Globalization has expanded the travelling privileges of certain populations (namely for those in the West) while it has simultaneously resulted in restrictions on the movement of the more racialized and impoverished populations. The economically disadvantaged groups are subjected to strict border control policies such as stringent visa requirements (to stop them before they migrate), border infrastructure (to curb their mobility while they are travelling across international borders), and detention policies (after they arrive in the host country). The corresponding challenges are particularly taxing and traumatic for vulnerable populations, especially minors. Using qualitative methodology, this research explores the interview-based accounts of nine asylum-seeking children and young adults regarding their migration experiences with border control policies (during their migration) and administrative detention procedures in Canada. Drawing on Criminology of Mobility as a conceptual framework, the findings of this study demonstrate that border infrastructure endangers young asylum seekers’ lives as it compels them to pursue more precarious means, such as using the services of human smugglers or crossing international borders from isolated and dangerous crossing points. The findings of this research also suggest that juvenile asylum seekers may be experiencing border control policies and immigration detention more negatively because of their age-related vulnerabilities.

Based on a discourse analysis of Swedish public investigations regarding immigration detention, this thesis examines the discourses around ‘foreigners’ therein. Rejected asylum-seekers awaiting deportation have gone from being systematically detained in prisons by the police, to instead be confined in detention centres administered by the Swedish Migration Board. Yet, an increased criminalisation is evident. Focusing, in particular, on the legal ambiguity that authorises the detention system to further detain and criminalise asylum seekers, it is argued that the practice of detention can be seen as ‘exceptional’ where discourses of care, suspicion and fear constitute subjectivities such as the ‘identity-less foreigner’, the ‘vulnerable foreigner’, and the ‘dangerous foreigner’.

In response to the recent surge in migrants entering Italy, the Italian government has implemented several laws since early 2023 to expand the administrative detention system for migrants - mostly males - pending repatriation, commonly known as Centri di Permanenza per il Rimpatr io (CPR). Despite the large body of evidence provided by national humanitarian organizations and academic research concerning their overall detrimental effect - both on national budgets and detainees’ psychophysiological health –, these centers are still deemed as the best way to deal with the migration phenomenon. Nevertheless, the high incidence of self harm episodes recorded within these venues, together with their secrecy and isolation symptomize their problematic nature. Thus, focusing on three different administrative detention facilities located in the Southern Italian regions of Apulia and Sicily, this thesis aims at penetrating these closeted realities in order to raise awareness about the prisoners’ true living conditions and grasp the potential political weight of their self injurious gestures. Moreover, it argues for the need to partially de medicalize the approach toward this specific health issue, as it prevents to acknowledge it as a full fledged expression of rebellion against this specific detention regimeand, simultaneously, to identify the strategies used by authorities to suppress it.

This research deals with the question of how detention of foreigners and the creation ofdifferent forms of detention centers have been rendered possible in the context ofSweden, from the early 1900s up until today. A qualitative content analysis is used toexplore four periods, in terms of the motivations and regulations that produce“detainable categories”, as well as the logic behind such practices of encampment.Drawing on the concept of the “state of exception”, and by using policy documents, thisresearch argues how the Government by gaining extended powers in different periods oftime justifies and regularizes the detention of foreigners. This has been done for thesake of security of the state, protecting the welfare and wellbeing of the nation. Thistells us that the creation and production of detainabilities is not only related toexceptional situations, but becomes the normal condition of the existence of the nationstate.

