administrative errors
To underline some of what I think is at stake in discussions of zoon politikon, yesterday the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s office released an initial report on 20 of some estimated 247 instances of “wrongful immigration detention” in Australia. “Wrongful immigration detention” means internment of people who are either citizens, have visas or are permanent residents. That is, “wrong” according to the law. But given that the law (since 1992) provides for the automatic and non-reviewable internment of non-citizens, all questions of politics seem to resolve down into questions of administration.
In other words, under the law it is possible to intern people extra-judicially (without trial or charge) and, since 2004, to do so indefinitely. Migration detention is, therefore, a wholly administrative matter, put into effect and operated by departmental bureaucrats, whose decisions can only be overturned by appealing to ministerial discretion.
Indeed, the formally arbitrary character of migration internment serves to underscore the patterning of rights-endowment and rights-denial by concepts of personhood and definitions of what it means to be (fully) human.
From the information available, all those detained have been non-Anglo-Celtic and, in many of those instances, homeless, and/or speaking a language other than English, and/or suffering from mental illnesses, and/or with a disability, and/or caught up by Government welfare agencies of one kind or another (including hospitals). Often, a combination of these.
The grounding of the rights-bearing person in concepts of rationality, possession of language, self-possession are, here, particularly pronounced.
In this sense, the clamour of indignation over the internment of citizens and lawful residents (and not internment as such) works to reconstruct the problem as a seemingly improper excess of migration law’s inherently racist character.
To be sure, such cases function as an embarassment and a scandal, but the question of whether the scandal protects xenophobia - ‘How dare they intern Australians‘ - rather than works against it remains the question. And for as long as the internment of residents and citizens is regarded as an anomaly - rather than an index of the racist pattern of migration law - these ‘administrative errors’ will continue to occur because not all citizens or visa-holders can ‘pass’ as properly Australian or fully human.
The Department of Immigration has merely been conducting a pogrom in a more official capacity and broader reach than did the unruly mob in Cronulla, the removal of people from the proper legal realm of Australia whom they do not identify as properly Australian.
It is no use suggesting that DIMIA officials might be re-trained so as to expand their notions of what properly Australian is, that better records be kept on legal status and so on. That the latter suggestion has inclined government and others to propose an identity card scheme indicates the solidarity between attempts to reform migration policy and the extension of control.
The problem is deeper than this - as Agamben remarks in The Open: Man and Animal: “Precisely because the human is already presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a kind of state of exception.”
This is great stuff Angela, though I feel a bit odd liking the writing so much when the issue is so fucked up. This really succinctly makes the case that you’ve put forward several time. The “wrongful internment” argument pushes forward internment as such and thus will also likely increase even the “wrongful” internments being decried by the migration policy reformists.
This also gets at some of what I was fumbling for in the comments on the other discussion. The (ostensibly) left wing version of the end of politics would be the achievement of a count that maps without slippage onto the bodies to be counted: no one would be “wrongfully” interned, all those interned will be “rightfully” so. No more politics, only administration of things (some of which happen to be bodies, but never mind that…)
take care,
Nate
Nate [December 8, 2006 @ 6:08 am]
These ways of categorising people are historically specific (obviously) and have been subject to massive changes in recent times. My father, for example, lived in Australia for the final decades of his life, worked quite a lot and paid taxes at least until he reconstructed his life into that of a professional gambler, was involved in creating, and producing the next generations of, several families, etcetera. For decades he was not a citizen, however - ‘merely’ a permanent resident. For the vast bulk of this time this status seemed essentially unimportant: as I recall, that he couldn’t vote in Australian elections was the sole (in)significance that was ever referred to.
Now, of course, the federal government forces everyone in the country to endure substantial propaganda campaigns intended to put a nice spin on efforts to coerce people into applying for full citizenship - for many the most visible manifestation of the seemingly ever-increasing number of negative consequences being imposed on permanent residents. So those who fail to ‘make a choice’ to become an Australian are in many ways being made into yet another new form of second class citizenry - not exactly ‘illegals’, but certainly suspect in their national loyalties, possibly deficient in Aussie essence. Creating new ways to make the legal-bureacratic-political-economic situations of permanent residents worse than those of citizens is a new sport of those intending to institutionalise ‘incentives’ for such people to ‘commit to Australia’.
Some of the immigration detention centres, after all, are not now mostly filled with those ‘asylum seekers’ who border-control reformists have spent such energy portraying as ‘legitimate refugees’, as noble people, good sorts, the deserving caged - as if these concentration camps are or would be legitimate if those locked within them were NOT ‘real’ refugees or admirable folks. Instead, many people being ‘detained’ for long periods of time are permanent residents who have had such status revoked for one or more of an increasing number of possible reasons, from criminal convictions to the governmental ‘character’ assessments to which PRs are now also vulnerable, I am given to understand. And of course such ex-PRs are in detention officially awaiting deportation - though because some countries do not except forcible deportations of this sort, these people can end up detained in a non-person no-man’s-land. (Though I know of no examples as extreme in Australia, similar systems in the United States have ended up with people literally jailed for decades, in effect for crimes for which a citizen would have received less than a year in prison.)
Of course my father emigrated from the United States himself, and would mostly have passed as white (his Russian-Jewish skin notable but not dark enough to add any other layer of racial suspicion). Apart from an encounter with Bob Hawke in which the latter seemed to believe that my father might have been fleeing McCarthyism (which Dad didn’t get the impression would have endeared him to Hawke at all) he wasn’t and still would not be likely to be subject to the kinds of processes rountinely applied to so many.
But toward the end of his life, though, he was talking about reasons to become a citizen - none of which had anything to do with affirming national loyalties, becoming a real Aussie, etcetera. He didn’t care about such things. Indeed, when his parents fled the Czar to the US, US emigration authorities made them anglicise their name - Ross instead of Rosenzweig - and I don’t think it ever occurred to him to bother changing it back.
Benjamin Rosenzweig
benjamin rosenzweig [December 8, 2006 @ 11:47 pm]
Speaking of the administration of things (and zoon politikon, and rights, or particularly copyright), Wood’s Lot has a link to think piece in CTheory - “Policing the Convergence of Virtual and Material Worlds,” which is of some interest, though strictly not on migration controls.
s0metim3s [December 10, 2006 @ 12:41 am]