Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru

Abstract

This paper advances a resource extractive framework for understanding the expansion of extraction and capitalist activity into the governance of human mobility. It draws on my research on the post/colonial overlaps of extractive industries around mineral and migrant resource sectors in the Republic of Nauru. Nauru, the world’s smallest island state, was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century. After the wealth it derived from phosphate extraction was depleted in the 1990s, the sovereign state resurged on the back of the refugee industry by importing Australia’s maritime asylum-seeking populations. By drawing continuities between past and present extractive industries, this paper emphasizes that environmental racism plays a crucial part in where migrant containment industries are located: all too often in minority and low-income communities. These uneven placements have important resonances with the racialized geographies of containment that are taking shape across the Global South, and the racial biases that structure how people move across borders. I argue that the disproportionate exposures of hypercriminalization, violence, and precarity that BIPOC migrants are subject to, as part of a differential access to mobility, is a form of environmental racism that is enacted on migrants’ bodies. An extractivist lens broadens our analytical and critical capacity to not only understand but also combat the growth in migrant containment regimes worldwide. Placing emphasis on the significance of livable futures for migrant, Indigenous, and citizen populations alike can challenge prevailing hierarchies and push back against the boundaries carved out by the state.