapter, “Never Again?” (Chapter 2), documents the development of an early system of remote control in the British effort to keep endangered and persecuted European Jews from reaching Palestine (a British mandate under the League of Nations) in the 1930s and 40s. These techniques pre-dated the 1951 and 1967 conventions, and this episode of persecution without refuge became a key rationale for protective international law. The British toolbox included naval interceptions, visa restrictions, diplomatic pressure on buffer countries, stationing immigration liaison officers abroad, sanctioning carriers, developing publicity campaigns, sabotaging vessels, and offshore detention centers. U.S. readers may be especially interested in chapters on “The Dome over the Golden Door” (Chapter 4), “The North American Moat” (Chapter 5), “Raising the Drawbridge to Cuba” (Chapter 6), and “Buffering North America” (Chapter 7). The work of Jason DeLeon (2015) on the southwest desert border region, a “land of open graves,” complements these chapters.
Fitzgerald argues that these practices employ a sort of hyper-legalism and urges a new long-distance humanitarianism, discretionary and non-specific though it is. He urges an integration of the work of rights-oriented government agencies and transnational advocates outside and in the courts, and he urges monitoring organizations, investigative journalists, legal advocates, scholars and engaged citizens to displace the brutal logics of repulsion and guard the paths to refuge.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews