Making Migration Law: The Foreigner, Sovereignty and the Case of Australia

Welcome and welcome back! We would like to invite you to our first event this term. Our speaker is Dr Eve Lester, who will talk about her new book Making Migration Law: The Foreigner, Sovereignty and the Case of Australia.

About the event:  
In her book Eve describes how migration law in Australia is best understood as part of a longer jurisprudential tradition in which certain political-economic interests have shaped the relationship between the foreigner and the sovereign. Her book explores how this relationship has been wrought by a political-economic desire to regulate race and labour; a desire that has produced the claim that there exists an absolute sovereign right to exclude or condition the entry and stay of foreigners. Lester calls this putative right a discourse of 'absolute sovereignty'. She argues that 'absolute sovereignty' talk continues to be a driver of migration lawmaking, shaping the foreigner-sovereign relation and making thinkable some of the world's harshest asylum policies.