This thesis is about border politics, in more than one sense. It looks at the recent period of anxiety about the control of Australian national borders (approximately, from the late 1990s until the 2007 Federal election), and attempts to understand how certain assumptions about women as potential reproductive bodies permeated biopolitical discourses in Australian national culture during this period. I employ the term ‘containment’ in order to make sense of this cultural moment. With reference to the work of theorists of modernity such as Michel Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman, I argue that containment is a key discourse in modern cultures—a way of thinking and speaking about confinement, control, management and order. It structures how we think about the management of populations and is a central part of the justification for the confinement of problem populations by modern political authorities. As such, then, it describes the ways in which the use of immigration detention for unlawful non-citizen asylum seekers has been thought about and accepted as reasonable in Australian national culture. / However, a discourse of containment has also been central to the thinking about gendered bodies in modernity, in particular to assumptions about the control of women’s bodies. The assumptions about the containment of women in the modern gender order are directly linked to ideas about political status, citizenship and sovereignty in modern nation-states. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’—the life that is excluded from the protections of citizenship and thus left unprotected from violence—I attempt to make sense of the connections between the immigration detention camp as a site where the modern state exerts control over the life of the nation, and that modern state’s attempts to control reproductive and reproducing bodies. The reducing of certain people to the status of bare life is, then, a gendered process. Women and men are stripped of political status in different ways because they are assumed to have, or potentially have, different kinds of political status. / I therefore consider how ideas about women as reproductive bodies were integral to the discourse and practices of containment which underpinned the use of immigration detention in Australia. These ideas were important at a number of levels. Firstly, ideas about women as reproductive bodies infused the thinking about national borders, border control and the management of national reproduction. Secondly, a racially inflected discourse about ‘women and children’ was of central importance in shaping the ways in which male and female asylum seekers in immigration detention were treated. In the techniques used to control and manage gendered asylum-seeking bodies, key modern assumptions about women as reproductive bodies, the family, sovereignty and violence are revealed. Furthermore, I argue that many popular culture texts which attempt to make sense of, or critique, Australian national border politics have reinforced the same gendered ideas about containment, the same naturalised assumptions about the reproduction of the nation, which underpinned exclusionist border politics and the use of immigration detention. Examining the intersection of gendered and national discourses of containment in national border politics reveals the gendered violence which infuses the modern social order.

The thesis revolves around the question of whether state and non-state actors’ responses to the refugee crises are restricting the rights of refugees by introducing privatization of security. The thesis studies the experiences of refugees in offshore immigration detention centres of Australia and the UN operated refugee camps, which are highly privatized or are in a process of privatization. The thesis rests on the theoretical framework provided by Hannah Arendt which explains why human rights are failing refugees in this context, and how they remain meaningless until the 'right to have rights' is incorporated as a basic right. The thesis argues that privatization of security is harmful and results in increased human rights violations and that the private military and security companies are a way of delegating as well as deflecting responsibility that state actors and non-state actors have towards refugees. The thesis also raises the possibility of private resettlement programs as one of the solutions to ensure the right of belongingness is translated practically by giving refugees a community. / Graduate

Yes / Recent decades have witnessed a growing number of states around the world relying on border control measures, such as immigration detention, to govern human mobility and control the movements of those classified as “unauthorised non-citizens.” In response to this, an increasing number of scholars from several disciplines, including psychologists, have begun to examine this phenomenon. In spite of the widespread concerns raised, few studies have been conducted inside immigration detention sites, primarily due to difficulties in gaining access. This body of research becomes even scanter when it comes to the experiences of detained women. This study is the first of its kind to have surveyed 93 women confined in an Italian immigration detention facility. A partial mediation model with latent variables was tested through partial least structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The findings revealed the negative impact that unfair immigration procedures have on detained women’s human dignity, which in turn negatively affects their self-rated physical and mental health. Overall, our study sheds light on the dehumanisation and damage to human dignity that immigration detention entails, as well as its negative impact on the health of those affected. This evidence reinforces the image of these institutions as sites of persistent injustice, while stressing the need to envision alternative justice-oriented forms to address human mobility. / FE’s doctoral research, on which this article relies, was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (SFRH/BD/87854/2012), and her subsequent work was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (grant number: CEECIND/00924/2018/CP1541/CT0004).

