In the second quarter of 2013, 7,944 people were detained in the UK ‘for the purposes of immigration control’ (Home Office, 2013). While 1,138 of those detained were women, major shortcomings are identified in their treatment and calls made for a more gender sensitive asylum system. Although 35% of these women went on to be released there is a lack of research that investigates the on-going legacy of detention and the consequences for the sense of belonging, social integration and wellbeing of ex-detainees. This thesis draws on in-depth narrative interviews with 16 migrant women in the UK who were detained and then released from UK Immigration Removal Centres and five charity workers. Within migration scholarship the paradigm of exclusion has been traditionally adopted to understand how states seek to protect borders, keeping unwanted individuals out or contained. A spatial examination of respondents’ critical geographies of home reveals however that despite their release from detention these women continued to negotiate multiple and fluctuating boundaries. It is argued therefore that this paradigm obscures a nuanced perspective and proposes instead a discourse of precarity. Not only can the ‘state of precarity’ implicit within narratives of detention seep into and define the everyday geographies of home beyond release, respondents’ everyday negotiations with home remained central to the construction and proliferation of everyday precarity. This is achieved through a home-infused geopolitical rhetoric and interventions in the name of immigration enforcement which were revealed through (in)secure spaces of home. An exploration of emotional and embodied geographies also exposes erosive implications for feelings of belonging and health and wellbeing. A discourse of precarity therefore allows for a differentiation and critical inquiry of subjective gendered positions, citizenship and importantly, emergent accounts of resilience, reworking and resistance on predominantly social trajectories.

"The Aliens Control Act (ACA) was racially biased towards immigrants who were easy to assimilate into the white population. It thus did not accord with the principles of the new regime based on equality and reflected an exclusionist apartheid ideology. Not only was the act itself repugnant, but the practice of the enforcement bodies in arrest, detention and deportation procedures was maligned as well. There were allegations of violence, arbitrary arrest, harassment, exploitation, unfit detention facilities and lack of procedural fairness. This precipitated the drafting of the Green and White Papers on International Migration, the much contested Immigration Bill and the Immigration Act (IA) itself. The well researched Green Paper's recommendations about the shift in focus from control to management of migration were not taken cognisance of. The government, in consultation with US immigration specialists, focused on control to prevent an influx from the rest of Africa into South Africa's newly 'opened' borders. The only concession granted was the amnesties for long-time residents (usually mineworkers and refugees) from SADC countries, but this was not well responeded to. The South African government seemed to be intent on keeping the exclusionist mindset, with a shift from race to nationality. The IA has to be examined to see whether the contents of the legislation which inform the repatriation process meet constitutional and international law muster. This should be done with the background and criticisms of the ACA in mind. The actual practice of the enforcement agencies that effect the arrest, detention and deportation must be measured against South Africa's accepted human rights norms. A consideration of the past harsh and unconstitutional immigration control mechanisms must take place as well to track South Africa's progress towards a human rights based repatriation program." -- Introduction. / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2004. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/academic_pro/llm1/dissertations.html / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

No description available.

Administrative justice is traditionally considered as the main alternative to the criminal justice system when a certain illegality is decriminalized or not enforced by criminal justice institutions (e.g. the regulation of elite deviance, urban disorder, mental health, etc.). This doctoral thesis studies how the conflicts related to immigration are being managed in the largest administrative tribunal in Canada: the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). It asks how exactly does immigration justice, and administrative law more broadly, constitute an alternative to criminal justice in terms of social reaction, and what kinds of challenges does this alternative present for the study of social control. This research takes a qualitative approach based on documentary analysis and long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the IRB between 2007 and 2009. It uses its own theoretical framework building on post-structural perspectives, including Bourdieu’s constructivist structuralism, governmentality and nodal governance studies, left realism and political economy of punishment. In the empirical part of the thesis, I present some of the characteristics of the legal translation of conflicts in immigration law, including the forms and logics of punishment involved and how immigration law is practiced at the tribunal. I argue that administrative adjudication and punishment differ substantially from criminal law regimes and I question the idea of criminalization (of immigration) as a category capable of nuancing the complexity of administrative forms of social reaction. Instead, I suggest that we should take these forms of punitive social reaction as they are, and study how they operate along, beyond and in addition to criminal law. I propose an integrated conception of the penal complex which works as a mobile (kinetic sculpture) and includes the criminal law realm, but also other normative systems that configure ‘less’ prominent locations of punishment playing an increasing role in social reaction. I conclude by proposing a new reading of selectivity of justice and penal policies, and consequently, a new agenda for criminology and criminologists. In this new agenda, the penal complex should be taken as a totality in order to promote broader and combined propositions for law reform and resistance to punitiveness.

No description available.

This paper seeks to understand policy in the City of New York which limits cooperation with federal authorities for purposes of immigration control. It does so by qualitatively analyzing a set of legal-administrative documents. The key, policy features are identified along with the interests and forces which shaped those features over time. An arsenal of supplemental, legal material as well as the findings of legal scholars are consulted for interpretation in hermeneutic fashion. Using a theoretical framework consisting of the structure of the legal system of the United States and it norms, plus certain immigration-related, national trends, this research concludes this policy is the legacy of an unbroken, bi-partisan lineage of administrations dating back to the 1980s – an evolving product of the tensions between the legal norms and the national trends. The policy reinforces sovereignty from the federal government, and it does so largely for purposes of constitutionality, administrative functionality and civil rights.

Thesis (Master of Military Studies)-Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 2008. / Title from title page of PDF document (viewed on: Feb 11, 2010). Includes bibliographical references.