The Isolation of Asylum Seekers: immigration detention in Australia

Fri 27 January 2023

Lady Mitchell Hall

Australia’s policy of mandatory, indefinite and unreviewable immigration detention was introduced in the early 1990s to respond to the arrival of asylum seekers by boat. The policy persists despite its failure to deliver policy goals, vast expense, international condemnation, and human damage. What explains this persistence? In this essay, I argue that immigration detention is best understood as the most recent iteration of administrative detention, a form of non-judicial incarceration with a long history. Governments in settler colonial Australia have found administrative detention indispensable for classifying and then incarcerating groups of people regarded as a threat to national security or identity. Significant historical examples include Aboriginal reserves, quarantine, and enemy alien internment; today’s offshore and onshore immigration detention centres share a similar purpose and character. Sites of unmitigated executive control, these different forms of administrative detention are control regimes with punitive effects. By demonstrating the embeddedness of this form of governance in Australia, the essay provides an endogenous explanation for the persistence of immigration detention, despite its harms.

Cost: Free