In recent decades, migrants have increasingly turned to dangerous maritime routes in their attempts to access the asylum systems and labor markets of the Global North. In the early 1980s, the United States was the first country to respond to such arrivals with a high seas interdiction program, initially conceived of as a means of intercepting Haitian asylum seekers before they reached U.S. territory. In its 1993 Sale v. Haitian Centers Council decision, the Supreme Court held that neither the Refugee Convention nor domestic immigration statutes constrained the executive’s capacity to interdict and return asylum seekers at sea. In the wake of 9/11 and the border control anxieties it sparked, several individual European countries, the European Union, and Australia adopted variants of the U.S. migrant interdiction approach.
http://www.law.yale.edu/news/18065.htm
