The Politics of Space and the Spatialisation of Politics: New Directions for Examining the Connections between Immigration and Contagion

Abstract

Politics is thoroughly spatialised and space is thoroughly politicised. Whilst there has been a renewed interest in this contention, marked by the so-called “spatial turn” in political science and related sub-disciplinary fields, much of the literature continues to treat “space” as a mere empirical referent, rather than a product of prior political conflict(s) and competing political discourse(s). This article draws upon an emerging body of literature in political science that treats borders as sites where the inextricable links between space and politics crystallise most clearly, bringing their imbrications sharply into focus. It argues that this body of work underscores the constitutive role of the political in the construction of space and consequential notions of who is “inside” and “outside,” and suggests this is codified in the enactment and administration of immigration law(s). Drawing on examples from migration politics in the Australian context, pertaining to the ways in which HIV and tuberculosis are figured, it illustrates how the proximity of the supposedly “infectious” outsider, their perceived literal and moral “contagiousness” and the supposed “threat” they pose to the “wider community,” is constructed. This always involves the invocation of notions of space through the construction of frontiers delineating who is “inside” and “outside.” The article argues that this approach opens up promising avenues of inquiry that seek to explore the connections between immigration and contagion; two enduring tropes in the public and political imagination.

Notes

¹ Staff reporter, “Hanson Unhappy about ‘Sick Africans,’” The Age, December 7, 2006, < http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Hanson-unhappy-about-sick-Africans/2006/12/07/1165081049997.html>.

² “Australian PM Calls for HIV Immigration Ban,” ABC Radio, April 13, 2007 <  http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/2007-04-13/australian-pm-calls-for-hiv-immigration-ban/721824>.

³ Mr Kevin Rudd's lecture at the Lowy Institute on July 5, 2007 on the topic “Future challenges in foreign policy” was widely reported by major Australian news outlets, including: Channel 7, Lateline, ABC Radio, ABC Channel 2, Radio National, Melbourne Herald Sun, The Australian, SBS, The Age, Sky News and the Sydney Morning Herald.

⁴ See, for instance: Dennis Altman, “The Most Political of Diseases,” in Eric Timewell, Victor Minichiello and David Plummer (eds), AIDS in Australia (Sydney, Australia: Prentice Hall, 1992), pp. 55–72. See also John Ballard, “The Constitution of AIDS in Australia: Taking ‘Government at a Distance’ Seriously,” in Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess (eds), Governing Australia: Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government (Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 125–138; and Paul Sendzuik, Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS (Sydney, Australia: UNSW Press, 2003).

⁵ Australian National Audit Office, Audit Report No. 37, 2006–07: Administration of the Health Requirement of the Migration Act 1958 (Barton, Australia: Australian National Audit Office, 2007).

⁶ Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor/AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988).

⁷ Kane Race, “Framing Responsibility: HIV, Biomedical Research and the Performativity of the Law,” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 9:3 (2012), pp. 327–338.

⁸ Connal Parsley, “Performing the Border: Australia's Judgment of ‘Unauthorised Arrivals’ at the Airport,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 18 (2003), pp. 55–75; Henk Van Houtum, Olivier Kramsch and Wolfgang Zierhofer, B/Ordering Space (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005).

⁹ Doreen Massey, “Politics and Space-Time,” New Left Review 196 (November–December 1992), pp. 65–84, at p. 84.

¹⁰ Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, UK: Verso, 2000), p. 101.

¹¹ Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London, UK: Verso, 1989). See also Jonathan Pugh, “What Are the Consequences of the ‘Spatial Turn’ For How We Understand Politics Today? A Proposed Research Agenda,” Progress in Human Geography 33:5 (2009), pp. 579–586.

¹² Alan Ingram, “The Geopolitics of Disease,” Geography Compass 3:6 (2009), pp. 2084–2097; Didier Fassin, “The Biopolitics of Otherness: Undocumented Foreigners and Racial Discrimination in French Public Debate,” Anthropology Today 17:1 (2001), pp. 3–7.

¹³ Didier Bigo, “Globalized (in)Security: The Field and the Ban-opticon,” in Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala (eds), Terror, Insecurity and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes After 9/11 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008), pp. 10–48.

¹⁴ Alfred C. Reed, “Immigration and the Public Health,” The Popular Science Monthly 83 (October 1913), pp. 313–338.

²⁰ Ibid., 1–2.

¹⁵ Anna-Marie Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain 1968–1990 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Leanne Weber, “The Shifting Frontiers of Migration Control”, in Sharon Pickering and Leanne Weber (eds), Borders, Mobility and Technologies of Control (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2006), pp. 21–44; and Leti Volpp “Imaginings of Space in Immigration Law,” Law, Culture and Humanities (March 2012), pp. 1–19.

¹⁶ Mary L. Dudziak and Leti Volpp, “Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders,” American Quarterly 57:3 (2005), pp. 593–610, p. 593.

¹⁷ Volpp, “Imaginings of Space,” p. 2.

¹⁸ David Howarth, “Space, Subjectivity, and Politics,” Alternatives 31 (2006), pp. 105–134, p. 118; Jason Glynos and David Howarth, Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory (London, UK: Routledge, 2007), p. 104.

¹⁹ Volpp, “Imaginings of Space,” p. 2.

²¹ John Howard, “Transcript of the Prime Minister: Speech Delivered at the Federal Liberal Party Campaign Launch, Sydney, 28 October, 2001,” September 23, 2012, < http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query%3DId%3A%22library%2Fpartypol%2F1178395%22>.

²² Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), p. 240.

²³ Jean Gottmann, “The Evolution of the Concept of Territory,” Social Science Information 14:3 (1975), pp. 29–47, p. 29.

²⁷ Ibid., 25.

²⁴ Maria Giannacopoulos, “Nomophilia and Bia: The Love of Law and the Question of Violence,” Borderlands e-journal 10:1 (2011), pp. 1–19; Parsley, “Performing the Border,” p. 63.

²⁵ Zoe Anderson, “One ‘Body/Nation,’” Cultural Studies Review 15:1 (2009), pp. 100–129.

²⁶ Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality, p. 25.

²⁸ Jason Myers and Robin Kearns, “Feelings, Bodies, Places: New Directions for Geographies of HIV/AIDS,” in Cynthia Pope, Renee T. White, and Robert Malow (eds), HIV/AIDS: Global Frontiers in Prevention/Intervention (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 501–510. See also Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality.

²⁹ Alison Bashford, “Quarantine and the Imagining of the Australian Nation,” Health 2:4 (1998), pp. 387–402. See also Nicos Papastergiadis, “The Invasion Complex: The Abject Other and Spaces of Violence,” Geografiska Annaler 88:B (2006), pp. 429–442.

³⁰ Altman, “Most Political of Diseases.”

³¹ Gilbert Caluya, “Domestic Belongings: Intimate Security and the Racial Politics of Scale,” Emotion, Space and Society 4:4 (2011), pp. 203–210.

³² Teresia Teaiwa and Sean Mallon, “Ambivalent Kinships? Pacific People in New Zealand”, in James H. Liu (ed.), New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2005), pp. 207–229, p. 210.

³³ Nicholas B. King, “Immigration, Race and Geographies of Difference in the Tuberculosis Pandemic,” in Matthew Gandy and Alimuddin Zumla (eds), The Return of the White Plague: Global Poverty and the “New” Tuberculosis (London, UK: Verso, 2003), pp. 39–54, p. 46.

³⁴ Howarth, “Space, Subjectivity, and Politics,” p. 129; Alison Bashford, “Quarantine and the Imagining of the Australian Nation,” Health 2:4 (1998), pp. 387–402.

³⁵ Race, “Framing Responsibility,” p. 331.

³⁶ Henrike Korner, “‘If I Had My Residency I Wouldn't Worry’: Negotiating Migration and HIV in Sydney, Australia,” Ethnicity & Health 12 (2007), pp. 200–225, p. 216.

³⁷ Marett Leiboff, “Law's Empiricism and the Object: How Law Recreates Cultural Objects in its Own Image,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 27 (2007), pp. 23–50; Susan S. Silbey and Ayn Cavicchi, “The Common Place of Law: Transforming Matters of Concern into the Objects of Everyday Life,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 556–565.

³⁸ Ibid., 560.

³⁹ Mark B. Salter, “The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,” Alternatives 31 (2006), pp. 167–189.

⁴⁰ Weber, “Shifting Frontiers of Migration Control.”

⁴¹ Caluya, “Domestic Belongings.”

⁴² Migration Health Regulations [1994].

⁴³ Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia (Joint Standing Committee on Migration Regulations), Conditional Migrant Entry: The Health Rules (Canberra, Australia: Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1992), p. 21.

⁴⁴ Alison Bashford and Bernadette Power, “Immigration and Health: Law and Regulation in Australia, 1958–2004,” Health and History 7:1 (2005), pp. 86–101, p. 98.

