‘Authoritarian neoliberalism’ and the Australian border-industrial complex

Abstract

What functions do the securitization and the militarization of the border serve under ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ in Australia? Having pursued the policy of mandatory detention of all undocumented migrants since 1992, the Australian government has also increasingly sought to outsource, privatize, and offshore the construction and operation of its immigration detention facilities, whilst simultaneously engaging in increasingly authoritarian interventions via the militarization of border control. This article seeks to problematize these developments by constructing an emergent cartography of the various links between the ongoing processes of neoliberal structural adjustment, and the intensification of the policing and punitive apparatuses of the Australian border-industrial complex. Accordingly, using theoretical insights gleaned from emergent work on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ and from race critical theory as a cue, I outline in this article three functions of the border within punitive approaches to immigration control under neoliberal structural adjustment in Australia: first, as an apparatus of ongoing colonial power; second, as a technology of racial differentiation through its functioning as a ‘filter’ that privileges certain migrant bodies over others, and as an ‘insulator’ against popular dissent; third, as a site of profit and accumulation for transnational capital.

Keywords

Race neoliberalism border border-industrial complex immigration

The grim pursuit of demonizing asylum seekers and refugees has become a sort of bloodsport in contemporary Australian politics. Tropes like ‘Stop the Boats’ are now mundane, though resilient, staples of right-wing electioneering. Aspiring candidates for political office frequently seek to blame various manifestations of suburban anomie on the presence of various migrant ‘others’: asylum seekers, bizarrely, were blamed by Fiona Scott, an unsuccessful Coalition candidate for the lower house seat of Lindsay, for congestion on a major motorway in western Sydney during the 2013 Federal election campaign (Robertson, 2013). Facts and well-reasoned arguments, though, tend to have little purchase in discussions surrounding migration and border protection. As we have seen across the Western world – in Trump’s ascension to the White House, Brexit, and the varying fortunes of a grab-bag of far-right parties and figureheads in France, Germany, Austria, and elsewhere – various modes of scapegoating migrants in general and refugees and asylum seekers in particular have proved resilient, constant conduits through which the various discontents of the white portion of ostensibly ‘multicultural’ polities in ‘crisis’ (Lentin and Titley, 2011) can be poured.

In the aftermath of these case studies in contemporary populism, a range of competing explanations coalescing around two key arguments have emerged: first, as the result of the alienation of the so-called ‘white working class’ from a political class dominated by cosmopolitan, technocratic elites, along with the failure of the political left to venture beyond the ‘identity politics’ of race and gender (Streeck, 2017); second, by the persistence of relations of white male supremacy and the racism and misogyny borne of it across and within class formations (Bhambra, 2017; Lentin, 2017b; Mitropoulos, 2016). These are, of course, oversimplifications of each broad argument, but they point respectively to the shortcomings of contemporary commentary and to the possibilities of emerging research on the anti-migrant backlash.

For Streeck and others purveying similar arguments (Tietze, 2016), neoliberalism has ‘sold out’ the working class in pursuit of ever-increasing profits, and the working class are now venting their frustration at the resultant growth in inequality. The particularly racist components of this frustration – objections to immigration, violence against people of colour, virulent Islamophobia – are dismissed as consequences of popular indignation at flows of migrants from the developing world into Western societies, enabled by the globalization of the labour market and relative ease of travel. Any attempts to address the possibility of racism being present in this indignation are either summarily dismissed as ‘identity politics’, ignored in analyses that foreground class (to the exclusion of race) as an analytical category,¹ or even used to suggest that ‘a disproportionate liberal emphasis on identity and diversity’ is itself responsible for the rise of Trump, Brexit, and other populist formations (Lentin, 2017b). Alana Lentin’s intervention (2017b), in particular, incisively critiques the tendency within the arguments advanced by Streeck (2017) and others to efface the way in which race both produces material realities and permeates institutions and discourses (see also Tilley and Shilliam, 2018).

Indeed, missing in the sort of arguments advanced by Streeck and others is an explanation of why this populist backlash to neoliberalism has taken on a peculiarly anti-migrant character. More crucially for this article, what is also elided is the fact that, under neoliberalism, migrants themselves have been subject to increasingly punitive measures at the hands of the state (and, crucially, the various agencies and corporations with which it enters into commercial, contractual relationships). Indeed, a common misconception regarding the nature of neoliberal structural adjustment is that it has mandated ‘open borders’ in order to enable the ‘free’ movement of both capital and people. This is only partially correct; as this article will demonstrate, processes of ‘bordering’ have only become increasingly violent globally (see Jones, 2017). Australia, since the onset of neoliberal structural adjustment in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Humphrys and Cahill, 2016; Pusey, 1991), has proved a particularly potent and notorious case study in what Wendy Brown identified in the opening remarks to Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010: 7–8):

What we have come to call a globalised world harbours fundamental tensions between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and reinscription. These tensions materialise as increasingly liberalised borders, on the one hand, and the devotion of unprecedented funds, energies, and technologies to border fortification, on the other.

Following Brown’s prompting, I argue below that a fundamental component of neoliberal structural adjustment in Australia since the late 1980s and early 1990s has been the securitization and militarization of the border, and that in this process the neoliberal state utilizes ‘race’ in a number of ways to achieve its political economic and electoral ends. I begin this paper by setting out the theoretical framework of this paper, deriving primarily from Ian Bruff and Cemal Burak Tansel’s work on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ (Bruff, 2013; Tansel, 2017b), and from the work of race critical theorists including Alana Lentin (2015) and David Theo Goldberg (2009). In the second part of the paper, I outline an anatomy of the key aspects of the Australian border-industrial complex from 1992 to present: mandatory, indefinite detention; outsourcing and privatization of immigration detention facilities; offshore processing and territorial excision of asylum claims, and; militarization of border policing. The paper concludes by putting the theoretical insights in the first section to work in outlining the key functionalities that the border-industrial complex serves under conditions of authoritarian neoliberalism in Australia.

Understanding ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ and race

In this article, I contend that the emergent theoretical perspective of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’, used in conjunction with race-critical scholarship, can together yield important insights in critiquing the development of the border-industrial complex in Australia. Popularized by Ian Bruff (2013) in an article that drew inspiration from the seminal works of Nicos Poulantzas (2014) and Stuart Hall (1979, 1988) on ‘authoritarian statism’ and ‘authoritarian populism’, respectively, ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ as a concept has been mobilized primarily in explaining the impacts on contemporary European social democratic governance of the management of the Eurozone crisis by the ‘Troika’ (the European Commission, European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund). Bruff uses this concept to argue that, in the context of Eurozone crisis management, neoliberalization has entailed a range of (ongoing) attempts to retool and reconfigure state and institutional power, rather than the withdrawal or rollback of the state. For Bruff, these attempts have primarily taken three key forms:

Continued appeals to circumstances of purported material scarcity as a ‘reason for the state being unable, despite “the best will in the world,” to reverse processes such as greater socioeconomic inequality and dislocation’;

Diminishing expectations of nonmarket institutions through the ‘deeper and long-term recalibration of the kinds of activity that are feasible and appropriate for nonmarket institutions to engage in’; and

A protracted, gradual retooling of the state as ‘increasingly nondemocratic through its subordination to constitutional and legal rules that are deemed necessary for prosperity to be achieved’ (2013: 115–116).

