Jaana Palander, Saara Pellander
The presence of a strong security paradigm in Finnish migration law, policy and court practice is not a new phenomenon. What has become most prevalent is the securitization of asylum seeking. For a long time, this speech has not turned into practice, but this may soon change, in response to the migration influx after 2015 and in the Belarussian context.
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Audrey Macklin
At the broadest level, 9/11 exacerbated the chronic precarity of non-citizens’ status as legal subjects governed under the rule of law. In principle, the rule of law is indifferent to citizenship: after all, the legal subject is constituted through subjection to law, not to the state as such. And yet, the rule of law has always been insipid in the sphere of migration, and securitization diluted it even further. This is true across all jurisdictions, including those bound by human rights entrenched in constitutional texts.
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Giacomo Orsini, Jean-Baptiste Farcy, Sarah Smit, Laura Merla
With liminal legal spaces expanding on several domains of non-EU migrants’ lives in Europe, specific populations of third country nationals came to face greater discriminatory treatment. Rules and procedures were being adopted in the name of security and the protection of the public and/or social order against so-called “irregular migration”. We focus on non-EU migrants in Belgium, as they constitute an extremely relevant case to illustrate how institutions of a liberal, democratic European state have transformed and adapted the ways they operate discrimination along racist lines.
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Mohsin Alam Bhat
Indien hat komplexe rechtliche Mechanismen geschaffen, die den Status der Staatsbürgerschaft stark verunsichert haben. Diese Mechanismen erlauben es, Personen willkürlich als mutmaßliche Ausländer ins Visier zu nehmen, stellen unzumutbare Beweisanforderungen für den Nachweis der Staatsbürgerschaft und erleichtern den schleichenden Verlust materieller Rechte - und das alles ohne formellen Entzug des Staatsbürgerschaftsstatuses. Diese Prozesse lassen sich meiner Meinung nach am besten als das verstehen, was Peter Nyers als "Irregularisierung der Staatsbürgerschaft" bezeichnet.
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Mohsin Alam Bhat
India has created complex legal mechanisms that have introduced severe insecurity of citizenship status. These mechanisms permit arbitrary targeting of persons as suspected foreigners, place unreasonable evidentiary standards for proving citizenship, and facilitate creeping loss of substantive rights – all without a formal revocation of citizenship status. These processes, I suggest, are best understood as what Peter Nyers calls ‘irregularizing citizenship’.
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Peter Billings
Obwohl der Zusammenhang zwischen Terrorismus und Asyl in Australien keine empirische Grundlage hat, haben bestimmte Gesetze, Maßnahmen und Praktiken, die im Jahr 2001 zur Terrorismusbekämpfung eingeführt wurden, bis heute Bestand - insbesondere die Offshore-Abfertigung von Asylbewerbern, die auf dem Seeweg ankommen. Ich behaupte, dass Australiens Abschreckungsmodell eine negative "Signalwirkung" auf die heutige Asylpolitik und -praxis einiger europäischer Staaten hatte.
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Peter Billings
The Australian government’s agenda of progressive border securitization was, initially, sustained by counter-terrorism rhetoric. However, the focus of concern has shifted away from the potential terrorist threat posed by asylum seekers towards deterring unauthorised maritime migration. Though the nexus between terrorism and asylum lacks an empirical basis in Australia, certain laws, policies and practices premised on counterterrorism in 2001 endure to this day – offshore processing of asylum seekers arriving by sea, notably. I argue that Australia’s deterrence model has had a negative ‘signalling effect’ on some European states’ contemporary asylum policies and practice.
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Emilie McDonnell
The Nationality and Borders Bill is the culmination of the UK government’s increasingly securitised, criminalised and hostile approach to asylum and migration. While 9/11 served to solidify the highly dubious nexus between migration and terrorism, the UK (alongside other destination states) has for decades been implementing restrictive migration policies and practices designed to deter and prevent asylum seekers and other migrants from reaching its territories and accessing safety.
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Ay?e Dicle Ergin
Even though 9/11 has had a significant impact on the global linking of migration and security, different triggers may be required for each country for the concrete effects of this approach to emerge. For Turkey, the developments are parallel but delayed. Turkish immigration policy, which was trending towards becoming more liberal and rights-based after 9/11, has suffered a serious break after a series of terrorist attacks in the country.
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The state of the European Union's asylum and migration policy can be summed up as follows: 20 years after the attacks on the Twin Towers, the "war on terror" has become both a cause of people on the move, and serves at the same time as the normative underpinning for the unimaginable arms race that has taken place at the external borders of the EU. Legitimised by the political leadership of the European Union, it is now a reality that the principles of the rule of law have ceased to apply at the EU's external borders without consequence.
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Sangeetha Pillai
Since its earliest days, Australia’s sweeping constitutional powers over aliens and immigration have been drawn on to support broad exclusionary laws. In the two decades since 9/11, the tendency towards exclusion has increased significantly.
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Eleonora Celoria
While concerns over terrorism have not shaped Italian migration policy in a comprehensive way, the increased use of the administrative measure of expulsion of foreigners for counter-terrorism purposes must be questioned. It poses serious challenges to fundamental rights and rule of law principles and might foster a shift from a punitive to a preventive approach in the field of migration control.
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Luicy Pedroza
As much as the comparative study of migration policies has developed recently, it still suffers from a blazing assumption: that states have equal sovereign power to determine their migration policy according to their own interests. The notion of “externalization”, so widely discussed nowadays, reminds us of asymmetries of power. In cases of extreme asymmetry though, as in the relation between Mexico and the United States, the spaces for sovereign decision making on migration policy are extremely thin to nonexistent.
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Ferdinand Weber
Migration and citizenship law are politically configurable matters, like all others. All terrorist threats affect the state's duty to protect life, possibly state infrastructure and the sense of security in the public sphere. Picking up a connection to migration, in contrast to already existing domes-tic right-wing and left-wing extremism, can promise a quick reduction of external dangers in the political competition. Certainly, most people reject an equation of migration and terrorism as politically backwards. However, the image of migration being infiltrated by terrorism is effective.
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