My coauthor Stephen Castles and I have argued that a distinctive period in global migration history began around 1970 when a confluence of factors precipitated what we term the Age of Migration. This era is demarcated by six general tendencies including the growing saliency of international migration-related issues in national politics as well as in bilateral and regional relations around the world. Each of the three volumes concerned with asylum and refugee issues considered here attests to that general tendency. Matthew E. Price reflects broadly about asylum and advocates a return to a strictly delimited asylum policy. Alison Mountz and Scott D. Watson focus on securitization of asylum and refugee policies with a comparative focus on Canada and Australia, countries long viewed as exemplary in the area of humanitarian policies. Mountz provides a very detailed ethnographic account, whereas Watson offers a constructivist account.
As specified by Watson, signatories to the 1951 Geneva Convention and the 1967 protocol, which lifted the geographic and temporal limitations of the 1951 convention, bound themselves to four norms—non-refoulement, legal processing of claims on an individual basis, nonarbitrary detention, and nonpunishment based on mode of entry. Since roughly 1980, many of the OECD states have strayed from strict adherence to these norms, leading some scholars to argue that the refugee regime created after World War II has been supplanted by a de facto new regime in which abjudication often is made on a group basis, asylum-seekers are routinely detained, and they often are punished for immigration law violations. Given the importance attached to refugee and asylum policy as a feature that demarcates Western democracies, the subject matter reviewed here can scarcely be viewed as a peripheral.
Price bemoans trends that he views as interconnected. On the one hand, persons increasingly are deemed refugees despite not falling strictly within the nexus clause of the convention, namely that they suffer persecution “for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion” (p. 251). Price fears that abjudication increasingly strays from the core reason for asylum thereby becoming palliative in nature. He advocates a “political” conception of asylum, one that strictly adheres to the nexus criteria and that is expressive of value judgements about states that persecute and linked to a broader foreign policy strategy to reform such states.
On the other hand, Price laments the erection of barriers to asylum seeking that are the subject matter of chapter 6. Many of these measures reflect erosion of formerly robust political support for asylum. Price fears that the humanitarian turn in abjudication has contributed to the decline in political support for asylum that also stems from increases in asylum seeking.
Price grounds his advocacy in a masterful history of asylum. He locates the Greek word asylia and inviolability in ancient Greece. Asylum is from the Latin. For the Greeks, inviolability was possessed by persons who worked outside of their states and was recognized by all states as a matter of comity. Inviolability also inhered in certain sites, such as temples, where supplicants could request immunity. Such sites often attracted foreigners. Hence, a profound linkage arose between asylum and international relations. The grant of protection to a supplicant prevented extradition.
Revolutionary France became the first state to extend asylum to political offenders in the constitution of 1793, which guaranteed asylum to all forced to flee their countries while advancing the cause of liberty. In so doing, France linked the grant of asylum to a view about legitimate authority. Price advocates that twenty-first-century states do so as well.
A key recasting of asylum from immunization of foreigners against unjust punishment through extradition to prevention of deportation began as states developed immigration control regimes in the nineteenth century. This would lead to the rethinking of asylum as a subset of immigration policy. Asylum would come to protect refugees, not fugitives. Asylum became a way for foreigners to gain a reprieve from deportation based on a valid fear of persecution.
In chapter 2, he analyzes connections between asylum and foreign policy and how states can affect the behavior of other states through coercion, persuasion, and acculturation. Grants of asylum can put a state on notice that the state granting asylum regards the persecution as intolerable. His notion of acculturation relates to the insight that state behavior can be explained by reference to a state's identity within an institutional cultural context. Thus, the first US decision to grant asylum to an Israeli citizen led to consternation in Israel.
Price is aware that a political approach can be used to serve foreign policy interests and ill-served refugees. Overprotection of refugees from Communist states prevailed during the Cold War. The Refugee Act of 1980 was intended to “establish [ ] a standard for uniform and non-ideological refugee eligibility” (p. 87). But underprotection of refugees from El Salvador most notably ensued. Nevertheless, Price argues that a political approach underscores the value of grants of asylum to the foreign policy interests of a state.
He next turns to persecution by states and nonstate actors. While recognizing that there can be no single standard for what constitutes serious harm, he defines persecution as such that is inflicted or condoned by states for illegitimate reasons. For Price, the key is to recognize that persecution constitutes a distinctive kind of harm that merits a response that is expressive and that criticizes or condemns state persecution, depending on the gravity of the harm inflicted. Therefore, he views asylum law as “an ongoing normative enterprise,” one in which abjudicators “draw and articulate the bounds of legitimate state conduct” (p. 136).
Concerning violence perpetrated by nonstate actors, Price criticizes abjudication that does not distinguish between a state's inability to provide protection and states that are unwilling to ensure protection. He suggests that asylum is not an appropriate remedy in the first instance but appropriate in the second.
In closing, Price elaborates on the importance of conferral of membership to the asylee through naturalization. This leads him to question the wisdom of growing recourse to grants of temporary protection in OECD states. The richness of Price's historical erudition and the clarity of his viewpoint make his volume required reading for everyone concerned by the humanitarian challenge posed by refugees.
Mountz's ethnography is based on first-hand observation of the workings of Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), the key agency involved with asylum. She also has done considerable observation of immigrants in the United States and Australian asylum policies. In key respects, Mountz's volume extends a line of research begun by Kitty Calavita in Inside the State (1992).
