Asylum seeking galvanises brutal state responses. The challenge of confronting the brutality of border security is understanding the elusive interlocking of knowledge and power that normalises technologies of securitisation, detention, and defiance of international conventions. In this paper we employ Marxist philosopher Ernest Bloch to interrogate the temporal horizon of border security discourse revealing the act of asylum seeking as a form of activism threatening breakthrough to an alternative future. In this analysis we expose discourses, such as Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders, as formations marked by temporal closure as much as by a specific imbrication of knowledge and power. Drawing on nine vignettes, we discern opposing versions of hope as people seeking asylum, politicians, activists, practitioners, and Australian citizens are enrolled into the diffuse and multifaceted global response to asylum seeking. We demonstrate differing temporalities distinguishing and advocating the overwhelming vision of hope in the act of asylum seeking itself.