Book Review: Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers
| Author | Susan Banki |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639211049104 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Harry Annison https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6042-038X
References
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DAVID SCOTT FITZGERALD, Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 359, ISBN 9780190874155 (print).
David FitzGerald’sRefuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers
delivers precisely what its title promises: it lays out, in impressive and painstaking detail,
the how of keeping asylum seekers from ever entering countries where they might take
advantage of national laws that assure that they will not be sent home. FitzGerald,
Professor at the University of California San Diego and co-Director of its Center for
Comparative Immigration Studies, convincingly demonstrates that wealthy countries
that have signed the Refugee Convention effectively dodge their international obligations
through physical and legal forms of remote control. That is, by preventing asylum seekers
from ever setting foot in their territories, wealthy countries can avoid being called out for
forcing people to return to the countries from which they claim to be persecuted, and thus
they can still claim that they have adhered to the international norm of nonrefoulement.
Through a historical and modern examination of asylum as a concept, followed by
seven empirically rich chapters on the United States, Canada, the European Union, and
Australia, Refuge Beyond Reach demonstrates the lengths to which these governments
have designed an “architecture of repulsion”(p. 14) that deploys strategies to keep
people out that are akin to medieval forms of barricading.
Indeed, FitzGerald draws parallels between several medieval practices and those
undertaken by governments today, showing that across time and also across space,
Book Reviews 505
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