The Politics and Practice of Exclusion

Abstract

The policies of Direct Provision and dispersal in Ireland are part of a broader movement towards what has been named as ‘Fortress Europe', with security organizations such as Frontex established in 2004, guarding periphery areas and keeping people out. Responsibilities of states towards people seeking protection are shirked, skirted around and denied through increasingly militarized border control, restrictive policies and ever-narrower interpretations of the 1951 Geneva Convention (see Cole in Journal of Refugee Studies, 31(1): 1–21, 2017; Karamanidou and Schuster in Journal of Refugee Studies, 25(2): 169–192, 2012), a recent trend in asylum and migration policies ‘characterized by the regression of fundamental protections and the progression of tools and practices of deportation and prevention of access to EU territory' (Dikec in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27: 186, 2009); with the EU becoming, as Van Houtum and Pijpers (Antipode, 39(2): 291–309, 2007) argue, a ‘gated community' where migration is ‘managed' to protect the comfort of a capitalistic lifestyle through ‘the simultaneous attraction of economically valuable and the rejection of allegedly market-redundant immigrants' (2007: 292). Asylum has become an issue which is increasingly high up on states' agendas, a key policy and political issue which has ‘moved from the periphery to the centre of EU law and policy' (Thornton in Report on Coherence of Human Rights Policymaking in EU Institutions and Other EU Agencies and Bodies, p. 105, 2014) as a result of increased numbers of asylum claims since the 1990s.