Thickening Borders: Deterrence, Punishment, and Confinement of Refugees at the U.S. Border [electronic resource]

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation critically analyzes the relationship between the state and the asylum-seeker through bordering mechanisms, with particular focus on confinement at the border. It argues that in contravention of international humanitarian law, Western signatory states manage refugees through punitive forms of enforcement. These countries enact bordering techniques that "thicken" the border, making it more difficult for people fleeing violence to reach a safe territory. These bordering mechanisms amount to a form of state-sanctioned violence that endangers the lives of refugees during the journey and, through confinement, harms them on arrival. Moreover, individual states enact bordering mechanisms that extend beyond their territories and result in buffer zones that sometimes overlap, forming a transnational sovereign assemblage that works to prevent displaced populations seeking asylum from exiting the Global South. This formation makes it necessary to look beyond individual regimes and think of borders transnationally, something I do by exploring the cases of Australia, the European Union, and the United States to identify a global refugee regime of deterrence, punishment, and confinement.My dissertation combines a novel approach to understanding borders with an analysis of bordering mechanisms at the U.S.-Mexico border. Using a transnational feminist lens, I explore how U.S. intervention in countries of the Northern Triangle creates racialized and gendered subjects that merge with existing stereotypes that criminalize brown migrants. The material consequences of this discourse can be seen at the southern border, where Central American women who seek asylum are punished. I theorize what happens at the border as a combination of sovereign and disciplinary punishment that serves also as a form of governing populations by deterring further arrivals. This methodology unveils how racist narratives of "deviant" motherhood precede these women and shape their reception. These gendered and racialized narratives make the punishment of refugees acceptable by conflating the immigrant, the criminal, and the asylum-seeker. In addition, I argue that humanitarian practices and narratives espoused by nongovernmental organizations working at the border are themselves among the mechanisms that constitute the border. These actors become complicit by participating in the knowledge production that reinforces the current refugee regime.This multi-scalar project makes several contributions to the scholarship on critical refugee studies, migration and immigration detention, and critical border studies. First, I approach bordering mechanisms at a transnational level showing the convergence of Western refugee management regimes into a transnational sovereign assemblage. Second, my research explains how states' disavowal of responsibility for the conditions that displace populations, along with well-rehearsed narratives of threat, facilitates the extension of detention as a routine practice in the management of asylum-seeking populations. It focuses in particular on practices of punishment deployed against this population. And finally, I contribute to the critical literature on humanitarianism by exploring how humanitarian practices by nongovernmental actors at the border are entangled with neoliberalism and co-opted by the refugee regime.