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The alert | and Alive in Joberg, the short film it was based on:

With the bizarre announcement yesterday that the US and Australian Governments have reached an agreement to, on an annual basis, swap 200 people interned, respectively, on Christmas Island (or Nauru) with those held on Guantanamo Bay, rumours that have been doing the rounds begin to seem more like explanations.

The above is a tour of the migrant detention centre currently being built on Christmas Island, estimated at around 364 million AUD, and with the capacity to intern 800 people - with a soundtrack I can almost, but not quite, name.

The first draft of an abstract/intro on the frontier.
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Oftentimes, the frontier is horizon approached as possibility. And yet, while it is so often conceived as a space of expansion without limit, it is also – in its paradigmatic, European sense – the rolling out of those limits as the proliferation of borders. Significantly, however, unlike the border against which it is so often defined, and as this delineation arises in tandem with the contrast of old Europe and a new America, the frontier is that space into which people carry those borders with them as they might their own personal baggage.

Three remarks on the relation between ‘economic migration’ and the processes of refugee determination. This is the first.

Alongside regimes of migration internment and deportation there are systems of finely tuned controls on so-called ‘economic migration’ - that is, controls on the duration, conditions and direction of labour flows across borders. The one cannot be thought without the other. Indeed, where refugee determination occurs without recourse to Australian (or Australian-funded) internment camps and (threat of) deportation, which is to say, where it occurs in camps administered by the UNHCR or organisations such as the IOM, the Australian Government operates a kind of ‘points system’, screening for those refugee applicants who might ‘fit’ particular criteria deemed important for the development of the Australian labour market.

Which is also to say, and more broadly: what binds the two processes - that of refugee determination and ‘economic migration’ policy - together is the concept of the national economy, competing within an inter-national economy. This national economy is perceived to be the premise rather than result of nationally construed accounting conventions, fiscal arrangements and, of course, the controls on the movements across those borders that sift each movement into legal and illegal, temporary and permanent, and various modulations of these. From the perspective of this ‘national economy’, the regimes of deportation and internment seek to excise those bodies deemed superfluous to ‘national productivity’ and, in so doing and in turn, define - or seek to impose and give shape to - a productive (national) body.

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.

UK Indymedia | MetaMute | SBS
Two days ago: “Britain’s largest immigration removal centre, Harmondsworth … is being run with a regime that is as strict as any high security prison, with those facing deportation victimised by staff and some strip-searched and temporarily locked in solitary confinement, according to the chief inspector of prisons.” | Indy update