No, no, no, no. Not more ‘illegals’!
By Bert Hetebry
A group of South Asian men arrived on our doorstep seeking shelter, seeking a place to be made welcome, seeking safety and security. We don’t know why they left their homelands, but they undertook a dangerous journey, finding their way from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India to Indonesia to board small, overcrowded boats and sail across to the northwest of Western Australia.
We don’t know what drove those men to leave their homelands, but to leave is never easy, the decisions usually are to escape one sort of tyranny or another, whether it be religious persecution or some other form of intolerance which is life threatening, racial difference, sexual orientation, or the consequences of natural disasters, but whatever the reason, they now find themselves on Nauru effectively imprisoned for an indeterminate period of time while various checks are made to determine who they are and whether their claim to seek asylum is legitimate, but are promised that they will never be settled in Australia.
They join a multitude of other stateless people, adrift in the uncertainty of having no home to go back to and no place for them to go to. According to the documentary film Human Flow made in 2017 by the Chinese artist and activist Ai WeiWei, about 68million people in search of a home, somewhere, anywhere as they have fled wars, famine, persecution and a life that the only certainty appeared to be death either through starvation or violence or imprisonment for daring to speak out on political differences. According to UNHCR that number has grown to over 110 million in 2023. That is about 1.375% of the world’s population are displaced for any number of reasons. (To make that number seem more real, that is more than 13 people out of every thousand, worldwide.)
Included in that number are internally displaced people who are not defined as refugees but have fled their homelands because of desertification due to climate change, flooding of regions to build dams to gain water security, rising sea levels or other environmental issues which have made the homelands uninhabitable.
These people, seeking somewhere to live are not criminal, they are not illegal, terms which seem to be flung around when defining refugees or asylum seekers, whether they arrive here by plane or boat. Many, according to the Australian Red Cross arrive here with a valid visa, as visitors, and then make claims for asylum. Neither is it illegal to enter a foreign country without visa, passport or other papers when seeking asylum. So the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia, effectively as criminals is not in accordance with the UN Declaration of Human Rights, to which we as a nation are signatories to. Article 14 affords the right to asylum in other countries from persecution.
We have politicised and effectively criminalised those who are some of the most desperate and disadvantaged people in the world and deny them the basic human rights as defined by that declaration which we are obliged to uphold.
And yes, we do have the right, in fact the obligation to confirm that the asylum seeker has a legitimate claim to asylum, and we can restrict their movements during the period of validating that claim. The wording of Article 14 stipulates that the right to seek and enjoy other countries asylum from persecution “may be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.” That does acknowledge that not all claims are legitimate and that at times criminals do try to get in ‘through the back door’, but the safeguards are there to ensure that those who are not legitimate refugees can be sanctioned, deported, returned to face justice from the place they have fled.
Listening to the political debate on refugees and asylum seekers, one could be forgiven for thinking that we have a severe problem.
We don’t.
The nations hosting the most refugees are Iran, Turkey, Germany, Pakistan, Uganda, Russian Federation, Poland, Bangladesh, Sudan, Ethiopia, Lebanon… and Australia does not even appear on that listing from stastista.com. Iran according to UNHCR for over 40 years has been host “to the largest and most protracted urban refugees in the world and has provided asylum to refugees for over four decades.” Iran currently hosts over 3.4million refugees and asylum seekers. The small nation of Lebanon, almost half a million refugees, many dating back to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine/Israel.
Why are we afraid of showing some humanity? Fear of these strange, desperate people drives the political argument, but when I look at our history as a nation, we are an immigrant nation. Starting 236 years ago were undesirables from Britain, prisoners and their guards, followed by wave after wave of settlers and more convicts, after both world wars more immigrants seeking a new life away from wore torn Europe settled here, developing this nation to be at that time an essentially European nation but that changed in the 1970s when we welcomed people from all over the globe. After the Vietnam war we welcomed more boat people, Vietnamese escaping from the re-education camps of the winners of that conflict or the repression of those who had sided with the losing side, and with each successive wave of immigrants we saw new economies flourish, rather than being a burden on this country, these immigrants all have made great contributions to Australia, cultural diversity, new businesses, each wave adding to the economic and cultural development of Australia.
