Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru

This book provides an extraordinary glimpse into the remote and difficult-to-access island of Nauru, exploring the realities of Nauru's offshore asylum arrangement and its impact on islanders, workforces, and migrant populations. The book charts the island's colonial connection to phosphate through to a new industrial sector in asylum. It explores how this extractive industry is peopled by an ever-shifting cast of refugee lawyers, social workers, clinicians, policy makers, and academics globally and how the very structures of Nauru's colonial phosphate industry and the legacy of the “phosphateer” era made it easy for a new human extractive sector to take root on the island. By detailing the making of and social life of Nauru's asylum system, the book shows the institutional fabric, discourses, and rhetoric that inform the governance of migration around the world. As similar practices of offshoring and outsourcing asylum have become popular worldwide, they are enabled by the mobile labor and expertise of transnational refugee industry workers who carry out the necessary daily operations. The book goes behind the scenes to shed light on the everyday running of the offshore asylum industry in Nauru and uncover what really happens underneath the headlines. It illuminates how refugee rights activism and ＃RefugeesWelcome-style movements are caught up in the hardening of border enforcement operations worldwide, calling for freedom of movement that goes beyond adjudicating hierarchies of suffering.