Abstract
Australia and Italy share many similarities. Boat people became an increasingly prominent source of political and public debate following the end of the Cold War in both countries. Similarly, support for anti-immigrant political parties began to grow during the mid-1990s. Partly as a result of these parties’ advance, immigration became an important electoral issue. Each state attempted to externalise its policies towards boat people as a result. But the nature of political and public debates surrounding the issue, the types of policies introduced to cope with the phenomenon and the consequences of those policy changes diverged considerably. This book presents a distinct puzzle: why did Australia and Italy, when faced with a similar problem, often react so differently? The comparative historical approach taken to solve this puzzle is explained and the contribution of the book to recent scholarship is also identified.
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Notes
- 1.
Amy Nethery and Carly Gordyn, ‘Australia–Indonesia cooperation on asylumseekers: a case of ‘incentivised policy transfer”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 68:2, 2014, 177–193.
- 2.
Susan Kneebone, ‘The Bali Process and Global Refugee Policy in the Asia–Pacific Region’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 27.4, 2014, 596–618.
- 3.
Irene Bloemraad, ‘The promise and pitfalls of comparative research design in the study of migration’, Migration Studies 1.1, 2013, 27–46, p. 41–2.
- 4.
Caroline Brettell and James Hollifield, ‘Migration Theory’, in Caroline Brettell and James Hollifield (eds), Migration Theory, Routledge, New York/London, 2000, 1–26, p. 14.
- 5.
Elena Ricci examines Malta and Italy’s more treatment of boat people in Il dramma del Mediterraneo, Milan: Mimesis, 2015. Kitty Calavita has compared Spain and Italy’s immigration laws more generally in Immigrants at the margins: Law, race, and exclusion in Southern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- 6.
To learn more about how Greece deals with asylum seekers, many of whom arrive by boat, see Heath Cabot, On the doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
- 7.
See, for example, Jacqueline Bhabha and Mary Crock, Seeking Asylum Alone, a Comparative Study: A Comparative Study of Laws, Policy and Practice in Australia, the UK and the US, Sydney: Themis Press, 2007, Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan (eds.), Does History Matter? Making and debating citizenship, immigration and refugee policy in Australia and New Zealand, Canberra: ANU Press, 2009 or Rebecca Hamlin, Let Me be a Refugee: Administrative Justice and the Politics of Asylum in the United States, Canada, and Australia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Of course, French is also an official language in Canada. Some exceptions exist, such as Claudia Tazreiter’s study of the role of NGOs and asylum policy in Australia and Germany; Claudia Tazreiter, Asylum Seekers and the State, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
- 8.
Charles Ragin and David Zaret, ‘Theory and method in comparative research: Two strategies’, Social forces 61.3, 1983, 731–754.
- 9.
Donatella della Porta, ‘Comparative analysis: case-oriented versus variable-oriented research’, in Donatella della Porta and Michael Keating (eds.), Approaches and methodologies in the social sciences: A pluralist perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 198–222, p. 221.
- 10.
Adrienne Héritier, ‘Causal explanation’ in Donatella della Porta and Michael Keating (eds.), Approaches and methodologies in the social sciences, 61–79.
- 11.
Donatella della Porta, ‘Comparative analysis’, p. 198.
- 12.
See, for example, Matthew Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees, London and New York: Routledge, 2001; Alison Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010; Alexander Betts and Gil Loescher, Refugees in International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; and Matthew Price, Rethinking Asylum. History, Purpose, and Limits, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
- 13.
For specific periods of asylum policymaking, see Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. For a concise history of the asylum policy of one country, see Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National, and Local Perspectives During the Twentieth Century, London: Routledge, 1999 or Gérard Noiriel, La Tyrannie du National. Le Droit d’Asile en Europe 1793–1993, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991. Despite the titles, Kushner and Knox’s book focuses on Britain’s reception of refugees and Noiriel’s deals mostly with the history of asylum in France.
- 14.