The reality is that each of us who does not claim First Nations status is an immigrant or can trace their ancestry to another country at the most ten generations ago, each of us have either arrived as immigrants, leaving our birth countries, or our parents, grandparents or great grand parents did, for reasons not dissimilar to those who arrive here, whether through the airport carrying a visitor’s visa or through unofficial channels, arriving by boat at great risk to escape whatever the threats and dangers of their homelands.
Diane Armstrong in her book The Voyage of Their Life, records the lives of over five hundred people who arrived in Australia in 1948 on a poorly prepared, dangerously inadequate ship, the SS Derna, and interviewed many of them fifty years later, recording the lives they have created in their new country, many are success stories, business people who have made significant economic contributions, others in the social and political spheres, from people who settled in all parts of Australia, from Western Australia to Far North Queensland, in other words like any other immigrant, arriving, seeking a better life for themselves and the families they formed.
Why do we continue to look to newcomers with such fear, instead of going through the validation of their claims for asylum as refugees and welcoming them so they too can start a new life and contribute as so many have before them.
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4 comments
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It is fear of losing identity.
As Goering said, people will take the big lie and press and papers will reinforce this insecurity for control within the society…if we feel threatened we will obey who ever the “strong” leader appears to be, Consider the battle for “without fear or favour” broadcasting and the “capture” of the ABC.
Most advanced nations are in turmoil through it on the basis of a flawed case presented that alleviates compassion. We were too scared to vote for the Voice and in are now in deep denial over Gaza. The real issue is to do with neglected facts as to ownership, control and distribution across the globe that create deep conflicts with a deprived country with population movements a symptom.
So, we ought to show solidarity with the Ignored World and its people, but loss of faith in politics through the incursions of neoliberalism creates and anxiety and scepticism of bona fides in our time has people shy away from action due to fear of betrayal by the oligarchy.
The oligarchy does not seem to want to bring the poor up to a minimum standard of living, it seems to want us who do have enough to be reduced to rat race level. Divide and conquer suits them, as we have seen in Britain and France, for example.
Some governments do try to alleviate the intended rough edges, but as Mathias Corman said, it is a “designed” society so that factor contributes to the upholding of false memes and the simulacrum. Give the manipulated, edgy folk people something to believe in regardless of whether its fair or rational and you win complicity in our over-heated time.
Exhibit A Dutton an d Murdoch.
I migrated from the UK to Australia when my partner successfully gained a professional position here. That was over 50 years ago when our 3 children were aged 7, 6 and 3.
Clearly we all spoke English as our first language, but many of the First Peoples of Australia cannot yet claim that, as it is often their third or more language.
It is time for a serious look at our Constitution, to properly recognise the place of those First Nations people, to appreciate that many who claim to be refugees when they arrive here have no hope of a life in the country where they were born, and that mankind is rapidly, urged on by the wealthy, destroying a once beautiful planet in their relentless quest for increased wealth!
When will we learn???
Two facts.
1; ever increasing numbers of people will be and are being involuntarily displaced from their localities due to both social instability (war, political/ethnic/religious persecution, ‘special military operations’) and environmental upheaval (ever-rising sea levels, droughts, flood etc).
2; 100% of this boatload seeking refuge are young males, which makes their case a hard one to sell.
Females are equally afflicted by environmental consequence, and often suffer worse systemic repression and abuse than their brothers (especially in more tribalistic or theocratic societies).
Also, when the “but terrorism” political card gets played, males between the ages of 15 & 50 comprise over 90% of the perpetrators of terrorist acts.
Finally, ‘women & children first’ is kindofa traditional policy when it comes to prioritising places on liferafts.
Realities we face.
Wrong question, bert?
How about why did you leave your women and children in danger?
It should not be possible for most, if not all, to be refugees.
ps
Spot on Crow, bert, is being disengenuous in his use of the SS Derna, in this context.