by Barbara Franz
The Biden administration is in the process of deporting thousands of people to Haiti. Since viral images of Haitians escaping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents first became public in September, at least 60 ICE flights to Haiti carrying approximately upwards of 100 people each flight.This is just the latest expression of the ongoing war against refugees and asylum seekers in the Global North. Militarized borders, interdictions at sea, detention centers represent the criminalization of mobility around the world. In addition to family separations and mass deportations without an assessment of individual protection needs are standard policies in the USA and elsewhere today. The Global North—the United States, Canada, the European Union (EU), Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, the Gulf states and East Asia—is massively investing in militarized border regimes that reach far beyond particular territorial borders to manage the movement of people from the Global South. Many American and European decision-makers have learned from (and are interested in copying) the Australian so-called Pacific Solution (2001-2008) and later Operation Sovereign Borders (2013 to present). These operations successfully prevent access to Australia’s territory for all displaced people traveling by boat, regardless of the legality of their asylum claims. All asylum seekers arriving by boat are intercepted on the sea and transported to detention centers in the Pacific island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG).Throughout the 21st century European countries experimented with top-notch technology, such as development of a state-of-the-art surveillance system, but soon realized that humans cannot be easily stopped by such technology alone. What finally limited the immigration surges for the EU were bi-lateral and multilateral agreements with Turkey, Tunesia, Libya, as well as Morocco. These agreements— so-called Mobility Partnerships—have been evolving while sea crossings have spiked in the post-2011 period. In effect, countries like Ukraine (seeking to eventually join the EU) and Libya, Turkey and Morocco have become “border guards” for the EU. The idea behind these agreements is simple: Internal right-wing populist agitation has become more wide-spread since the 2015 the “refugee crisis” hit Europe. In order to prevent more right-wing populism domestically and its ascent to government (such as the 2016-20 Trump administration), the governments in Europe agreed on the enactment of drastic international measures. The completion of the externalization of Europe’s refugee and migration management is one of them.
A new militarized regime of border and mobility control is taking shape across the Global North. Catherine Besteman has shown that this militarized regime mimics South Africa’s system of racial apartheid that formally ended in 1994. Like that regime, the tools of the new global racialized containment policy aim to create an exploitable labor force and enclose those considered undesirable or expendable in territories, detention centers or refugee camps far from the borders of the Global North. Militarized apartheid is emerging as a global norm. Biden’s recent mass expulsion of Haitian refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants is just one expression of this policy.
