World's harshest refugee laws
By Iggy Kim
With last week's passing of the Border Protection Bill by the federal Coalition and Labor parties, Hansonism became law. Australia now ranks as the most anti-refugee among the wealthy, predatory countries of the First World. This is an amazing paradox just two years after the strong grassroots movement against the rise of Pauline Hanson's racist One Nation party.
This state of affairs is the result of some major attacks introduced over the last decade by Labor and Liberal governments.
Mandatory detention
The first was the mandatory detention of all unauthorised arrivals, implemented by the Labor federal government in 1994. This formalised the de facto situation since the Migration Act of 1958. The 1994 codification of mandatory detention was preceded by another Labor bill in 1992 which singled out "boat people" for such treatment.
While all imperialist governments have provisions for detaining people who arrive at their borders without permission, pending deportation or legal entry, only Australia imposes mandatory detention with no right to obtain bail or other temporary release.
More importantly, even unauthorised arrivals who formally request asylum are locked up while awaiting the outcome of their application. In the event of a negative ruling, they remain locked up during their (often lengthy) appeal. There is no judicial review of this criminal treatment.
Other wealthy countries that detain unauthorised arrivals seeking asylum do so only in particular circumstances, and the detainees have rights to judicial review and temporary release. In Portugal, those who request asylum within 48 hours of arriving cannot be detained at all.
In several countries, there are provisions for a weekly review of detention cases, as well as accountability and appeal procedures when detention is continued beyond a certain time. In 1994, Luxembourg reduced the maximum allowable detention period from six months to one month. There are also strict restrictions against imprisoning minors: Sweden recently raised the minimum age of detainees from 16 to 18.
In Australia, mandatory detention extends to children, including those born while their parents are detained. Since 1992, the time limit on detention has been set at 363 days. This is already too long, but counting is suspended during any legal proceedings, thereby condemning an asylum seeker to indefinite imprisonment.
According to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, in the early to mid-1990s, many were detained for more than three years before being deported or admitted.
The length of detention and the number of long-term detainees have now been greatly reduced, but only because restrictions were introduced by the Immigration Department in 1994 to prevent boat arrivals applying for asylum in the first place.
The proportion of "boat people" entering the refugee determination process is now less than 10%, compared to between 40% and 100% before 1994. Moreover, out of the minority who entered the process in 1994-97, the annual rate of granting refuge averaged about 7%, compared to a 1989-93 average of just over 55%.
If they are denied refuge at the primary stage of the application, asylum seekers can appeal to the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT), where, historically, there has been more success.
According to a 1998 National Audit Office report, the refugee determination process is the only administrative decision-making system in which the review stage has a higher approval rate than the primary stage, demonstrating the barriers refugees face in the first instance. The catch is that an appeal to the RRT costs $1000 if unsuccessful.
Temporary protection
The second major attack, incorporated in the Border Protection Bill, is the automatic denial of the right to permanent refuge for all asylum seekers who arrive without prior authorisation. Again, this is unique in the world.
Other governments have used temporary visas to deal with sudden influxes resulting from particular crises of mass displacement, such as the war in the Balkans. But Australia is the first to generalise this to all unauthorised arrivals who apply for asylum.
The particular target is "boat people", who are currently prey to a racist media frenzy in which every boat, whether it carries 10 or 100 people, is blasted by panic headlines. This is especially appalling in light of the tiny number of boat arrivals to Australia compared to the 20-25 million refugees worldwide, and compared to the multitudes of desperate migrants who arrive at the borders of other countries.
Australia brands "boat people" as the archetypal illegal immigrants — the two are synonymous in the capitalist media and government. But the largest category of "illegals" is the tens of thousands of visa over-stayers, primarily from Britain and the United States. There have not yet been reports of any of these illegal immigrants being hauled behind the barbed wire of Port Hedland or Woomera.
As we approach the centennial of the 1901 white Australia policy, it is being reintroduced in new guises, fuelled by the same paranoia about the "yellow hordes" threatening to clamber over the horizon. In the new century, the hordes will be not only yellow, but also black and brown, and occasionally white as the poor nations of eastern Europe and the Balkans join the Third World. Fifty-nine nationalities were aboard the six vessels that arrived in October.
To this day, Australia's top two source countries of immigrants are Britain and New Zealand. Canada's are Hong Kong and India, while the US's are Mexico and nations of the former Soviet Union.
As masters over a conquered island, what haunts the racist politicians and immigration bureaucrats in Canberra is the spectre of an uncontrolled and undetected tide of immigrants undermining a tightly controlled intake governed by economic imperatives (as manifested in the complex points system used to assess the eligibility of prospective immigrants). Refugees arriving by boat represent their worst nightmare.
And yet, in other imperialist countries, not only have "illegals" been a more common part of the social landscape, but there have also been widespread campaigns in support of their rights. Such campaigns have resulted in several mass legalisations in the United States (2.7 million last year) and Europe.
Only recently have there been moves in the US to limit public education, health and welfare services to illegal immigrants. This began with the passing of Proposition 187 in California in 1994, only after vociferous opposition by many 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ of the population. Subsequent court challenges have severely curbed the application of key parts of Proposition 187.
Compare Australia's treatment of refugees with that of some impoverished countries. In some nations of Africa, refugees make up 10-20% of the population. In 1997, the rate of granting refuge in all the African nations combined was 83.5% (of 49,270 applicants, many of them border arrivals without prior authorisation).
Global implications
All this points towards a broader but immediate need: the drastic overhauling of the formal category of refugee.
As global warming threatens to drown whole peoples, as 60 million by the end of this decade emigrate off lands too degraded to support them, and as those same millions are driven to the sprawling super-slums now fringing cities like Jakarta, Mexico City and Calcutta, we're fast approaching the precipice of a humanitarian crisis that will dwarf the Holocaust, the world wars and all the other essentially European tragedies that gave birth to the original entities of asylum and refugee. Outright persecution is no longer the issue.
Unfortunately, Australian governments' increasing tendency to punish the victims pushes the bounds of international practice and precedent away from any such overhaul of asylum provisions and refugee status.
The Inter-Governmental Consultations on Asylum, Refugee and Migration Policies in Europe, North America and Australia — an inter-imperialist body aimed at creating a uniform First World fortress — is due to hold its next full consultation in April. At that meeting, Australia's recent attacks are likely to become an imperialist benchmark.
Ultimately, the solution does not lie in laws governing the granting of refuge — this is only a secondary issue. As long as masses of people are displaced by global inequality, we should fight to allow them into the fortresses of privilege in the First World.
And if there is insufficient room, it's only because these fortresses have concentrated the world's wealth into such few, tightly clenched fists. The only lasting solution is to break these fists wide open.
[Iggy Kim will be presenting a talk on the subject of immigration and refugees at the Marxism 2000 conference, Sydney, January 5-9. See advertisement on page 7.]