All at Sea: The Policy Challenges of Rescue, Interception, and Long-Term Response to Maritime Migration

As the world’s refugee and asylum-seeker populations climbed past post-World War II records in 2015, the most dramatic images of migration were of those who travel by sea, typically in dangerously overcrowded and barely seaworthy vessels. A drowned child lying facedown in the sand. Capsized boats. Life jacket-strewn beaches. People huddled on deck, awaiting rescue.

Just a tiny proportion of the world’s international migrants travel by sea without permission to enter their intended destination country. Yet the plight of these migrants—with more than 3,700 lives lost at sea in 2015 in the Mediterranean alone—receives an outsize share of media and policymaker attention. And in certain countries, it absorbs a significant amount of financial and human resources devoted to making and implementing migration policy.

This volume reviews the policy responses to irregular maritime arrivals at regional, national, and international levels, focusing on case studies in five global hotspots: the Mediterranean, the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea region, the Gulf of Aden/Red Sea, Australia, and the Caribbean.

While policy discussions once typically focused on rescue at sea, those today are more likely to be framed in terms of interception designed to address concerns of border protection, national security, and organized crime. The current, central dilemma, as explored by Kathleen Newland and her coauthors, is how to reconcile these concerns with international legal obligations and regional or global burden-sharing.