Threatening bodies

During Refugee Week 2017, a 20-foot-tall man sailed into Melbourne crouched on a wooden boat. Inflatable Refugee is a sculpture made by Belgian art collective (Schellekens, 2017). The sculpture was initially exhibited in Venice in 2015 to highlight and comment on the plight of people journeying across the Mediterranean during the refugee crisis, and some of the problematic responses with which they had been met. The size of the sculpture was a critical commentary on the construction of refugees as a menacing and overwhelming presence advancing on Europe.

While there are differences in local contexts and encounters between refugees, migrants and populations in receiving societies, at a global level the response from governments in societies that have received them has been characterised to a significant degree by hostility and exclusion. These responses have been particularly pronounced in the states discussed in this book, drawing on some of the discursive and emotional legacies of earlier colonial encounters which were so central in the formations of these states. In his last few months in office, President Obama spoke at the 2016 UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants. He entreated to the audience, ‘This crisis is a test of our common humanity – whether we give in to suspicion and fear and build walls, or whether we see ourselves in another’ (Kenny and Koziol, 2016). Two months later, the 45th President of the US was elected on an anti-immigrant platform following a campaign defined by the chants of ‘build the wall’. In Autumn 2016 in Calais, as refugee camps were bulldozed, a £2.3 million British-funded border wall was erected in just two months. A few months later, in February 2017, the Dubs programme to resettle unaccompanied refugee children in the UK (discussed in Chapter Four) was brought to a premature end, having at that point assisted only 200 children. Across Europe too, border fences have been erected to prevent a repeat of the 2015 refugee exodus when people crossed the continent in search of safety, while in the summer of 2017 it was announced that some Italian ports might soon turn away humanitarian rescue boats (Wintour, 2017). The Australian government continues to maintain offshore detention facilities on the Pacific island of Nauru, despite the revelations of endemic and wide-scale abuse at the centre.