The major contribution of Bruff’s conceptualization of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ is thus as follows: processes deemed emblematic of neoliberalization – austerity, privatization, and deregulation, to name a few – are reconceptualized as processes in which the capitalist state² engages itself in a ‘constitutionally and legally self-disempowerment of nominally democratic institutions, governments, and parliaments’ (Bruff, 2013: 116). Through this pursuit, dominant social groups at the helm of the capitalist state are ‘less interested in neutralising resistance and dissent via concessions and forms of compromise that maintain their hegemony’, preferring instead the ‘explicit exclusion and marginalisation of subordinate social groups’ (Bruff, 2013: 116). Bruff uses the example of the development and strengthening of surveillance mechanisms of Eurozone member states by the ‘Troika’ to illustrate how the impositions and interventions that typify authoritarian neoliberalism function not only to react to the emergence of capitalist crises and contradictions, but to preempt the emergence of dissent or alternative ‘fixes’ by ‘locking in neoliberal governance mechanisms in the name of necessity’ (Bruff, 2013: 123).

Since Bruff’s intervention, a range of analyses in contexts beyond the context of European social democracy have utilized ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ as a heuristic device to analyse the ‘increasingly visible and salient symbiosis of neoliberalism and authoritarian state power’ (Tansel, 2017a: 18). Indeed, the definition of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ has broadened somewhat, and metastasized into a more general cue for an inquiry into the changing nature of strategies geared toward ensuring capital accumulation. As Tansel argues:

‘… we position authoritarian neoliberalism as a historically specific set of capitalist accumulation strategies that both exacerbates the existing, structural trends in the political organisation of capitalism and embodies distinct practices geared towards unshackling accumulation at the expense of democratic politics and popular participation.’ (2017a: 6)

Whilst some, as a consequence of this conceptual broadness, have accused purveyors of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ as lacking a certain degree of precision and clarity, the upshot of this is that a range of political mechanisms and strategies, conventionally treated as disparate and as operating in isolation from each other, can be conceived as interlocking and variously articulated (Hall, 1996a) together under specific spatiotemporal circumstances. Crucially, as Bruff contends from Hall and Poulantzas, ‘authoritarianism’ cannot solely be viewed as the ‘exercise of brute coercive force (for instance, policing of demonstrations, racist political rhetoric, etc.)’, it can also be discerned in the ‘reconfiguring of state and institutional power in an attempt to insulate certain policies and institutional practices from social and political dissent’ (Bruff, 2013: 115). The point, then, is not to suggest that authoritarianism is an entirely new phenomenon under neoliberalism, nor is it to romanticize earlier iterations of capitalism as inherently less violent. Neoliberalism carries with it a rhetorical appeal to the cathartic, liberatory release of the state’s grip on political and economic affairs; it touts the restorative capacities of a wholesale release of the energies of the ‘free market’ upon the economy and society (if one even accepts such a dichotomy). The point of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ is to highlight that neoliberalism has, even in its founding texts (Bruff and Starnes, 2018), always used coercive and violent means to enact its political economic programme.

This article, then, can first be located as a contribution to this burgeoning literature on authoritarian neoliberalism, particularly in response to Tansel’s call for greater scrutiny of the ‘particular gendered, racialised and localised effects of authoritarian neoliberalism, as well as their relationship with the contemporary forms of indebtedness, financialisation, migration and globalised conflict’ (Tansel, 2017a). To be sure, neoliberal reforms clearly advance specific class interests whilst limiting others, though it is important to note that the ‘concrete effects’ of these reforms on individuals and collectives ‘vary significantly based on sociopolitical markers of gender, race, ethnicity, age and (dis)ability’ (Tansel, 2017a: 12). In this pursuit, this article seeks to problematize the border-industrial complex in Australia as a case study in authoritarian neoliberalism’s tendency to single out racialized groups for punishment and discipline.

To assist in this critique, it is crucial to bring the aforementioned literature on authoritarian neoliberalism into dialogue with extant work on neoliberalism’s peculiarly racialized character. One of the key works in this field is David Theo Goldberg’s The Threat of Race (2009), which remains one of the more influential works on the concept of ‘racial neoliberalism’ to date.³ In this work, Goldberg argues a point similar to that advanced within the broad conception of authoritarian neoliberalism outlined above (2009):

Neoliberal emphasis is less to get rid of the state – what, in any case, exactly would that mean? – than radically to shift its priorities, to redirect it to represent different interests, to do different work. While committing to the flows of commodifiable entities, contemporary modes of control have been decidedly more circumspect about freedom of movement for multitudes of people.

The neoliberal state, for Goldberg, facilitates and lubricates the movement of certain groups of people, whilst seeking to disrupt and frustrate that of various groups of people who threaten the predominance of its control over flows of capital, goods, information, and people. Indeed, its role is now that of a ‘regulatory node’; an ‘intrusive and invasive regulator … invested in directing and ordering flows of goods, people, information, capital’ across its borders (Goldberg, 2009). In other words, the neoliberal state has come to function primarily as a ‘traffic cop’, a qualitative shift from the ‘caretaker or pastoral’ state (itself, it bears noting, racialized and gendered) of welfare capitalism (Goldberg, 2009).

As a consequence of this shift, whilst jobs have moved from the core to the periphery in order to exploit armies of cheap labour in developing countries, the lawful movement of people in the opposite direction – from the various areas of the periphery paralysed by conflict, inequality, famine, and repression to more ‘developed’, highly capitalized societies in the core – has been ‘increasingly curtailed’ through the ‘enactment, enlargement, and (re)enforcement’ of ‘state institutions of violence and repressive control’ (Goldberg, 2009: 333). Gary Younge puts it more bluntly: ‘borders have become tougher for people, but they have all but been lifted for capital’. Money can ‘travel the globe virtually without restriction, in search of regulations that are weaker and labour that is cheaper’, but the movements of people displaced by capital flight are actively suppressed by various mechanisms of control (Younge, 2017). Thus, whilst the borders of neoliberal states open up to the whimsical movements of capital, the same borders foreclose the mobilities and possibilities afforded to those caught up in the fallout. Their very existence is ‘emblematic of a broader system that seeks to preserve privilege and opportunity for some by restricting access to resources and movement for others’ (Jones, 2017: 5).

It is in this sense that borders are fundamentally violent. The foreclosure of the possibilities afforded to migrants has been ensured through the widespread deployment at the border of walls and razor wires, paramilitary and security agents, naval interdiction programs, regional processing agreements, and drones and heat sensors that collectively aim to predict, control, and prevent movement across the mutable, contingent boundaries of Western nation-states. A glance at the history of these polities reveals that this is not a new pursuit: Australian governments, for example, have practiced varying forms of racially discriminatory immigration control throughout Australia’s post-invasion history (Markus, 1994; Markus and Curthoys, 1978). The histories of racial exclusion and violence across various sites suggest that these are not incidental to their operation, but, as will be discussed in the third section of this paper, inhere in the very nature of borders themselves.

