Asylum Seekers In Australia

Penological studies have consistently emphasized the representations of asylum seekers being underpinned by the states’ apprehensions of the integrity in numerous ways. Australia makes a particularly interesting case study of asylum seekers arriving on Australian shores whereby they are seen as a threat to border security due to their exemplification of deviance. This deviance has been reinforced by the language and politics of exclusion and the dichotomous construction of normality (in which asylum seekers are not). For several decades, Australian governments have intensiﬁed detention practises on and offshore with asylum seekers which have ultimately received considerable social and political debates. This essay will critically analyse the …show more content…
Within this rationality, those who arrive by boat are treated as threats to Australian security. Border protection and possibility of infiltration by strangers provide the justification for compulsory detention and the ordering of life chances by visa categories. Adopting the Code of Behaviour by Hodge (2015, p.125), the signalling a disciplining of ‘‘suspicious bodies’’ extends the grounds of illegality by recasting potential acts of nuisance to that of criminal status. This code is an effort to increase awareness of the ‘‘highly mobile illegal identity’’ to those bodies out of reach of government marking them as always already ‘‘detainable subject”. Hence, asylum seekers are considered as manipulative people who seek the pity of others to take them under refuge. By doing so, Australian citizens who are ‘‘subjectiﬁed as potential victims’’ at the hands of ‘‘unknowable’’ threats (Hodge 2015, p.126). Therefore, the need to criminalize is …show more content…
In looking at the modern state, Foucault introduces the terms ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ to symbolize an explicit system of governmental power. Within a governmentality analytical framework, what is immediately apparent is the operation of biopower which addresses the control and regulation of the nation’s population (Foucault 1997, p. 254-246). This approach is similar to that of Seth’s (2001, p.75) liberalism as a form of governance, and the sets of practices accompanying this rather than a normative political philosophy or doctrine. Vital to liberal governmentality is the belief in the freedom for individuals to oppose the government in legitimate ways. Juxtapose to this, individuals also internalise the effects of power and regulate themselves to be congruent with the forms and effects of power deployed by the state (Butler 2004, p.62). Though freedom, sovereignty, the law, rights and responsibilities are the dominant ideas in liberal discourse, one must be aware that dictatorial, bigoted and violent movements within the liberal state cannot be

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