Making Migration Law: The Foreigner, Sovereignty, and the Case of Australia
The
emergence of international human rights law and the end of the White
Australia immigration policy were events of great historical moment.
Yet, they were not harbingers of a new dawn in migration law. This book
argues that this is because migration law in Australia is best
understood as part of a longer jurisprudential tradition in which
certain political-economic interests have shaped the relationship
between the foreigner and the sovereign. Eve Lester explores how this
relationship has been wrought by a political-economic desire to regulate
race and labour; a desire that has produced the claim that there exists
an absolute sovereign right to exclude or condition the entry and stay
of foreigners. Lester calls this putative right a discourse of 'absolute
sovereignty'. She argues that 'absolute sovereignty' talk continues to
be a driver of migration lawmaking, shaping the foreigner-sovereign
relation and making thinkable some of the world's harshest asylum
policies.
