The shifting and expanding 21st-century border has raised new and complex questions about the ethics of migration, asylum, and border control: Is there any conceptually necessary connection between presence in a particular state’s territory and asylum protection? Does the exercise of migration control away from national borders impose unique responsibilities upon states and their agents? Is it morally permissible for affluent states to discharge their asylum obligations to poorer ones? Do border externalization practices subject people on the move to unique harms, and how should we understand those harms? Our sixth seminar sought to address foundational normative questions — both ethical and legal — regarding contemporary border externalization practices.
The first presentation, “Border Externalization and the Paradoxes of Humanitarianism” by David Owen (Univ. of Southampton) highlighted how states often employ a justificatory framework of humanitarianism and rescue in order to legitimate often violent forms of border externalization, and sought to show how, in turn, externalization practices can be delegitimated by shifting the discourse regarding asylum seekers from a politics of compassion to one of dignity. The second talk was given by Ayten Gündoğdu (Barnard College), and was titled “On the Lawful Lawlessness of Borders: Rethinking Extraterritorialization as a Technique of Racialized Governance." In it, Gündoğdu examined how states in the Global North externalize borders in order to create geographical zones of lawnessness and rightlessness, and how those spaces in turn allow those states to employ racialized violence against asylum seekers, using Spain’s practices in Mellila as an example. As a whole, the presentation argued that we should rethink many border policies as consonant with other forms of racial domination. The final talk, “Immigration ‘Fraud’ as Resistance” by Patti Tamara Lenard (Univ. of Ottawa), contended that certain forms of immigration “fraud” are not morally problematic given that the background immigration laws and policies in whose context they occur are broadly unjust. Instead, Lenard suggested that certain types of “fraud” can be re-conceived as forms of political resistance to an unjust status quo.
Recording: