Manufacturing Threats: Boat People As Threats or Refugees?

How have certain illegal immigration control policies come to be regarded as essential for national security in some liberal democratic states while in others these policies remain unacceptable? Forced return, mandatory detention, restricted access to courts and temporary protection have been adopted by a number of liberal states, all of which violate the regulative norms of the 1951 Refugee Convention. This paper argues that the constitutive and regulative norms of the international refugee regime are based on a ?humanitarian? construction of refugee and receiving state identity, and that the shift toward a securitised discourse has re-constructed the identity of refugees and refugee producing states. This discursive shift has been a crucial factor in permitting state elites to enact policies that violate these international norms.Drawing on the arrival of unauthorized boat arrivals in Canada and Australia over a twenty-year period, this paper will show that securitising actors within these societies sought to alter the dominant discourse on refugees and asylum seekers. In Australia, these securitising attempts proved successful, shifting the discourse from humanitarian to securitised, thus ultimately paving the way for government elites to enact policies previously deemed unthinkable for a generous, humanitarian state. In Canada, these securitising attempts failed, making the implementation of restrictive measures unbefitting to the perceived Canadian national identity. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]