Michael Marrus, The Unwanted. European Refugees in the Twentieth Century, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980s; Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; Phil Orchard, A Right to Flee: Refugees, States, and the Construction of International Cooperation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
- 15.
Klaus Neumann, Across the Seas: Australia’s response to refugees, Collingwood: Black Inc., 2015.
- 16.
See these authors’ various entries in the bibliography for more details of their publications.
- 17.
Some notable exceptions were the work of Nascimbene and Finotelli: Bruno Nascimbene and Carlos Pena Galiano, ‘Italy’, in Jean-Yves Carlier, Dirk Vanheule, Klaus Hullman and Carlos Pena Galiano (eds), Who is a Refugee?, Kluwer: The Hague, 1997, 457–469; Bruno Nascimbe, ‘Italy’, in Imelda Higgins (ed), Migration and Asylum Law and Policy in the European Union, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 205–222; Claudia Finotelli, ‘Accolti o sanati? L’asilo e la protezione umanitaria in paesi di ‘nuova’ e ‘vecchia’ immigrazione’, in Francesca Decimo and Giuseppe Sciortino (eds.), Reti Migranti, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006, 211–245.
- 18.
For example, Federico Lenzerini, ‘The evolution of Italian jurisprudence concerning the relationship between the constitutional right of asylum and the recognition of refugee status’, The Italian Yearbook of International Law Online 19.1, 2009, 137–156; Christopher Hein (ed.), Rifugiati: Vent’anni di storia del diritto d’asilo in Italia, Rome: Donzelli, 2010; Marina Calloni, Stefano Marras and Giorgia Serughetti, Chiedo Asilo: Essere rfigiato in Italia, Milan: Università Bocconi, 2012; Simonetta Bisi and Eva Pfösti (eds.), Quasi umani: I richiedenti asilo in Italia, Rome: Bordeaux, 2014.
- 19.
See, for example, Emanuela Paoletti, The Migration of Power and North–south inequalities: The case of Italy and Libya, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; Philippe Fargues and Sara Bonfanti, ‘When the best option is a leaky boat: why migrants risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean and what Europe is doing about it’, Migration Policy Centre Document, 2014; Elena Ricci, Il dramma del Mediterraneo; Maurizio Albahari, Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
- 20.
Charles Tilly, ‘Why and How History Matters’, in Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly (eds.), The Oxford handbook of contextual political analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006, 417–437, p. 417.
- 21.
H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science. Twin Vistas on the Past, London: Harper and Row, 1964, p. 107.
- 22.
Michael Margolis and Gary Mauser, ‘Public Opinion as a Dependent Variable: An Empirical and Normative Assessment’, in Michael Margolis and Gary A. Mauser (eds.), Manipulating Public Opinion, California: Brooks/Cole, 1989, 365–379, p. 366.
- 23.
Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News, New York: Vintage Books, 1980, p. 117.
- 24.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent. The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, p. 22.
- 25.
Teun A. van Dijk, ‘Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis’, Discourse and Society 4.2, 1993, 249–283, p. 268.
- 26.
Jane McAdam, ‘Australia and Asylum Seekers’, International Journal of Refugee Law 25.3, 2013, 435–448, p. 435.
- 27.
Luciano Fasano and Francesco Zucchini, ‘L’implementazione Locale del Testo Unico sull’Immigrazione’, in ISMU-Cariplo, Sesto Rapporto sulle Migrazioni in Italia, Milan: Franco-Ageli, 2001, p. 39. Quoted in Kitty Calavita, ‘Italy: Economic Realities, Political Fictions, and Policy Failures’, in Wayne Cornelius, Philip Martin and James Hollifield (eds), Controlling immigration: a global perspective, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004 (updated edition of 1994 publication), 345–380, p. 371.
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Glynn, I. (2016). Introduction: International Obligations Versus National Interests. In: Asylum Policy, Boat People and Political Discourse . Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51733-3_1
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