By Julia Morris

Author of

Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (2023).

Over the last few decades, asylum and border control have become increasingly outsourced from Global North to South. In one form of outsourcing, a destination country  contracts out the assessment and provision of asylum to a third country. Usually, the destination country’s goal is to reduce the number of asylum seekers arriving on their territory. There are many examples of this arrangement, from the EU funding Albania, Turkey, and countries across Africa, to the economic partnerships relating to asylum that exist between the United States, Mexico, and Central America.

Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru zeroes in on the local effects of one such policy. How does asylum outsourcing affect the world’s smallest island nation? Since 2001, Nauru, which is just twenty-one square kilometers and located in the equatorial Pacific, has had an on-and-off asylum partnership with Australia. In this arrangement, Nauru houses asylum seekers who are trying to reach Australia by boat. Most of these asylum seekers are coming from Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq; when they cannot obtain an Australian visa, they attempt harrowing boat journeys to claim asylum on Australian territory. Australian’s excision policy now prevents asylum seekers who arrive by boat from lodging asylum claims . Most of these asylum seekers are turned back to South Asia or picked up by the Australian coastguard, then sent to Nauru for claims processing and resettlement.

I draw on long-term fieldwork to chart Nauru’s move from a mineral to migrant economy. Like other practices of border outsourcing, Nauru’s asylum arrangement with Australia reflects deep colonial histories. Phosphate mining under the British dramatically transformed the island. Post-independence, Nauru held the world’s second highest GDP per capita after Saudi Arabia: fast cars met with fast food, and even a failed London Broadway musical investment. But all this led Nauru to the brink of disaster. Environmental depletion and near bankruptcy coupled with some of the highest diabetes and obesity rates worldwide. With a longstanding dependency on Australian-initiated extraction, the Nauruan government agreed to a new industry to resurge the country’s economy: this one, an import sector around asylum.

Since 2001, the Nauruan government has received more than AU$5 billion (roughly US$3.3 billion) from Australia for its asylum processing work, which is an enormous amount for a country with a GDP of less than AU$200 million (US$133 million) in 2022. Nauru’s finances are not all that have been transformed by this arrangement: its legal, economic, and even policing and education structures have also been remodeled in line with the demands of processing and resettling refugees. But while the asylum industry has proven highly profitable for some Nauruans and for Australian contracted workforces, it also carries harrowing consequences.

Asylum and Extraction describes the hefty costs of Nauru’s outsourcing arrangement on islanders, industry contractors, and migrant populations. Outsourcing asylum continues previous forms of colonialism—in Nauru’s case because it builds on the transformations initiated by British and Australian leadership during colonial phosphate mining. Outsourcing asylum also mirrors the dynamics of other extractive industries in the ways it wreaks havoc on individuals. In the phosphate industry, dust and toxins are released into the air, causing elevated rates of respiratory illnesses and other health traumas. In the asylum industry, migrants are forced to voice their trauma through demeaning legal narratives to secure the right to move elsewhere. The demands and consequences of housing asylum seekers from around the world ignores how many of these migrants have devastating pasts and uncertain futures. In Nauru, suicide and incidents of self-harm were tragically commonplace among asylum seekers and refugees.

Outsourcing asylum has deeply damaged Nauru, and the small nation’s experiences serve as a cautionary tale for other countries toying with similar contractual agreements. Nauru’s example also gives perspective to debates over “illegal immigration,” which have reached fever pitch. Dog whistle politics of deporting “illegals” also ignore the structural causes behind migration and the fact that most migration, both to Australia and elsewhere, is fully authorized. There are only small numbers of asylum seekers involved in Nauru’s case: 1,200 asylum seekers at the policy’s height. Asylum and Extraction uses granular and historically informed fieldwork to problematize the crisis narratives used by politicians, interest groups, and media to stir fear and attract support.

Julia Morris is Associate Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She holds a DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Previously, she was a Post-doctoral Fellow at The New School’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility and a Research Student at Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. Morris’ research focuses on forced migration, refugees, humanitarianism, and border work. Her work looks particularly at the moves of western governments towards developing outsourced asylum and border regimes, conceptualized as a contemporary form of resource extraction, much like other forms of mining, but that involves racialized migrants as commodities. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the impacts of border outsourcing on migrants, local residents, government agencies, and contracted workforces in the Republic of Nauru, Australia, Geneva, and Fiji to research projects in Guatemala, Jordan, and Lebanon.