Remote Control of Asylum Seekers: The US Experience

A Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law talk by David FitzGerald of the University of California, San Diego

As the Trump administration casts immigration to the forefront of its agenda, Professor David FitzGerald, from the University of California San Diego, offered a global, domestic and historical context for the latest American plans.

Remote Control of Asylum Seekers: The US Experience considered how immigration policies impact individuals in daily life. Professor FitzGerald added insight on contemporary issues in Australia, which last year offered to resettle refugees from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador now in camps in Costa Rica as part of a deal with the US.

Professor FitzGerald argued that the US government has built an expanding set of concentric rings of control around its territory. The effect – and often the intent – is to prevent asylum seekers from reaching the US to lodge claims or enjoy the full procedural rights of those on US territory. Within each of these rings, however, there are limits to the government’s ability to keep out asylum seekers.

This event was part of a Kaldor Centre lecture series on comparative perspectives on refugee issues. Information about other talks in this series is available here.

Audio from this event is available via iTunes.

Presentation slides from this presentation are available for download. 

About the Speaker:

David FitzGerald is Theodore E. Gildred Chair in US-Mexican Relations, Professor of Sociology, and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Co-author of Culling the Masses: The Democratic Roots of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2014), he also authored A Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages its Migration (University of California Press, 2009) and co-edited six books on Mexico-US migration.

His work on the politics of international migration, citizenship, and research methodology has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, International Migration Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Qualitative Sociology, New York University Law Review, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Professor FitzGerald was awarded the American Sociological Association’s International Migration Section Award for Public Sociology in 2013. His current project examines asylum policies in comparative perspective.