⁴⁵ Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Factsheet: Health Requirement for Permanent Entry to Australia, < http://www.immi.gov.au/allforms/pdf/1071i.pdf>.

⁴⁶ Les Szaraz, “Australia's Immigration Response to HIV/AIDS,” in Australasian Society for HIV Medicine, HIV and Hepatitis C: Policy Discrimination, Legal and Ethical Issues (Sydney, Australia: Australasian Society of HIV Medicine, 2005).

⁴⁷ See “Applying for Permanent Residence in Australia: Information for People with HIV and Their Advisors: Factsheet,” National Association of People Living with HIV in Australia, November 15, 2012, < http://www.afao.org.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/6839/AFAO_Immigration_Factsheet_Sept_2011.pdf>.

⁴⁸ Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Form 1071i: Health Requirement for Permanent Entry to Australia (Canberra, Australia: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2010).

⁴⁹ Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Supplement to Form 1163i: Complete Country Listings for the Health Assessment Matrix (Canberra, Australia: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2012).

⁵⁰ Bashford and Power, “Immigration and Health,” p. 100.

⁵¹ Gonzalo G. Alvarez, Brian Gushulak, Khaled A. Rumman, Ekkehardt Altpeter, Daniel Chemtob, Paul Douglas, Connie Erkens, Peter Helbling, Ingrid Hamilton, Jane Jones, Alberto Matteeli, Marie-Claire Paty, Drew L. Posey, Daniel Sagebiel, Erika Slump, Anders Tegnell, Elena R. Valín, Brita A. Winje and Edward Ellis, “A Comparative Examination of Tuberculosis Immigration Medical Screening Programs from Selected Countries with High Immigration and Low Tuberculosis Incidence Rates,” BMC Infectious Diseases 11:2 (2011), p. 6.

⁵² Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Form 1071i: Health Requirement for Permanent Entry to Australia.

⁵³ Alvarez et al., “A Comparative Examination of Tuberculosis Immigration Medical Screening Program,” p. 5.

⁵⁴ Kathleen King, Paul J. Douglas, and Ken Beath, “Is Premigration Health Screening for Tuberculosis Worthwhile?,” Medical Journal of Australia 195:9 (2011), pp. 534–537.

⁵⁵ UNAIDS, The Impact of HIV-related Restrictions on Entry, Stay and Residence: Personal Narratives (Geneva, Switzerland: UNAIDS, 2009).

⁵⁶ UNAIDS, Global Commission on HIV and the Law: Risks, Rights & Health (Geneva, Switzerland: UNAIDS, 2011), pp. 59–61.

⁵⁷ Bigo, “Globalized (in)Security,” p. 34.

⁵⁸ David Fidler and Lawrence O. Gostin, Biosecurity in the Global Age: Biological Weapons, Public Health and the Rule of Law (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 121; Claire Hooker and Syed H. Ali, “SARS and Security: Health in the New Normal,” Studies in Political Economy 84 (2009), pp. 101–126.

⁵⁹ Dean Wilson and Leanne Weber, “Surveillance, Risk and Preemption on the Australian Border,” Surveillance & Society 5:2 (2008), pp. 124–141; Australian National Audit Office, Audit Report No. 37, 2006–07: Administration of the Health Requirement of the Migration Act 1958 (Canberra, Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 2008).

⁶⁰ Parsley, “Performing the Border”; Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, p. 101.

⁶¹ Decision of the Australian Migration Review Tribunal: 0901884 [2010] MRTA 905.

⁶² Doreen Massey, “New Directions in Space,” in Derek Gregory and John Urry (eds), Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London, UK: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 9–19.

⁶³ Decision of the Migration Review Tribunal of Australia: [2002] MRTA 5266.

⁶⁴ Alan Ingram, “Domopolitics and Disease: HIV/AIDS, Immigration, and Asylum in the UK,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26:5 (2008), pp. 875–894.

⁶⁵ Paul Farmer, Aids and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

⁶⁶ Judith Littleton, Julie Park, and Linda Bryder, “The End of a Plague? Tuberculosis in New Zealand,” in Ann Herring and Alan C. Swedlund (eds), Plagues and Epidemics: Infected Spaces Past and Present (New York: Berg, 2010), pp. 119–136.

⁶⁷ UNAIDS, Global Commission on HIV and the Law, p. 61.

⁶⁸ Anne-Emanuelle Birn, “Making it Politic(al): Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through Action on the Social Determinants of Health,” Social Medicine 4:3 (2009), pp. 166–182.

⁶⁹ Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 16–18.