Border hotels: Spaces of detention and quarantine

'Border hotels' have come to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as spaces of detention and quarantine. Despite the longer history of using hotels for immigrant detention, efforts to contain outbreaks have led to the proliferation of hotels used for border governance. Ad hoc quarantine facilities have been set up around the world acting as choke points for mobility. The use of hotels as sites of detention has also gained significant attention, with pandemic related restrictions impacting on access to services for detained refugees and asylum seekers. Inhumane conditions and mobilisations against these conditions have recently received substantial media coverage. This symposium initiates a discussion about 'border hotels', closely engaging with these developments. Contributors document the shifting infrastructures of the border, and explore how these sites are experienced and resisted. They draw attention to divergent experiences of immobility, belonging, exclusion, and intersections of detention and quarantine. In exploring different - and controversial - aspects of 'border hotels', this symposium theorises modalities of governance implemented through hotels. Following in the footsteps of the 'hotel geopolitics' agenda (Fregonese and Ramadan 2015) it illustrates how hotels become integrated into border regimes. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the material and infrastructural dimensions of bordering practices and specifically to the literature on carceral geographies, polymorphic bordering and the politics of mobility.

Fault-lines in temporary migration schemes: The case of Australia and the legacies of settler-colonial mentalities in the exploitation of temporary non-citizens

We evaluate the complexity of temporary migration schemes in contrast to the longstanding approach to immigration as a key aspect of nation-building in settler societies. Until the early 1990s, predominantly one-way, permanent immigration schemes were preferred in settler societies such as Australia. In an increasingly fluid global context, temporary migrants are more susceptible to forms of abuse and exploitation in a host society, with fewer forms of redress due to their status as non-citizens and non-permanent residents. Taking a specific focus upon Australia, we contextualize the experiences of temporary migrants both prior to and under the conditions of COVID-19. Our key argument is that temporary migration schemes are organised and structured not only to favour states, as well as employers and businesses, but that the stripping back of rights to those who enter these schemes is a deliberative aspect of the state approach.