Book review: Border Crimes: Australia’s War on Illicit Migrants
Abstract
TCRsptcrTheoretical Criminology1362-48061461-7439SAGE PublicationsSage UK: London, England10.1177/136248061141835510.1177_1362480611418355Book reviewsBook review: Border Crimes: Australia’s War on Illicit MigrantsPoyntingScottManchester Metropolitan University, UK22012161113115GrewcockMichaelBorder Crimes: Australia’s War on Illicit MigrantsSydney: Institute of Criminology Press, 2009. pp. ISBN: 9780975196793, AU$49.99 (pbk)© SAGE Publications 20122012SAGE PublicationsWatching the news just before Christmas 2010, of 48 or more asylum seekers drowning off Australia’s Christmas Island, I felt doubly guilty. I was ashamed as an Australian that my country was continuing to flout international law in ways that led ineluctably to the otherwise avoidable deaths of yet more asylum seekers. I also felt guilty that I had not yet reviewed Mike Grewcock’s careful, analytical and (since it is commendably morally engaged) inevitably condemnatory study, Border Crimes: Australia’s War on Illicit Migrants. Grewcock shows us that such deaths are not just tragedies, they are the result of state crimes. The perpetrators of these ‘border crimes’ are not the conveniently blamed ‘people smugglers’, still less the victims travestied as ‘illegal immigrants’, they are policy-makers and agents of the Australian state. These are state crimes.Border Crimes begins, appropriately, with the story of the Iraqi refugee, the late Amal Basry, who with her son Rami survived in October 2001 the shipwreck of the