Governments around the world use immigration detention to detain and deport irregular immigrants, which negatively affects their health. The aim of this thesis was to explore, describe and identify factors that could mitigate the effect of immigration detention on the health of detainees. This was a mixed method study using qualitative methods (Papers I and II), quantitative methods (Paper III) and descriptive case comparison (Paper IV) comparing the Swedish system to the system in the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). The study design was strengthened by triangulation of methods and data sources. Detainees experienced lack of control over their own lives due to lack of information in a language they can understand, inadequate responses from detention staff and restrictions within detention centers further limiting their liberty. Duration of detention was negatively associated with satisfaction of services provided in detention and the detainees’ Quality of Life (QOL). Detainees had low QOL domain scores with the psychological domain having the lowest score (41.9/100). The most significant factor positively associated with the QOL of detainees was the support received from detention staff. A sense of fear was present among detainees and staff. Detainees’ fear was due to their inadequate interaction with authorities, perceiving it as threatening, and due to their worry of facing repercussions of being involved in incidents caused by others. The potential for physical threat from detainees created a sense of fear among the staff. The detention staff expressed the need for more support to manage their emotional dilemma and role conflict of being a civil servant, simultaneously enabling the deportation process while providing humane care to detainees as fellow human beings. Detention centers in the Benelux countries had more categories of staff providing different services to detainees. Compared to the Benelux countries, healthcare services at the Swedish detention centers were limited. Detainees were offered no medical screening on arrival and no regular access to mental healthcare professionals. Detaining authorities have the obligation to safeguard the health of detainees. Challenges faced by the detention staff and detainees must be addressed to create a supportive environment and fulfill that obligation.

This thesis explores the normative propriety of immigration detention in liberal states. In the first part of the thesis, I explore the development, current practice, and popular justifications for immigration detention in the United Kingdom. I argue that a crucial but unacknowledged role for immigration detention is to function as a political spectacle of the centralisation of power in liberal states. I find that the key motivation for detaining non-citizens is that they could abscond before their removals. I conclude that this basis for detention is normatively acceptable in only very limited cases and, even then, alternatives are often available and ethically preferable. Based on the fact that there is a normatively acceptable rationale, albeit circumscribed, for detention practices, I then propose a framework of minimum standards of treatment in detention that I advise all liberal states to follow. After outlining my proposal, I turn in the second part of the thesis to an examination of the normative theories of immigration control and how they take account of detention. Normative theorists differ in how they balance their commitments to individual and state rights, yet I find the majority concedes the need for some degree of immigration admissions control. Such theories face a moral dilemma: there can be no immigration control without detention, and so detention becomes an implicit assumption for these normative theories to be coherent. A potential solution for combating the practical problems associated with the growing, worsening detention estates as well as the moral dilemma of incarcerating a non-citizen based on fear of absconding would be to open borders and eliminate immigration control. Given the reality of the sovereign right to control immigration, however, I argue that the more feasible normative answer is lobby liberal states to adopt my framework of minimum standards of treatment while simultaneously pressing for open borders as the long-term ethical goal.

Immigration policies and border control in the US were hardened significantly more ever since the new government’s immigration executive order in 2017. A series of massive raids and immigrant detentions were carried out which got the attention of both human rights activists and the news media. How these immigration detention events are portrayed in the news media reflect, moreover, a series of discourses which seem to attract audiences from either left-wing or right-wing political ideologies, specifically to read CNN and Fox news respectively, according to previous survey-based research. This paper aims to identify through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) how those in detention are represented in the news headlines of Fox News and CNN, and secondly, identify what possible left-wing and right-wing political ideologies about immigration are expressed in the news outlets. Reference strategies and transitivity will encompass the micro-level analysis, which focuses on language construction. For the macro-level analysis, on the one hand, discourse practices like process of production and consumption will be considered, and on the other hand, American foreign policy viewed from the left-wing and right-wing perspectives will be discussed to consider differences in style, tone, and perspective in CNN and Fox News’ headlines in relation to immigration detention events. Results show that CNN, tied to left-wing audiences, portray the immigration detention events from the perspective of immigrants who are in a vulnerable position since they are detained with their families. Moreover, Fox News, tied to right-wing audiences, show the events more from the viewpoint of the government and the public entities in charge of the immigration policies, who are in need to restrain, detain, and deport immigrants for the sake of the country’s security. This paper aims to contribute further to the research on political ideologies as a relevant factor to understand differences in discourse in the news media for future research.