We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come. A proposition first articulated by John Howard and later reiterated by Tony Abbott. It stands to reason – we are a sovereign nation, and whether or not one subscribes to the notion of open borders, the reality is that we possess both law and procedure to determine who can enter and immigrate. While these facts are open to political contestation – for example, under extreme libertarian notions of freedom of mobility, anarchist notions of statelessness, and among certain variants of the Marxist tradition – the idea of a nation constituting a sovereign state with international recognised and respected borders has come to play a central role in our ideas of security, collectivity, and national identity. What is also apparent, however, is that this is not a uniform standard in our global outlook. There is a demarcation, it seems, between those states that are genuinely sovereign and those in which sovereignty can, when it is convenient, be overlooked — a divide roughly corresponding to the …