Mountz is a geographer and well read on theories of state. She views ethnography as a research strategy to counter disembodied theories of state by recording dispersed sovereign powers in daily practice. Just about any graduate-level social science course focused on the state of the state would benefit from inclusion of this book on its reading list.
Mountz is struck by the policy-on-the-fly response to the successive sightings of boatloads of Chinese migrants off the coast of British Columbia in 1999. CIC bureaucrats scrambled to improvise policy even though the scenario of landings by sea had been foreseen as boatloads of Indian Sikhs had arrived in 1987. At the time of the 1999 landings, there was no written policy on how the Canadian government should respond to such an event.
Following the work of James C. Scott, Mountz endeavors to see the ships like the state. One of the political scientist's insights involves how states endeavor to impose order on people and places not subject to that order. And so it was with the CIC in 1999 when the first boatload of Chinese migrants landed. There was considerable confusion between the agencies involved. Mountz uncovered a considerable disjuncture between policy and practice.
She discovered that one of the key barriers to an effective response arose from a paucity of intelligence on human trafficking. Contrary to Paul Smith, Mountz contends that human smugglers have maximized the importance of geography. They rely on mastery of localized geography to elude detection by in much the way that nonstate terrorist groups operate.
Mountz raises critical questions about Canada's handling of the boat arrivals. The migrants on the first boat were not detained after processing by authorities and many did not appear for their hearings. This proved embarrassing to the government. Her research documents how central a role press coverage played in dramatizing what came to be viewed as a crisis. While not unsurprising, this finding comes at a time when the significance of the Fourth Estate is viewed as declining. Within the CIC, however, employees complained that they felt they were in a fish bowl under intense media scrutiny. Management of media coverage became a key concern to the government.
The media came to view the migrants as illegal aliens smuggled in by criminal gangs. This view contributed to the sense of urgency that led to changes in standard operating procedures. After the fiasco of the first boat, subsequent boatloads of migrants were detained in an isolated makeshift detention facility far from Vancouver. This made provision of adequate legal advice to asylum claimants very problematic, and most were promptly returned to China. Mountz fears some of those returned may have been genuine refugees.
I assigned Mountz to my interdisciplinary international migration graduate seminar this last spring. My students loved the book in part because it provides a fascinating account of anti-immigrant political mobilization in a national setting largely untouched by the rise of anti-immigrant politics in the transatlantic zone.
Watson references Mountz's earlier work a great deal in his effort to examine how securitization of migration occurs principally through a comparison of Australia and Canada. Securitization is a concept associated with the influential work of constructivists Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, who are best known for the study of security. With reference to international migration, it refers to the linkage of migration issues to security agendas thereby enabling governments to undertake emergency procedures that often result in harsher treatment of international migrants. Securitization of migration policies undoubtedly ranks as the most important development in international migration study in recent decades. And, after 9/11, the volume of scholarly, and not so scholarly, writing about migration and security has grown enormously.
What I found most refreshing was Watson's ability to rise above the contestation of securitization to examine how it takes place empirically in an objective manner. He builds on the theoretical work of Buzan and Waever by specifying how securitization occurred in the two contexts. He discerns varying outcomes.
Watson offers important critiques of both literature on comparative immigration policies in OECD states and on security studies. He faults the former for ignoring the effects of national security developments even though they have challenged standard operating procedures across the OECD. Second, the literature ignores or gives short shrift to international developments even though they powerfully influence domestic politics. Third, he discerns a tendency to view actors as rational and unitary. He sees parallel limitations in the security literature, especially little progress in explaining variations in responses to perceived threats. He then credits constructivists for beginning to address these gaps by showing how cultural differences affect what is perceived and what responses are viewed as appropriate. He regards neither Canada nor Australia as seriously threatened by the numbers of asylum-seekers received, as they are quite low by OECD standards. Rather, the cause of the consternation lies in fear of a loss of state control over international migrant arrivals.
Watson views the linkage of migration and security in Canada as quite weak, especially because of Canada's exemplary leadership on refugee matters. He then plunges into detailed analysis of key moments in the history of migration and security. Like Mountz, Watson attributes a key role to the media in securitization. His major innovation is to study both processes of securitization and of desecuritization. This allows him to make more fine-grained assessments of outcomes. He identifies the role of the media, the political opposition, and the judiciary as key to understanding securitization/desecuritization outcomes. Watson's content analysis of the role of the media is more systematic than Mountz's account of the role of the media in her analysis of the 1999 boat landings. Watson eventually concludes that securitization of humanitarian migration is much more pronounced in Australia than in Canada.
Price's political approach requires an intrusive United States. In On Empire (2009), the noted historian Eric Hobsbawm warns about humanitarian interventionism becoming a new form of imperialism of human rights. Mountz's erudition about postmodern theories may be beyond the ken of her readership. And Watson's description of the post–World War II construction of the international refugee regime ignores the creation of the United Nations Work and Relief Agency for Palestinian refugees, who at 4.7 million in 2010 still constitute the world's largest refugee population.
These three outstanding volumes provide further evidence of the remarkable flowering of migration studies in recent decades. Social science inquiry has taken a migration studies turn. Maybe this too suggests that we live in an Age of Migration.