How, then, to conceive of the role that ‘race’ plays at the border under conditions of authoritarian neoliberalism? Here, it becomes salient to speak of a coterminous shift in the politics of race and racism under neoliberalism, alongside its propensity to violently restrict and control the movement of certain groups of people. Under conditions of ‘post-racialism’ – the widespread idea in ‘polite’ Western societies that ‘racism belongs to a bygone era and that remaining racist attitudes and behaviours are the preserve of unbalanced or uneducated individuals’ (Lentin, 2015: 2) – the terms on which the ‘traces … structural conditions, [and] continuing significance’ of racism (Goldberg, 2009: 360) in a world irrevocably shaped by the exploitative dynamics of European colonialism (Hall, 1996b) might be unearthed have started to ‘recede, fade from view and memory’ (Goldberg, 2009: 360). It is widely held in these societies that the worst of racism’s excesses – the violent, genocidal invasion and domination of the so-called ‘New World’ by European colonial powers, the transatlantic slave trade, Jim Crow, the Holocaust – have ceased to meaningfully structure global politics. The upshot of this is that racism as a salient social concept ‘becomes stigmatised so that only the obviously bigoted – extreme individuals – get to qualify’ (Goldberg, 2009: 360). Attempts to advance ‘race’ or racism as meaningful structuring agents of social life are incessantly policed; their operations ‘denied not only through silencing, but through noise, not just through a lack of attention to racism but through an excess of particular kinds of attention’ (Titley, 2016). This, Titley argues, means that racism becomes ‘debatable’ – not in the sense that experiences and structures of racism are open to debate, but that ‘incessant, recursive attention’ is paid to ‘what counts as racism and who gets to define it’ (Titley, 2016).

The ‘debatability’ of racism clouds over the various ways in which the legacies of colonialism and the ongoing structural, institutional, and interpersonal effects of racism persist in contemporary times as key structuring factors of social life. Whilst ‘race’ may have been ‘rendered part of the profane’ and ‘socially desacralized’ within the public discourses that circulate within contemporary Western socialities (Goldberg, 2009: 334), it is fundamentally imbued within the interventions of the authoritarian neoliberal state in the sense that it both underwrites the processes of sifting between ‘valuable’ and ‘non-valuable’ migrant bodies, ‘acceptable’ refugees and ‘threatening’ queue-jumpers, and enables the discipline and punishment of those that threaten the authoritarian neoliberal state’s prerogative to carry out this process of ‘sifting’ without disruption. In the face of the disruptive movements of asylum seekers and refugees, race is invoked to ‘secure [the state] from perceived threats, almost invariably if more or less silently racially perceived and shaped from without’ (Goldberg, 2009: 334). Whilst explicit racial reference may be largely purged from the public lexicon, its expression is not ‘erased’ so much as ‘structurally transformed’; race still functions to index ‘those who threaten the fiscal wellbeing … or the social security of the nation’ (Goldberg, 2009: 335–336). Consequently, dialectically interwoven with the measures described previously are various racial constructions of asylum seekers and refugees as ‘threats’ to the public purse in their supposed welfare dependency and indolence; to the health of the nation in their susceptibility to infectious diseases; to national security through their proclivity to commit acts of terror and crime (Smith, 2018). The authoritarian measures that make up the border-industrial complex cannot be fully understood without reference to the ways in which race both underwrites and produces its invasively repressive measures.

An anatomy of the border-industrial complex

How, then, might the ‘border-industrial complex’ be defined? It bears noting, first of all, that my usage of this term is not original. Drawing on extant ideas developed on the prison and military industrial complexes, Tanya Golash-Boza (2009) coined the term ‘immigration industrial complex’ to describe the ‘confluence of public and private sector interests in the criminalisation of undocumented migration, immigration law enforcement, and the promotion of “anti-illegal” rhetoric’. Angela Mitropoulos has also used the term ‘border-industrial complex’ to refer to a global assemblage of border control systems, in which state and capital combine to convert ‘migrant control … into money and profits’ (Kiem and Mitropoulos, 2015). Though there are subtle differences between the two, unifying the two definitions is a concern to outline the nexus between state and capital in the mutable, shifting systems of border control practiced globally. What is outlined below thus amounts to a case study of the key functions and machinations of the border-industrial complex in contemporary Australia.

Mandatory, indefinite detention

A decisive move in the formation of Australia’s contemporary border-industrial complex was the formal institution of the mandatory detention of all undocumented migrants arriving via boat in 1992 (Kiem and Mitropoulos, 2015). This, as Grewcock points out, followed a period of approximately five years in which, the Labor-led Australian government had sought to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of the claims for protection made by asylum seekers travelling via boat from post-war Vietnam and Cambodia, and from refugee camps in Indonesia and Malaysia (2009: 126). For the Australian government, those seeking asylum via boat represented an ‘objective challenge’ to its sovereign control over immigration flows; a challenge the government had sought to head off via the construction and signing of a regional screening, resettlement, and repatriation plan in June 1989, backed by the UNHCR, that sought to discourage ‘clandestine departures’ (those seeking asylum outside of government and/or UNHCR-sanctioned channels) (122–123). Of particular importance in the plan was the inclusion of the ‘no advantage’ principle, a principle that has re-surfaced more recently in crucial governmental reports underlining current policies (Houston et al., 2012): in order to discourage ‘clandestine departures’, the parties agreed to ensure that no asylum seekers embarking on journeys to potential resettlement countries outside recognized channels would encounter any ‘real or perceived advantage’ in doing so. This principle underpinned the formation of an imagined ‘queue’ in the region which all aspiring refugees were to join; a ‘legal and political fiction’, given the lack of even notional administrative queues, that functionally criminalized the autonomous seeking of asylum by applying for protection onshore (Grewcock, 2009: 130–131).

Mandatory detention, then, coupled with the public stigmatization of Vietnamese and Cambodian asylum seekers as ‘economic migrants’ and opportunistic ‘queue-jumpers’ (Grewcock, 2009: 130), functioned, and continues to function as a mode of control and deterrence. Indeed, the practice of mandatory detention, along with its underlying logics, has remained unchallenged as a bipartisan, key tenet of immigration policy since its inception. It has been primarily sustained by the desire of the Australian government to maintain the perception of state control over immigration, and to deter people from seeking asylum via boat. In terms of the former, the ‘nominally administrative’ (Mitropoulos, 2015) nature of mandatory detention allows the government time to verify the identities of undocumented migrants in the absence of identifying papers (many asylum seekers, in particular, do not arrive with identifying papers; it would be a difficult ask, for example, for Hazara asylum seekers to make the dangerous trip to Kabul in order to obtain such papers before fleeing for their lives), to carry out security clearances, and to complete health checks. It bears noting that the subtexts underlying such checks are unsubtle: as was discussed in the first section of this paper, asylum seekers are perceived, in racial terms, as liable to criminality, potential terrorists, hosts of all sorts of pathogens and exotic diseases, harbingers of desperation so acute they would throw their own children overboard in order to get their own way (Marr and Wilkinson, 2004; Perera, 2013; Pickering, 2001).

In practice, however, the evidence concerning the duration and conditions of detention experienced by asylum seekers and refugees suggests that mandatory detention is only nominally administrative.⁴ As of 31 July 2017, the average asylum seeker or refugee would have spent 442 days in detention (Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP), 2017; this despite the vast majority detained by the Australian government having been found to be bona fide ‘refugees’ whilst in detention – see Phillips, 2015). The long, protracted nature of mandatory detention is not only down to the incompetence of the department responsible for processing applications for asylum (Anderson, 2016); in fact, this very incompetence may well be intentional, to a degree. Above all, the mandatory detention of asylum seekers arriving via boat functions to reify the ‘no advantage’ principle referred to above. By making the consequences of a journey via boat as unattractive as possible (a difficult ask, given most asylum seekers are fleeing persecution, violence, or potential death) via the guarantee of punitive, seemingly indefinite detention, the government seeks to deter asylum seekers from making such a voyage. Instead, asylum seekers are forced to choose to either languish in regional processing centres in Malaysia or Indonesia (where asylum seekers and refugees are denied rights to work and study, or are simply detained and/or deported), or to return to (or remain in) their countries of origin to face the threats from which they fled. This is further reinforced by the overtly militarized approach to the deterrence of asylum seekers, discussed later in this section.

