This paper explores the emergence of social movement action on the rights of asylum seekers in the Australian case. It focuses on new and growing collective action in the context of the neoliberal and neoconservative government of John Howard (1996 -2007) and situates this rise within a generalizable and universal human rights movement. The detention and deportation of asylum seekers, which resulted in revitalized collective action, is detailed as the trigger for collective action. The paper argues that a combination of neoliberal values and new nationalism created a hostile environment for newcomers and proved a difficult environment for the solidarity evident in this new social movement.
This article explores the status of temporariness in international migration. The focus is on the impact of temporary status on migrants’ actions, behavior, and emotional responses to the daily circumstances in negotiating everyday life. Ambivalence is evaluated as an explanatory category that allows particular insight into strategies of resistance used by temporary migrants as they navigate a host society besides maintaining connections with home. Original data obtained from in-depth interviews with Indonesian migrant workers and students undertaking temporary migration projects in Australia is discussed. The case study explored in this article identifies some of the core problems temporary migrants face as encapsulated by a deficit of rights and protections that, at the same time, are expected by members of liberal states. Temporary status turns migrants into nomadic global laborers. The article argues that actions and responses that appear to be ambivalent are far from irrational, hasty, or disloyal. Rather, migrants’ decision-making in response to the uncertain and shifting economic and sociocultural environments that they enter often comprises subtle calibrations and switching actions, observable as ambivalence, in adjusting to the unanticipated demands of a new society.
During the last decade measures of overt and covert surveillance, information sharing and deterrence of the illegal movement of people has increased within and between states. Border security has come to dominate international relations, and increasingly to deflect the needs of asylum-seekers who search for a state that will offer them substantive protection under the Refugee Convention. Measures of internal and external deterrence diminish the reality of protection to genuine refugees as some of the most vulnerable individuals in the world today. Australia, as a country of relative geographic isolation, has not experienced the large-scale influxes of asylum-seekers seen in many parts of the world. Notwithstanding this, the Australian Government has in recent years implemented harsh policy and administrative measures directed at asylum-seekers with a substantial measure of public support. In August 2001, an incident involving 433 asylum-seekers was branded in popular discourse an 'asylum crisis'. This incident involved a Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, which picked up survivors from a sinking boat who were making their way to Australian waters in order seek protection under the Refugee Convention. The Tampa was repelled by Australian security forces from disembarking the people they had picked up in distress on Australian soil. In this article, I explore the Tampa incident against the backdrop of refugee policy development from 1999. I argue that rather than responding to a crisis, the Australian government has generated the perception of a crisis in the Australian community. Implications of the Australian response to asylum-seekers are significant not only in the Asia/Pacific region, but further afield, as policy responses toward asylum-seekers by receiving states have converged in the recent past.
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