In our contemporary world, asylum and immigration have become politically charged issues, questionably linked to terrorism in a post-9/11 climate of fear where those who are noticeably ‘foreign’ are deemed suspects. Despite globalising trends, marked by migratory movements and border crossings, barriers are going up along the frontiers of the rich world, restricting entry to asylum seekers and other disadvantaged migrants, who are held up at borders, kept in internment camps and detention centres, and subject to deportation. Those fleeing war, poverty and other forms of violence find themselves in new spaces of confinement and exclusion, although the unwanted migrants are often the fallout from the military interventions and colonial histories of the wealthy states reinforcing their borders against them. The terrorist threat following 9/11 is one of the reasons offered for the new ‘deportation regime’, which comprises elements of mobility control and detention, as well as actual deportation (Peutz and De Genova 2010: 4).

This chapter deals with science fiction films that have dramatised these issues in their dystopian worlds set in an alternative present or future. In the scenario that unfolds in Children of Men (2006), set in 2027, Britain has closed its borders and declared all foreigners ‘illegal’. Immigrants are locked up in cages and mistreated in ways reminiscent of ‘War on Terror’ prisons and Nazi concentration camps. In Monsters (2010), the USA has constructed a wall along its border with Mexico to keep out the aliens that inhabit the extraterrestrial ‘Infected Zone’ south of the border. A spacecraft hovers above Johannesburg in District 9 (2009), discharging an alien refugee population who are placed in a temporary camp that becomes a security zone.

Despite common assumptions that it deals with the future, science fiction (henceforth SF) is a historiographic mode: ‘it relates to us stories about our present, and more importantly about the past that has led to this present’ (Roberts 2006: 28). It has a number of elements in common with the historical dramas discussed in Chapter 2 and shares some of their pitfalls. Similar to those films, which present their own historical story-worlds through their imaginative creation of the past, and the memory-worlds in Chapter 3, SF designs and dwells in its own world, which is in constitutive tension with this world.