The conditions of detention experienced by asylum seekers and refugees further reinforce the punitive, correctional nature of mandatory detention, despite governmental claims regarding its administrative purpose. The indefinite periods of isolated detention endured by detainees have produced a range of disastrous outcomes: many have met with preventable death and illness (Green and Eagar, 2010), violence, and several have committed suicide (see Border Crossing Observatory, 2017). Detainees held offshore in Nauru and Manus Island experience horrific conditions, including high temperatures and humidity, cramped conditions, contaminated water, prohibitions on access to mobile phones, restricted access to medical and psychological care, and little to no access to legal advice (Amnesty International, 2016). These conditions have triggered successful class actions from previous and current detainees: for example, in June 2017, the government agreed to pay an AU$70 million settlement to 1905 detainees held in offshore detention on Manus Island between 2012 and 2016, who alleged they had been held in conditions that breached the government’s own standards of care (Younger and Florance, 2017). At the time of writing, another class action was coalescing around potentially thousands of detainees, whose visa claims had not been processed by the government in a timely manner (Koziol, 2017). The government has sought to circumvent the possibility of further legal challenges along these lines by engaging in ‘open centre arrangements’ with the governments of Papua New Guinea and Nauru, whereby detainees are allowed to leave detention centres and enter the communities surrounding the detention centres. However, this is not only subject to curfews and other restrictions; it has exposed detainees to further risks, including violence from residents nearby, and from local police and military forces (McKenzie-Murray, 2017). These ‘open centre arrangements’ do not displace the mandatory, protracted, and punitive experience of immigration detention.

Outsourcing and privatization

Having pursued the policy of mandatory detention of all undocumented migrants since 1992, the Australian federal government has also increasingly sought to outsource and privatize the construction and operation of its immigration detention facilities (Welch, 2013). This drive to convert immigration detention into opportunities for profit and accumulation began in 1997, when Australasian Correctional Management (ACM),⁵ then a subsidiary of the US prison corporation Wackenhut, was awarded a contract by the Federal government to operate all mainland immigration detention centres (IDCs) for an initial period of three years (though this contract was later extended to six years; Mitropoulos, 2015). This contract stipulated that ACM would provide security at all IDCs, accommodation, maintenance, catering, health care and medical treatment, opportunities for recreation and study, welfare and counselling, and transport for detainees (Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, 2001). After ACM’s six years as the private operator of Australia’s IDCs, on a contract valued in excess of AU$500 million (Australian National Audit Office (ANAO), 2004: 12), global prisons and security firm GSL were contracted to provide the same services across the mainland and on Christmas Island for four years from August 2003. Thereafter, various private companies and organizations have held contracts with the government to provide welfare and garrison services in IDCs onshore and offshore: Serco, G4S (which acquired GSL in 2008), Transfield (now renamed Broadspectrum)⁶ have all been contracted to operate onshore and offshore IDCs, International Health and Medical Services, The Salvation Army, Save the Children and Red Cross have been contracted to provide health and welfare services to detainees, and Wilson Security, Toll Holdings, Thiess, Canstruct and others have been contracted (or subcontracted) to provide security, transport, construction and maintenance services (Evershed, 2014).

The wholesale privatization of immigration detention from 1997 occurred alongside broader, ongoing processes of privatization under conditions of neoliberalism (often referred to locally as ‘economic rationalism’ – see Pusey, 1991) in the Australian political economy. As a case in point, ACM had already privately operated four Australian prisons since as early as 1991, and prisons in state of Queensland had been privatized from as early as 1988 (Menz, 2011: 126). The logic, according to government sources at the time, was to induce cost savings via a process of competitive tendering that would, in time, yield a more efficient delivery of immigration detention services. This has clearly not eventuated: the costs of operating Australia’s immigration and border protection regime have been significant. An analysis of the contracts carried out by The Guardian in 2014 showed an overall spend of close to AU$10 billion from mid-2007 to mid-2014 – offshore contracts alone were valued at AU$859,363 per detainee, compared with AU$157,014 per onshore detainee, and AU$131,723 for those detained in the community (Evershed, 2014).

Furthermore, right from its commencement, this reliance on private companies and organizations to run IDCs has been accompanied by an ever-growing list of human rights abuses, riots and outbreaks of violence, hunger strikes and self-immolations, contractual inadequacies, refusal or inability to provide even the most basic of health care, educational or recreational opportunities. This should not be surprising: as Mungo MacCullum argues, to privatize IDCs is ‘to admit that conditions inside don’t matter, that prisoners and detainees have forfeited their rights to the protection of the state’ (2002: 28). MacCullum’s argument is borne out by the various government reviews and inquiries that, whilst having acknowledged the abuses and violence carried out, prescribe only that contracts between the government and service providers include new Service Delivery Models with more stringent performance standards and operating principles (Joint Standing Committee on Migration, 2009). The persistence of the sorts of abuses described above tends to result only in governmental revisions of these standards and operating principles, or if one is to adopt a more cynical disposition, the quiet stripping of the tender from the offending private operator due to ongoing breaches of contract. Regardless of which private company operates within Australia’s immigration detention network, the abuses and outbreaks of violence and self-harm continue unabated, as demonstrated in a recent leak of internal incident reports from Nauru published by The Guardian (Evershed et al., 2016) and by numerous parliamentary inquiries (Commonwealth of Australia, 2015) and leaked UNCHR reports (McKenzie-Murray, 2016).

Despite the wholesale privatization of the Australian immigration detention network, it bears noting that this has not implied the withdrawal of the state from the management of migratory flows. As Georg Menz argues in a previous issue of this journal, the state ‘involves private actors in migration enforcement in addition to maintaining – and often extending – a state migration management apparatus. The involvement of airlines, shipping companies, and private security companies in the detention, prevention, and control of migration flows, especially those considered unwanted, thus provides an additional layer of migration management and does not automatically result in the retreat of the state’ (2011: 117). Mitropoulos puts it more succinctly: ‘border control is a kind of “public-private partnership” between states, corporations, and NGOs’ (Kiem and Mitropoulos, 2015).

Offshore processing and territorial excision

The privately operated immigration detention facilities used to detain asylum seekers arriving by boat, up until 2001, were exclusively on the Australian mainland. The so-called ‘Pacific Solution’, an assemblage of policies implemented in the wake of the Tampa crisis by the Howard Coalition government in 2001, introduced the practice of detaining asylum seekers in detention centres located offshore – either in Australian territories like Christmas Island, or in smaller neighbouring states like Nauru and Papua New Guinea. The ‘Pacific Solution’ was, at least ostensibly, dismantled upon the election of the Rudd Labor government in December 2007. The IDC on Nauru, its construction and operation funded by the Australian government since 2001, was closed in March 2008, and the refugees detained there were resettled on the mainland. The much-maligned temporary protection visas (TPVs), introduced also under the Howard Coalition government, were scrapped, and many refugees living in the community on these visas were given permanent residency (Grewcock, 2014: 72). These changes, albeit significant at face value, were short-lived and did not disturb many of the key pillars of the extant immigration detention regime. The policy of mandatory detention of all asylum seekers arriving by boat was retained, along with the excision of offshore Australian territories (including Christmas Island) from Australia’s migration zone (Vogl, 2015). The closure of Nauru in March 2008 was soon followed by the formal re-opening in December 2008 of an IDC on Christmas Island,⁷ and the government sought without success to build another centre in Timor Leste. Combined with the practices of naval interdiction and various programmes aimed at the disruption of people-smuggling (both of which will be discussed further in the following section), the offshoring of Australia’s responsibilities toward asylum seekers under international law completed the return to the policy agenda set out under the Pacific Solution.

