Demonising refugees: The Australian experience

The Trump administration retreated last month when faced with outrage over its separation of refugee and migrant families at the Mexican border. President Donald Trump said he hated taking children away from their parents, and soon abandoned his claim that only Congress could stop it. Such a reversal is hard to imagine here in Australia, where the ruthless deterrence of asylum-seekers has provided a template for other countries in an era of hardened attitudes.

Australia does not separate the children of “unauthorised arrivals” from their parents, but it does detain entire families in horrible conditions, sometimes for years. Because these families are held in prison like centers on islands hundreds of miles away, Australians rarely get to see the kinds of images that provoked widespread anger in America. But even if we did, it is unlikely that public opinion or government policy would change. We Australians understand, and many of us accept, that discouraging migrants from landing on our shores means cruelty.

Deterrence is a seductive policy. It promises a sense of security and sovereignty in return for atrocious costs on a relatively small number of people, people often stigmatized as lawbreakers who need to be stopped for their own safety. The only way to deter people desperate enough to risk death on their journey to a new country is to threaten them with conditions worse than the ones they fled. The United States has so far been unwilling to do this explicitly, and Americans seem unprepared to face the human consequences of such an approach.

But if political leaders in the United States keep talking about a humanitarian crisis as nothing more than a violation of America’s laws, Americans could become inured to the suffering of migrants and more receptive to brutality. Trump’s preoccupation with foreigners “taking advantage” of Americans could still usher in an Australian-style future.

Australia has imposed mandatory detention on immigrants without valid visas since 1992. The government of Prime Minister John Howard toughened this policy in 2001 with the “Pacific Solution.” Under this system, asylum-seekers arriving by boat cannot apply for protection visas in Australia. Instead they are taken to detention centers in the island country of Nauru or, until recently, on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea while their claims are examined. Since 2013, it has been government policy that they cannot be resettled in Australia.

And while they wait to be processed, they languish in conditions that are often horrifying. A United Nations report from 2017 cites isolation, overcrowding and limited access to basic services on Manus and Nauru, along with “allegations of sexual abuse by the service providers” and continuing reports of self-harm and suicide.

This year, the Department of Home Affairs contested a federal court order that a 10-year-old who repeatedly attempted suicide on Nauru must be brought to Australia for treatment. In 2015, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture found that Australia’s processing centers violated the rights of asylum-seekers to be free from torture.  The prime minister at the time, Tony Abbott, responded that Australians were “sick of being lectured to by the United Nations.” About 80 per cent of the asylum- seekers detained on Nauru and Manus are ultimately found to be refugees. But with no prospect of ever being allowed into Australia, hundreds decide to return to their countries of origin. Australia has sought other locations for resettlement, including Cambodia and the United States. Canberra has so far

refused offers by New Zealand to resettle refugees, arguing that this option would be too appealing to asylum-seekers. Almost no boats have arrived in

Australia since Australian back an unknown There are detention 515 in Manus Island. Some of openly defend policies. they have “people smugglers since 2014, though the government has turned unknown number at sea. still some 225 people in on Nauru, and an estimated in “transition centers” on Island. of Australia’s politicians defend the brutality of deterrence policies. For many years, preferred to talk about smugglers” rather than asylum- seekers themselves. Forever banishing boat-borne asylum-seekers from Australia, they say, destroys the business of those who carry refugees on dilapidated vessels for profit. The politicians warn that people smugglers are watching and waiting for a moment of weakness by Australia to resume operations.

Last month, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton warned that “the hard-won success of the last few years could be undone overnight by a single act of compassion.”

Many people’s attitudes about asylum-seekers changed in 2008. That year, the Labour Party government of Kevin Rudd closed the Pacific detention centers and began processing asylum-seekers in Australia. This coincided with deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, and there was a surge in boat arrivals, resulting in many deaths at sea. Some progressives were finally convinced of the moral need for harsh policies.

A former Labour immigration minister, Tony Burke, describes how  he kept the name of a 10-week-old boy who died at sea on his desk as a reminder of why he came to support policies to discourage people from getting on boats. Labour reinstated offshore processing in 2012, but lost an election the following year to the Liberals and Abbott, who pledged to “stop the boats.” The Australian Greens, a smaller progressive party, is the only one in Parliament that consistently opposes offshore processing. The severe stances of the major parties are popular. A recent study found that about two-thirds of Australians support offshore processing, and growing numbers support measures to turn back intercepted boats at sea. While a quarter of the population say policies are too tough, higher numbers usually say policies are too soft. Some Australians see refugees from predominantly Muslim war-torn countries as national security threats, and believe they must be dealt with as harshly as possible. Many othersresent those who arrive by boat as “queue-jumpers” who have unfairly circumvented Australia’s laws, unlike the “legitimate” refugees who wait for years in United Nations refugee camps.

Government statements and public opinion reinforce each other. Politicians justify draconian measures with appeals to Australians’ sense of fairness and safety, and in turn they face an electorate that they fear would punish them if they did otherwise. If American public opinion turns towards accepting cruel deterrent measures, it will be political rhetoric that leads the way. Warnings by the Trump administration that criminals use children to exploit legal loopholes would sound familiar to Australians, whose government once claimed that asylum-seekers threw children into the sea to force the navy to take them to Australia.

While some Americans compared Trump’s separation policy to Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” when Australians seek fictional dystopias to account for our asylum policies we often reach for Ursula Le Guin. Her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” describes a peaceful and idyllic city-state whose happiness depends on the cruel imprisonment of a child in a basement.

Everyone knows the child is there. The citizens of Omelas may be disturbed by the predicament of the child, but they are convinced of its necessity. In the words of the journalist Jeff Sparrow: “Le Guin intended her story as a cautionary tale. How did we end up with two political parties using it as an instruction manual?”

(David T Smith is a senior lecturer at the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney.)