Anywhere but Here: Locating the Border and Narrating Asylum Seekers under Australia's Policy of Territorial Excision

This thesis argues that the securitization of migration is a discourse that has gained a near monopoly over how the physical spaces of the territorial border are imagined and how the border itself is understood as a site of exclusion and control. Narratives about who undocumented people are and why they arrive at the border play a central role in justifying the anxious regulation of the border and migration as a national security issue. Taking Australia's policy of territorial excision as a representative instance of border policy that is dictated and defined by the securitization of migration, this thesis traces the various and over-determined narratives of the territorial border and the undocumented person that were articulated in the parliamentary debates surrounding this policy. It argues against securitization's constructions of these subjects, to show that neither the border nor the undocumented migrant exist independently of the narratives that constitute them. These narratives work not only to justify the exclusion of undocumented people at the border as sensible and legitimate, but also actively obscure and discredit other ways of imagining people who arrive at the border, as well as the functions and spaces of territorial borders.