Broadly speaking, then, the Labor governments⁸ of 2007 to 2013 continued to prosecute the same broadly punitive and disciplinary policies against asylum seekers arriving by boat as had been deployed under the Howard Coalition government. Indeed, as Michael Grewcock argues, the failure of Labor to challenge the underlying logics of mandatory detention, interception, and deterrence led it to ‘increasingly imitate its predecessors’ to the point where an ‘Indian Ocean Solution’ was introduced in place of the preceding ‘Pacific Solution’ (2013: 12). A novel aspect of the ‘Indian Ocean Solution’ was the aggressive pursuit by the Labor government of a ‘regional solution’: a range of people-swap and regional processing deals with neighbouring states in the Asia-Pacific region that would attempt to facilitate detention, processing, and even permanent resettlement in these states, without guaranteeing resettlement in Australia (16). Deals of this nature were pursued with both Malaysia and Timor-Leste, but neither were successful: the Malaysia deal was stymied by a High Court challenge (High Court of Australia, 2011), whilst the Timor-Leste deal was ultimately rejected by the Timor-Leste government (Allard and Needham, 2011). The lack of success in Malaysia and Timor-Leste has not stopped following governments from pursuing similar deals: for example, the government-commissioned report of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers in 2012 made a total of 22 recommendations, seven of which explicitly addressed the need for various forms of regional processing and resettlement (Houston et al., 2012). The Coalition governments of Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull from 2013 to present have continued to prosecute similar deals with Cambodia and the US; both subject to multiple controversies over reports of coercion and inducements exerted by the government over refugees detained in Nauru and Manus Island.

It is worth noting that the ‘offshoring’ component of the border-industrial complex, as Grewcock has argued, is thoroughly enmeshed in long-standing relationships of (neo)colonial power (2014). In particular, the willingness of the governments of Papua New Guinea and Nauru to allow the construction of IDCs on their lands despite local opposition owes much to their ‘dependency on Australian aid and development funding’ (75). In the case of Papua New Guinea, promises of an increase in foreign aid to the tune of over AU$420 million were used by the Rudd Labor government in 2012 to secure consent to the construction of immigration detention facilities on Manus Island. For Nauru, a tiny island whose reliance on its now-exhausted supply of phosphate had brought their government to the brink of insolvency, the Australian government’s offer of close to AU$50 million in aid and funding for an upgrade to the local prison dwarfed by some margin its annual national budget of AU$35 million, not to mention debts in the region of AU$500 million (Grewcock, 2014: 75; Maclellan, 2013). Indeed, Nauru’s parlous financial state cannot be considered in isolation from both the past and present of Australian involvement in its administration; as Nic Maclellan (2013) describes in some detail, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID)⁹ has actively promoted neoliberal structural adjustment in Nauru since the early 1990s, primarily through making ongoing aid contingent on the privatization of publicly owned and operated services and utilities, cuts to public sector salaries, and reductions in the size of the public service.

The border-industrial complex has not only expanded into offshore territories and neighbouring states; in a legal sense, it has sought to shrink Australian territory through the practice of ‘territorial excision’ (Vogl, 2015). For the purpose of negating the applicability of the Migration Act 1958 on asylum seekers that would seek to land on one of Australia’s 4891 outlying islands and territories, the government has sought to ‘excise’ or remove these islands and territories from the ‘migration zone’ to which the Act applies. In doing so, the government renders it legally impossible for asylum seekers to apply for protection under the auspices of the Act – instead, they are classified as ‘unauthorized maritime arrivals’ and are barred from making an application for an Australian visa of any kind (Vogl, 2015: 115). This was taken a step further in May 2013, when the Australian mainland itself was also excised from the migration zone – a move which served to enable the state to ‘determine who is ‘in’ Australian territory for the purposes of access to the state and its protections’ (Vogl, 2015). As a consequence, from the perspective of the state, these ‘unauthorized maritime arrivals’, whether they arrive on Christmas Island or on Cape York, can be detained offshore or sent to a third country, as there is no legal obligation for Australia to process their claims for protection (Vogl, 2015: 124). The offshoring of immigration detention and the practice of territorial excision, then, together ensure that the lives of asylum seekers and refugees are rendered external to Australia – both in a geographical and legal sense.

Militarization of border policing

Lastly, alongside the offshoring of IDCs and territorial excision, the militarization of border policing has long formed a particularly salient part of the border-industrial complex, and has arguably only increased in intensity since its inception. The commencement of this phenomenon can be roughly dated at the ‘Tampa crisis’ of 2001; though, as Grewcock points out, moves to allocate further resources to the policing of migratory flows both in source and transit countries, and in Australian waters were clearly evident from as early as 1999 (2009: 156). Notwithstanding, the ‘Tampa crisis’ occupies significant public notoriety as a catalysing moment for Australia’s ongoing militarized approach to ‘irregular maritime arrivals’, and as such merits some attention.

On 26 August 2001, the Norwegian cargo vessel MV Tampa responded to the desperate mayday calls of a stricken, overloaded fishing vessel, rescuing the 438 asylum seekers, mainly Afghan, on board. These asylum seekers were rescued by the crew of the Tampa in close proximity to Christmas Island, though, as Grewcock (2009) and Marr and Wilkinson (2004) detail, notwithstanding the frail health and crammed conditions on the vessel, the Australian government went to extreme lengths to prevent the asylum seekers making landfall on the small Australian island territory. Having initially acquiesced to the government’s insistence that he return the rescued asylum seekers to Indonesia, the captain of the Tampa, responding to the pleas of the survivors on board, sought to dock at Christmas Island. The government responded by closing the only Christmas Island port indefinitely from 27 August, and blocked attempts by the Royal Flying Doctor Service to provide medical assistance to the vessel. When the Tampa declared on 29 August that it had ‘no alternative but to declare a distress signal and move close to shore for assistance’ and entered Australian territorial waters (Grewcock, 2009: 161), 45 troops of the Australian special forces boarded the vessel. In deploying these troops, the government was making a clear statement: the only way out for the vessel was to return to international waters. Media scrutiny of the government’s activities was prevented through the use of a no-fly zone, and through the jamming of the Tampa’s satellite phone. The stricken asylum seekers were eventually loaded onto an army vessel, and taken to the new Nauru offshore detention centre (Grewcock, 2009: 159–162).

In the years following the ‘Tampa crisis’, the Australian government has only intensified its militarized approach to the policing of migratory flows in Australia’s northern territorial waters. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the government deployed 25 navy vessels in a strategy dubbed Operation Relex which, in a manner similar to that undertaken in response to the Tampa, would surveil Australian territorial waters for so-called ‘Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels’ (SIEVs), intercept them, then tow them back into international waters and leave them there (Grewcock, 2009: 162). These practices, oriented as they are toward the removal of vessels to international waters rather than finding them safe harbour, have proved inherently risky for both asylum seekers and navy personnel charged with rescuing them when in distress: SIEV X, the tenth vessel identified under this operation, sunk with all 353 asylum seekers on board on 19 October 2001 (Perera, 2006; Weber, 2007: 85–86). The practices of surveillance, interdictions, and tow-backs have been stubbornly pursued by all governments since, with similarly disastrous results: SIEV 221, for example, was dashed on the rocks surrounding Christmas Island on 15 December 2010, during which 50 asylum seekers perished (Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 2014).

