Analytical Approaches to Improve the Defensive Asylum Process at the United States Southern Border

This Major Qualifying Project encompasses an analysis of the United States defensive asylum process with the goal of providing information to assist decision makers for immigration policy. Currently, there are over one million pending immigration cases that include asylum seekers who are waiting for a hearing. Through the use of data and regression analysis, queuing theory, simulation, and optimization, the team developed a web-based tool to aid in resource allocation at the United States southern border. The web tool takes these relationships and user input data to output a sector-by-sector allocation of judicial resources to minimize time in system, queue size, and costs

Performance analysis of time-dependent queueing systems: survey and classification

Many queueing systems are subject to time-dependent changes in system parameters, such as the arrival rate or number of servers. Examples include time-dependent call volumes and agents at inbound call centers, time-varying air traffic at airports, time-dependent truck arrival rates at seaports, and cyclic message volumes in computer systems.There are several approaches for the performance analysis of queueing systems with deterministic parameter changes over time. In this survey, we develop a classification scheme that groups these approaches according to their underlying key ideas into (i) numerical and analytical solutions,(ii)approaches based on models with piecewise constant parameters, and (iii) approaches based on mod-ified system characteristics. Additionally, we identify links between the different approaches and provide a survey of applications that are categorized into service, road and air traffic, and IT systems

Life, death, and corporeal resistance in immigration detention

This thesis analyzes corporeal strategies of resistance used by immigration detainees in the global North. Corporeal resistance is defined as an act of protest that physically harms the actor but is not intended to harm anyone else. Examples include hunger strikes, lip sewing, self-immolation, and other forms of public suicide. In response to the prevailing public opinion that detainees\u27 acts of self-harm or suicide are simply acts of desperation by disenfranchised people who have nothing to lose, I argue that they can be a logical and strategic response to state necropolitics. Detainees take back corporeal necropower by reasserting control of their own life and death. The paper proceeds by analyzing the corporeal power inherent in immigration detention centers. I analyze detention centers as a space of waiting in a confined space for an indeterminate amount of time, in which the state is given the power to deport detainees to a place where their life is threatened (effectively sentencing them to death), or allow detainees to stay (letting them live). I then elaborate on how detainees have used methods of self-harm as a form of corporeal resistance. Narratives from detainees who have participated in these acts demonstrate a desire to reassert corporeal autonomy and send a symbolic message that their life is at stake. State responses to detainee corporeal resistance, in turn, show that these acts are a threat to the very object and purpose of immigration detention

Analysis of buffer allocations in time-dependent and stochastic flow lines

This thesis reviews and classifies the literature on the Buffer Allocation Problem under steady-state conditions and on performance evaluation approaches for queueing systems with time-dependent parameters. Subsequently, new performance evaluation approaches are developed. Finally, a local search algorithm for the derivation of time-dependent buffer allocations is proposed. The algorithm is based on numerically observed monotonicity properties of the system performance in the time-dependent buffer allocations. Numerical examples illustrate that time-dependent buffer allocations represent an adequate way of minimizing the average WIP in the flow line while achieving a desired service level

A Queueing Analysis to Determine How Many Additional Beds Are Needed for the Detention and Removal of Illegal Aliens

Due to lack of detention capacity (the U.S. government measures capacity by the number of detention beds), tens of thousands of apprehended illegal aliens are released into the U.S. interior each year, instead of being removed from the country. This vulnerability can be exploited by terrorist groups wanting to enter the United States. We construct a queueing model of the U.S. detention and removal operations, and derive approximate analytical expressions for key performance measures, including a simple normal approximation for the required number of beds. Due to shortcomings in the U.S. government's data collection procedures, we cannot directly estimate all of the model's parameter values. Consequently, we use the approximate analytical expressions and the 2003 U.S. government data quantifying these key performance measures to estimate several unknown parameter values. Although current funding is for approximately 21,000 detention beds, we estimate that approximately 34,500 beds are needed to remove all potential detainees (this does not include nonviolent, noncriminal Mexicans, who are returned to Mexico within several hours) based on 2003 data. The dramatic increase in the arrivals of potential detainees since 2003 suggests that approximately 50,000 beds are currently required, although the estimation of future arrival rates is very difficult due to uncertainties about the future direction of U.S. immigration policy. Our estimated bed requirements are approximately 25% higher than naive estimates that fail to account for right censoring of residence times due to some detainees being released from detention before removal to make way for higher-priority detainees.nonstationary queues, statistical inference, homeland security

'Less like a wall': negotiating asylum in contemporary Australian and UK reality theatre

This thesis takes as its starting point Elaine Scarry’s theorisation of the benign room, which enables civilisation by acting as a filtering mediator between the body and the world. With this theoretical underpinning, I explore how contemporary Australian and UK reality theatre about asylum navigates and interprets what I have termed necrocivilisation (society predicated on the impermeable or overly porous cell rather than the room). Important work on performance and asylum has proliferated over the past twenty years, including compelling investigations of several plays discussed in the present project. This thesis draws on but also recasts these insights into ethics and political expediency, bearing witness, hypervisibility, and hospitality. The porosity of borders is a central concern in this burgeoning body of work, and this thesis will serve to illuminate past and future research by way of an extensive analysis of filtered and filtering boundaries in contemporary theatre about asylum. It offers a framework for reading these plays based on the concept of the filter, a metaphor that manifests in various ways (from sieve-like boats to the bodies of hunger strikers to plastic carpet runners) as the plays under investigation employ it to comprehend and communicate the individual and collective implications of necrocivilisational boundary production. Australia and the UK are linked by Anglo colonial histories, theatre traditions, and the migratory imaginaries of both are intensely shaped by the sea. Given these connections between the two liberal democracies, as well as the tendency of European states to look to Australia’s hardline asylum policies as a guide, an examination of Australian asylum theatre alongside UK examples provides insight into continuities but also often subtle but significant points of divergence. The thesis examines three settings of asylum filtering: the journey and arrival, the holding cell, and civilisation. Each of these Parts contains two chapters focusing on two to three plays produced in Australia and the UK respectively. ‘Part I: Vessels’ examines plays involving both porous and impermeable vehicles that convey asylum seekers toward hoped-for security in the UK and Australia, and contextualises encounter on shores characterised as points of siege. Examining the Scarrian room’s carceral perversion, ‘Part II: Cells’ locates the non-arrival of immigration detention and other carceral asylum measures in the filtering devices that construct and justify material and discursive cages for people seeking refuge. Finally, ‘Part III: Civilisation’ investigates plays that take for their subject Australian and UK civil society and its relationship to people seeking asylum. I argue that filters utilised in the plays I discuss frame how necrocivilisation thrives in each of these settings, and, importantly, how each play proposes to resist it. The thesis as a whole demonstrates that the filter as lens to investigate physical and discursive boundaries leads to important insights into both the power and limitations of theatre of asylum in western liberal democracies

Australia's frontline: Remembering the 1939-45 war

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