BY SARAH STEPHEN
One of immigration minister Philip Ruddock's central arguments against accepting "queue jumpers" (read, onshore arrivals) from Afghanistan is because they know that they have a better chance of being granted asylum in Australia than if they waited to be assessed by the United Nations in Pakistan or Indonesia.
The UN has challenged this assertion, explaining that of those Afghan asylum seekers in Indonesia in 2000, 32.2% were recognised as refugees and only 13.4% rejected. The remaining 54.4% have not even come into contact with the extremely under-resourced United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
The 70% of Afghan asylum seekers assessed as refugees in Indonesia is not appreciably different from the 60-90% assessed as refugees in Australia.
There are currently 500 UN-recognised refugees in Indonesia awaiting resettlement. Only Sweden and the US have agreed to take any — 27 each. The Australian government has not agreed to take any from this "official" queue.
PM John Howard told the August 31 Australian, "What we object to is that people go outside the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and they bypass an internationally credible [system] which is fair to all potential refugees."
But the claim that those who use their own limited resources to find sanctuary are less needy than, or taking the places of, those waiting in refugee camps misses the central point that the immigration programs of wealthy countries are not geared to help the neediest people (see table).
Consider this. There are, according to UN estimates, presently 23 million people in the world identified as fitting the UN definition of a refugee. Of the 138 countries party to the UN refugee convention, only 10 have refugee resettlement quotas for UN-identified refugees. In total, the annual resettlement quotas of all 10 countries amount to a mere 110,000.
If only half of the world's refugees sought resettlement in another country, it would take 210 years to resettle them all. Many countries don't have resettlement quotas, yet take in large numbers of refugees. If this doubled the UN's resettlement capacity, it would still take 105 years.
The UNHCR cannot prioritise the neediest refugees because it hasn't the staff to assess, or the capacity to resettle, even a fraction of those most desperately in need. If every refugee had an equal chance of being resettled (and many have never seen someone from the UNHCR), they would still face a four in 1000 chance. That's not a queue, that's a lottery.
That's why large numbers of asylum seekers have little choice but to turn to people smugglers to help them find safety and a chance at a new life.
Ruddock and Howard argue that Australia has to make a choice between an immigration program controlled by the government on the one hand or by criminals and people smugglers on the other.
This couldn't be more wrong. The two are unavoidably connected — enforcing a strictly limited and highly controlled refugee intake forces asylum seekers to turn to smugglers.
The only thing which will permanently eliminate the conditions under which the people-smuggling trade flourishes is for all wealthy countries to open our doors, particularly to the millions fleeing the horror of conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The movement of people around the world is nothing new. It's been a feature of human society since its beginning.
What is new today is the barriers being erected around rich countries to stop this free flow of people, and in particular those designed to stop the poor, mainly non-white majority from moving to rich, mainly white countries.
As the barriers go up, the imperatives to move are also becoming more urgent. Corporate globalisation is steadily increasing the misery and suffering of the majority of the world's people, as it concentrates wealth and resources in the hands of a tiny minority inside a small number of rich countries.
This trend is accentuating the flow of people out of war-ravaged, environmentally devastated and politically repressive countries, and in to those same rich countries who have helped to create the grotesque system of global inequality.
Those rich-country governments must now be compelled to take moral and social responsibility for the human consequences of their decades-long actions.