These disasters, it bears noting, are only the ones we know about. As practices of surveillance, interdictions, and tow-backs have persisted from 2001 as key components of the Australian border-industrial complex, they have become shrouded in ever-growing layers of secrecy and governmental obfuscation. This has been particularly evident since the formation of Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) and the commissioning of the Australian Border Force (ABF) in 2013 and 2015, respectively. The formation of OSB took the criminalization of asylum seekers and refugees as constructed by the policies described in the preceding sections to an altogether more intensified level; though it utilizes broadly similar practices of surveillance, interdiction and tow-backs, and deploys the same language of ‘illegal maritime arrivals’, it adopts the language and symbolism of war to implicate ‘asylum seeker bodies – the ‘cargo’ of people smugglers – as they become targets of military operations’ (see also Chambers, 2015; Hodge, 2015: 127). This was clear through the appointment of a three-star general – the now Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell – to head OSB, and in the refusal of Campbell to disclose any information relating to OSB’s activities, referring to them as ‘on-water matters’ (Hodge, 2015: 127). It also involved the redoubling of governmental efforts to discourage ‘people smuggling’ within source and transit countries – the ‘No Way, You Will Not Make Australia Home’ campaign, for example, involved the use of videos and billboards to ‘advertize’ the government’s harsh new policy settings to prospective migrants, at some cost to the taxpayer (Farrell, 2017). The commissioning of the ABF in July 2015 – effectively a merger of the operational capacities of the immigration and customs arms of government – similarly extended the logics of surveillance and interdiction into new domains of governmentality. This included the militarization of the existing functions of both arms (policing flows of people, goods over borders), the introduction of a new, draconian Code of Conduct for those in community detention on the mainland, complete with threats of deportation and withdrawal of social security should this Code be breached, and the institution of a two-year jail term for any workers in the immigration detention network caught revealing information regarding the operations of the ABF (Verma and Mitropoulos, 2015).

Explaining the functionalities of the border-industrial complex

The question remains: why the violence of the functions and machinations of the border-industrial complex? Or, more appropriately, what functions do ‘violent borders’ serve in the context of the neoliberalization of the Australian political economy? Having described above the various components of the Australian border-industrial complex, along with the core tenets of this article’s theoretical framework, I move now from these two sections to address the question that governs this paper, by developing in the below paragraphs an analysis of what functions the border-industrial complex serves under conditions of authoritarian neoliberalism in Australia. Put differently, the question that governs the remainder of this paper is as follows: what work does the border-industrial complex accomplish for capital and the state in the contemporary neoliberal conjuncture in Australia?

To explain the functionalities of the border-industrial complex, we must first explain the border. I argue that any analysis of immigration under neoliberalism must start with a general analysis of the border as a primary site at which state and capital combine to exercise authoritarian power. This sort of analysis, deriving variously from the bodies of work on authoritarian neoliberalism and race critical studies discussed above, can reveal the variegated ways in which the border is put to work in order to reproduce the mechanisms and power relations necessary for the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. Accordingly, the final section of this article aims to explain the functionalities of the border-industrial complex, utilizing the theoretical framework advanced above.

The border as a relation of colonial power

First, and most fundamentally, the border is not simply a concrete, static line that demarcates and distinguishes between spaces of exclusive sovereignty occupied by different nation-states. Borders are dynamic, mutable, ever-shifting, multivalent systems, perpetually being reconstructed and remade (Anderson, 2017; Jones, 2017; see Tyler, 2017; Walters, 2006). As Nicolas De Genova (2016) argues, ‘bordering is indeed a verb, and signals a process of border-making’, and this border-making process is imbued with socio-political relations of power: the ‘agonistic coherence and ostensible fixity of borders – their thing-like qualities – only emerge as the effect of active processes by which borders must be made to appear thing-like’. In other words, the acknowledgement of the centrality of relations of power in the formation of borders causes us to interrogate how borders are rendered into ‘seemingly fixed and stable thing-like realities with a semblance of objectivity, durability and intrinsic power’ (De Genova, 2016). Furthermore, borders, instead of being produced by the kinds of policies and interventions described above are themselves productive; they are a kind of ‘means of production’, insofar as they produce space, and more particularly difference in space (De Genova, 2016). Borders ring-fence nation-states so as to bracket the ‘autonomy and subjectivity of human freedom of movement’, and they exist to subject the ‘recalcitrant and obstreperous’ force of human mobility to the ‘sovereign power of states and border regimes’ (De Genova, 2016). The shifting, mutable, dynamic mechanisms of border control described in the second section of this paper, all of which seek to facilitate and obstruct certain kinds of migration, can thus be seen as geared toward meeting the irrepressible, dynamic movements of mobile bodies, who themselves adapt and work around mechanisms of border control.

But to what end? Or, what are the socio-political relations of power that underwrite borders and their policing of mobility? I argue, along with many other scholars who have made similar arguments before (Grosfóguel et al., 2015; Lentin, 2014; Nevins, 2017; Walia, 2013), that borders are fundamentally relations of ongoing colonial power. They can be seen as such in two respects: first, they concretize and reify global divisions of power laid down under modern European colonialism and ongoing Western imperialism; second, and especially (but not only) in Australia, they preserve the primacy of whiteness within the territorial bounds of the nation-state border. In the first sense, Harsha Walia’s development of the concept of ‘border imperialism’ (2013) is crucial. Walia develops a critique of borders that foreground their construction and reification under the historical and present conditions of Western imperialism, in which Western states¹⁰ have sought to dispossess and displace communities ‘in order to secure land and resources for capitalist interests’ (28). For Walia, the millions of forcibly displaced people globally are displaced primarily because of the ‘coercive extractions of capitalism and colonialism’: the dispossession of Palestinians from the formation of the Israeli settler colony in 1948 onwards; the multiple invasions and military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, which has not only involved military interventions, but also the destruction of infrastructure, neoliberalization (see also Harvey, 2005), and interference in governance; the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has caused the impoverishment and displacement of hundreds of thousands in Mexico (2013: 30–32).

As Walia continues to point out, at the same time as these people are displaced, they meet with processes of border fortification by the very same Western states that bear responsibility, at least in part, for their displacement. These processes of border fortification collectively produce what Ghassan Hage calls an ‘apartheid’ world of national borders, in which there are two broad experiences of mobility (2017: 39):

On the one hand, we have a world where a ‘third world looking’ transnational working class and underclass citizens live, and are made to feel that borders are exceptionally important and difficult to cross. In this world, visas, checkpoints, searches, investigations, interviews, immigration bureaucracies, refusal of permission to cross, language problems, embassy queues, fences, cost of travel, and the like all combine to make national borders appear salient and important realities. On the other hand, we have a world experienced as open, in which people move smoothly across national borders, experiencing the world as almost borderless. This is the experience enjoyed by the largely White upper classes, who are made to truly feel at home in the world.

