By Peter Boyle
Immigration minister Gerry Hand bluntly dismissed the hunger strike by 56 Chinese refugees detained at Port Hedland in an interview on Channel 10 on March 23. "If I was to intervene now", said Hand, "I may as well get the rules, tear them up and throw them away and say, 'Well, if you just come here, that's sufficient for you to stay in Australia'".
His statement was calculated to label the refugees as mere queue-jumpers, as immigrants simply not willing to abide by fair rules, and who sought to play him for a "good, old-fashioned Australian sucker". But these 56 people had crossed thousands of kilometres of ocean and then trekked for days across the desolate outback before they were rescued and then promptly detained. If they were just queue-jumpers, they were prepared to pay a very high price to come to Australia.
The label "queue-jumpers", like "illegal migrant" and "unskilled migrant" plays a very effective role in suspending all notions of compassion and human decency in the public debate on immigration. Powerful anti-immigration lobbies and cynical governments have combined to set the terrain for the immigration debate in the 1990s, and this terrain is distinguished by callousness and dubious perceptions of the "national interest". The labels were refined and inserted into a framework for immigration law by the 1988 Fitzgerald Report, which rode on a wave of anti-Asian hysteria whipped up by John Howard, Geoffrey Blainey and a handful of racists disguised as environmentalists.
Now the plight of the 56 Chinese — a story that one would expect to elicit sympathy — only draws a mindlessly callous response from a "left" Labor minister who insists that Australia is "fair" to refugees and has done "better than anyone else proportionally".
'Better than anyone'?
Proportional to its small population, Australia may be argued to have taken its share of the estimated 18 million refugees worldwide. But what does this really mean? In 1989-90 Australia took in a mere 1537 refugees, the previous year 3623. The supposedly big intake of Indochinese refugees between 1975 and 1982 amounted to less than 70,000.
Meanwhile, one of the poorest countries in the world, Bangladesh, is now home to some 200,000 recent refugees from Burma and they are coming in at 6000 a day, according to the latest press reports. Bangladesh also hosts 250,000 refugees from the Indian state of Bihar.
Thailand hosts 350,000 Cambodian refugees. Lebanon hosts 300,000 Palestinian refugees (most for more than four decades). Hong Kong, highest population densities (5385 per sq km) has 54,000 Indochinese refugees. War-ravaged and famine-prone Ethiopia has 400,000 Sudanese refugees, Uganda 300,000 Rwandan refugees. Even Australia's closet neighbour hosts some 7000 West Papuan refugees, while Australia has admitted only a handful of them.
Apart from the 18 million technically classed as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are a further 20 million "displaced persons", including 1.2 million Kurdish refugees who have returned to Iraq but are still subject to the persecution and deprivation that sent them fleeing across icy mountains into Iran and Turkey last year.
Few of the countries which host most of that sea of human misery have even a fraction of the resources or technology at Australia's disposal. They certainly don't have the option of hiding behind legalities, of screaming "queue-jumpers" when a mere 56 desperate people land on their shores!
Should the recession in Australia temper compassion for the refugees? There is permanent recession in most of the Third World, where unemployment rates of 50% or more are not unheard of and where people live on less than a dollar a day.
The suggestion that these problems are best solved "over there" — a theme repeated in official reports on the refugee problem and Australia's response — is merely an excuse to turn away more refugees. Western aid to the majority of refugees in camps in the Third World averaged $11.80 per person for the year. Further, for the last decade, global capitalism has decreed a process of de-development in most of the countries which are either the source of refugees or their main hosts. Inequitable trading relations between industrialised and Third World countries have worsened.
'Economic' motives
An arbitrarily applied distinction between refugees fleeing political persecution and so-called "economic" refugees also demands scrutiny. A recent National Population Council report asserts that "Australia has no moral obligation to automatically accept for settlement those seeking refugee status in response to environmental or economic causes".
The report concedes that, in a world characterised by greater and greater inequality, the number of economic and environmental refugees can only grow. But it then argues that precisely because resettling refugees will not solve the root problem, there is no obligation on better-off countries, like Australia, to accept them. The argument's corollary is that some of the poorest and most environmentally stressed countries should continue to carry the burden of most of the world's refugees.
Refugees have long been treated as political footballs. They are deemed "genuine" political refugees when it suits the elites of powerful nations, but most are not.
Many economic refugees from Communist countries were accepted as political refugees during the Cold War and in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, while a constant stream of economic refugees from Africa, Latin America and India have always had a hard time getting in. Refugees from Cuba have been encouraged by the United States (though only on terms that suit Washington) while thousands of Haitians fleeing last September's military coup against the elected Aristide government have been turned back.
Australia's biggest waves of refugees was allowed in when it suited the ideological and foreign policy requirements of the Cold War or business interests. The biggest numbers of refugees were accepted in 1947, when there were 1.8 million displaced people in camps in Europe. Only Europeans were allowed in and, until 1949, Jews were excluded. The next wave of refugees, from Indochina, was smaller, but again the motivation was political.
Now that the Cold War is over and the legacy of Bob Hawke's posturing over the Tienanmen Square massacre is an economic inconvenience, the axe is to fall on refugees.
The total numbers of refugees and displaced persons in the "New World Order" is about 38 million, nearly five times that in Europe after World War II. Nevertheless, the signal is being sent out loud and clear from Canberra: any future "boat people" will be turned back, as will "overstayers" and even "genuine refugees" offered temporary asylum if and when the bureaucracy deems that the crisis in their home countries has abated. Further, if the ACTU and other lobbies have their way, the few refugees who have been allowed in will find it much harder to seek family reunions, because of language and recognised skill barriers.