The border, then, is capable of being transfigured – according to which side you fall on in the global race-class divide. Holding both categories together is crucial; as David Roediger (2017) argues, the ‘production of racial and other differences is itself part of the logic of capital’ as much as is the stratification of social (im)possibilities according to class position (Hall, 1996a; see also Lentin, 2017b). A cash-rich executive from Singapore, for example, would not encounter the same barriers to mobility that a compatriot from Singapore’s sprawling informal working class would confront. This transfiguration of the border is no accident: in constructing the kinds of assemblages described earlier, Western states seek to perpetuate, and hedge against the consequences of, its creation of the very conditions that cause people to migrate: inequality, famine, ecological and climactic disasters, persecution, violence, and so on. Australia, despite having a relatively minor role in global affairs compared to many other Western states – it is hardly a ‘Great Power’ like the US, UK, Germany, or France – wholeheartedly lends its material and symbolic support to the kinds of dislocating, dispossessing imperialist endeavours described above, and meets the human fallout of these endeavours with a fervour for aggressive, militaristic approaches to bordering that has even drawn the admiration of US. President Donald Trump (March, 2017). Indeed, as a long-term ‘client state’ (Paul, 2014) of the US, and as a settler colony borne of British imperial expansion, it is integral to the processes of ‘border imperialism’ that Walia so incisively describes.

In short, Walia’s concept of ‘border imperialism’ highlights how borders function to manage the fallout of Western colonialism and imperialism, both by reinforcing the ‘unequal relationships of political, economic, cultural and social dominance of the West over its colonies’ (2013: 30), and by ‘deter[ring] those for who migration is the only option to the plundering of their communities and economies due to the free licence granted to capital and militaries’ (2013: 32). This dynamic is not, however, specific to ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ per se; as a cursory look across a history of immigration in Australia that includes the White Australia Policy (see Markus, 1994; Tavan, 2005) and the persistence of exclusionary immigration policies thereafter (Piccini, 2016, 2017) would reveal. Instead, as the final two sub-sections below demonstrate, authoritarian borders have been reconfigured and their exclusionary capacities intensified under neoliberal capitalism.

The border as a technology of (racial) differentiation

Under authoritarian neoliberalism, the border functions to differentiate between migrants that are useful for the various purposes of capital and the state, and those that are not. At Australia’s ever changing, adapting borders, aspiring migrants into Australia are weighed and sifted, their initial entry and ongoing entitlement to stay determined according to a range of criteria: their mode of arrival, their skills (or perceived lack thereof), their wealth, their health, their criminal history, amongst others. Non-white migrant bodies are not excluded tout court as was the case under the more overtly racial White Australia policy, but the onset of multiculturalism and a purportedly ‘non-discriminatory’ (Moran, 2011) immigration regime has by no means fully displaced the ways in which the border functions to demarcate between ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ migrant bodies. Indeed, Menz suggests that, as a general rule across a number of Western states,

migrants are desirable in principle so long as they are perceived as useful human resources, while barriers are erected against the unsolicited entry of ‘undesirables’. Migration policy thus becomes an additional mechanism for human resources procurement, especially if it complements existing production strategies. (2011: 117)

This ‘desirable/undesirable’ dichotomy is especially salient in contemporary Australia. The priorities of Australia’s immigration policy have shifted dramatically in concert with the onset of neoliberal structural adjustment from the late 1980s, adopting an increased emphasis on privileging temporary modes of migration through the use of a variety of skilled and unskilled working visas (see Collins, 2017), over more permanent modes of immigration (e.g. humanitarian and family streams). James Walsh has documented this shift extensively, arguing that multiculturalism in Australia has become fundamentally ‘marketized’ (2014), and that aspiring migrants seeking to gain entry into Australia are increasingly subject to points-based systems which seek to quantify or measure migrants’ desirability or worthiness by ascertaining their relative levels of ‘human capital’, by positioning them on constructed scales of potential risk and undesirability, and by assessing their potential to act as entrepreneurial, self-reliant migrant subjects (2011). Walsh argues that these points-based systems, oriented toward ‘attracting enterprising, flexible, and self-supporting knowledge workers, entrepreneurs and investors, while excluding those perceived as integrative risks’, link in with the neoliberal agenda in three key ways (2011: 875–876):

First, they have provided mechanisms for lubricating the inflow of capital and ‘high-end’ labour and stimulating international competitiveness and integration by boosting trade, investment and the purported quality of the nation’s human infrastructure. Second, they constitute forms of accounting and profiling directed toward assessing and minimising risks through quantitative analysis and statistical modelling. […] Finally, by attracting individuals thoroughly inculcated in contractual logics and values the points systems are characteristic of responsibilisation strategies in which individuals are admonished to be self-reliant and enrolled for the purposes of government.

The border, then, functions as a sort of ‘filter’ (De Genova, 2016) or ‘sifter’ that the neoliberal state deploys in order to distinguish between ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ migrant bodies. Those who carry the kinds of ‘human capital’ sought by the neoliberal state and capital tend to find passage easy enough; those who are deemed to carry risk are obstructed at every turn. Indeed, if the neoliberal state is to preserve the border’s orderly operation and ongoing legitimacy as a filter, it must continually head off attempts to transgress it. Asylum seekers and refugees arriving by boat collectively represent a visceral, racially evocative example of mobile bodies (the ‘yellow/brown perils’) that threaten this order: in their desperation, they are perceived as having jumped a non-existent ‘queue’; in their ‘exoticness’ and ‘third-world-looking-ness’, they are feared for the diseases¹¹ and cultural atavisms they might bring; in their supposed duplicity, having subverted the grim, yet official channels of UNHCR camps and informal, precarious living in transit countries, they are constructed as having the potential to engage in criminality and terrorist activity. Resilient settler colonial discourses of racial inferiority and fears of floods of ‘yellow’ and ‘brown’ people from the north intertwine with the mechanisms of detention and deterrence described above to produce a deadly, violent symbiosis.

The border, in this context, also functions as an insulator; a stabilizing influence, a circuit-breaker of dissent. By disciplining and punishing the sorts of migrant bodies that threaten the orderly operation of the border as filter, the neoliberal state seeks to maintain popular consent for, and insulate itself from criticism due to its use of multiculturalism as a source of global competitiveness and as an instrument that can be used to discipline labour. Alana Lentin captures this dynamic usefully (2017a):

In fact, in [Australia], in a postracial move, controlling migration is increasingly portrayed as being necessary in order to protect the multicultural ‘harmony’ that the mythological ‘immigration nation’ has carefully calibrated. These visions of, what Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull calls, ‘successful multiculturalism’ excise from the narrative the utilitarian reasons for immigration; ‘populate or perish’ in the Australian case. They also, crucially in the case of the settler colonies, omit to consider the significance of immigration for shoring up demographically against the Indigenous population.

The utilitarian reasons for immigration may have shifted somewhat from the ‘populate or perish’ drive of the Australian post-World War II immigration scheme, toward an immigration scheme more tailored toward ensuring competitiveness in a global economy. However, the dynamic remains the same: strict, punitive controls on immigration serve the purpose of both reassuring the white population that their interests remain central to the calculations of the neoliberal state, despite the unpopularity of its drive towards privatization, deregulation, and widening inequality (hence, discourses like ‘the only kinds of migrants we let in are those who will contribute to our economy’ prevail in discussions surrounding multicultural governance). In short, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson has argued, strict immigration controls at the border function to reify Australia as a ‘white possession’, notwithstanding its structural dependency on the dispossession and genocide of the many Indigenous nations which had long populated and sustained the continent (2015; see also Pugliese, 2011). The visible, almost pornographic (Wacquant, 2014) spectacle of militarized border control reassures the white majority population that migration is being managed ‘in the national interest’, binding the population to the state in a manner analogous to that described by Stuart Hall under Thatcherism (Hall, 1988).¹²

The violence and neglect of the spectacle of border control toward asylum seekers and refugees, one geared toward the maintenance of the border as a filter and as an insulator, is sustained and reproduced through various technologies of distancing (Dickson, 2015) and deflection. As Mitropoulos suggests, borders ‘are conducive to ensuring that people on either side of a border do not feel affection toward one another, or are repelled, distanced from being affected’ (O'Brien and Mitropoulos, 2017). The outsourcing and privatization of immigration detention, then, does not simply function to relieve the government of the budgetary and operational responsibilities associated with border control; it also enables the government to deflect responsibility for the abuses and breaches of human rights onto the private operators with which it enters into contracts (Menz, 2011: 118). In this sense, the privatization of immigration detention has ensured that this space remains one in which ‘socio-racial interventions – demographic exclusions, belittlements, forms of control, ongoing humiliations, and the like – difficult or impossible any longer for the state to carry out baldly in its own name’ (Goldberg, 2009: 334–335) can be extended. A similar dynamic takes place in the offshoring of immigration detention and militarization of the border – in the case of the former, ‘detainees’ can be effectively shafted by the Australian government into the jurisdictions of Papua New Guinea and Nauru, despite its obligations to them as asylum seekers under international law, and having been repeatedly cited by the UN as retaining ‘effective control’ over the IDCs therein (Human Rights Committee, 2017). In terms of the latter, disclosures of information regarding the conditions of detention experienced by asylum seekers, or the actions of the ABF and Navy in interdicting vessels, become activities liable for prosecution.

The border as an international industry

The final way in which the border forms a crucial part of authoritarian neoliberalism in Australia concerns the ‘industrial’ in the ‘border-industrial complex’: the predominance of corporations in the construction, management, and day-to-day running of Australia’s IDCs. Under authoritarian neoliberalism in Australia, the repression of dissenting social groups (in this case, those who threaten the orderly functioning of the border through the practice of seeking asylum) has become an immensely profitable activity for a range of corporations. Indeed, as Angela Mitropoulos argues in an interview with Matthew Kiem (2015; see also Mitropoulos, 2015), Australia has come to be seen as a sort of ‘laboratory’ in the broader milieu of the international industry that has ‘sprung up around border control and migrant detention’. Over the past two decades, Australia’s approach to border control has ‘not only expanded in reach, complexity and the calibration of its system of control’; as the discussion in the second section of this paper demonstrates, it has ‘served as a capacious, well-funded laboratory for techniques that have been exported around the world’ (Mitropoulos, 2015: 27).

Australia, as a laboratory for an international industry dedicated to the pursuit of new systems and technologies oriented toward border control, has provided significant funding for corporations via lucrative tenders for various functionalities critical to the functioning of immigration detention and control. Corporations offering operational, welfare, health, security, construction, and transport services have raked in amounts exceeding AU$10 billion over the last decade, as of the end of 2015 (Evershed, 2014). As of 6 December 2016, the total value of the contracts entered into by the government with corporations in the immigration detention network was AU$3386 million (ANAO, 2017). These sums are quite enormous, but only take into account what is formally reported by the DIBP (now the Department of Home Affairs); the ANAO, for example, found in 2017 that the DIBP had spent at least AU$2.2 billion in excess of authorized spending – half of which was completely unaccounted for in departmental records (2017; see also Doherty, 2017).

Notwithstanding, these contracts represent the apotheosis of racial authoritarian neoliberalism, insofar as they convert the irregular, unpredictable movements of migrant bodies into value. To understand this point, Mitropoulos’ ground-breaking work on the functions of ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ in these contracts (2015, 2016) is crucial. Immigration detention, for Mitropoulos, is a speculative economy – one preoccupied not with the ‘linear production of things’, but with ‘the indefinite delivery of services and the buying and selling of joint stock’ (2015: 166). In this speculative economy,

the circuits of speculative value manoeuvre around the threshold of unclassifiable, unknowable, incalculable, but nevertheless estimable risk (i.e. uncertainty), throwing up putative problems that, conventionally, were tangential to the metrics and methods of industrial production […]. (Mitropoulos, 2015: 167)

In the border-industrial complex, as with other sectors in the service economy, value is derived not so much from the ‘production and circulation of things’ as it is from personalized interactions, and speculation in financial markets (Mitropoulos, 2015: 167). Central to the speculative value of risk is the ability to assign value into the future to certain probabilities derived from statistical knowledge; however, in all social processes, there is an element of unknowability, unpredictability – or ‘uncertainty’ – which evades risk analytics’ reliance on ‘formulations of statistical probabilities’ (Mitropoulos, 2015). Thus, for Mitropoulos, ‘uncertainty’ plays a crucial role in the calculation of value, as it ‘grasps the technical inapplicability of probabilistic science to stochastic processes and, more saliently, to a world in which continuous, predicated classification has been challenged by movements against the enclosures’ (2015: 168). In this sense, the racialized unpredictability and volatility of migrant bodies and their migratory movements against and within the border are quite literally, through a range of formulae and metrics, converted into value for the corporations involved through not only the irrepressibility of the efforts of asylum seekers and refugees to exercise agency in seeking safe havens, but also in their struggles to cope with and resist the violence of the border-industrial complex during their protracted detention.

Conclusion

Using the work on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ developed by Bruff (2013) and Tansel (2017b) and on racial neoliberalism by Goldberg (2009), I have argued above that borders, always already colonial relations of power, are peculiarly operationalized by the state under ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ in Australia as a means to facilitate certain flows of migrants deemed beneficial to the needs of capital. The privatization of the border – and the attendant formation of the ‘border-industrial’ complex – has yielded and will continue to yield profits for transnational capital – but this is only half the story. The ongoing virility of the neoliberal Australian state depends, in large part, on influxes of skilled and unskilled temporary migrants in order to discipline labour; race is deployed within the machinations of the border-industrial complex to detain and discipline, very publicly, those that embody threats to the state’s prerogative in this pursuit. The securitization and militarization of the border – fundamentally imbued with racial logics – is not incidental to neoliberal structural adjustment in Australia; it is crucial to its reproduction and ongoing virility.

In closing, it is important to note three key areas that this article has not had space to explore adequately, and require further research and analysis. First, there are aspects of the border-industrial complex that extend beyond the realm of immigration detention into the everyday lived experience of migrants who, somehow, manage to make it through the obstructions described above. How, for example, are migrant bodies disciplined and subject to authoritarian interventions by the neoliberal state whilst in Australia on temporary visas? Here, the work of Jock Collins (2017) and Verma and Mitropoulos (2015) can be further supplemented. Second, it is clear that Australian police and military forces have been involved in the training and resourcing of police forces in transit countries (Nethery et al., 2013), and this crucial work requires updating in order to take into account recent developments surrounding OSB and the ABF. Third, and finally, migrant bodies that do make it in are never free of racial structures. In a polity never far from a new multicultural ‘crisis’ (Ang and Stratton, 2006; Lentin and Titley, 2011), race, class, and gender structure the possibilities and impossibilities of migrant bodies outside, at, and within the border under authoritarian neoliberalism.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for ‘Authoritarian neoliberalism’ and the Australian border-industrial complex

Supplemental material for ‘Authoritarian neoliberalism’ and the Australian border-industrial complex by Cameron Smith in Competition & Change

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which this article was written: the Dharug nation, and the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. Thank you to the participants of the 2017 EISA Conference stream on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ in Barcelona, Spain for their feedback on an early version of this paper. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers, whose insights sharpened this paper. Thank you to Sune Sandbeck and Adam Fabry for constructing this special issue.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: partially funded by an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship from the Australian Government, and by a Postgraduate Research Fund grant from Macquarie University, Sydney.

Notes

References

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