By Allen Myers
The harsh new restrictions introduced by the federal government cannot stop the flow of refugees. Restrictions can at most divert that flow — causing refugees to seek asylum in some other country.
What is really going on is a competition to raise the barriers to refugees, in the hope that they will seek asylum somewhere else. Australia leads the world in this disgraceful contest, as the cover story points out. Amnesty International last week cited figures showing that the number of refugee claimants in Australia in 1998-89 was less than one-fiftieth of the number in North America.
To stop the flow of refugees, rather than merely diverting it, it's necessary to remove the factors that cause people to abandon their homes and take their chances with an increasingly hostile reception abroad. I would suggest that any politician's claim to be concerned about reducing the refugee flow be judged by how seriously he or she attacks the following causes.
1. War. There's nothing like bombs and bullets to convince people that it's a good idea to be somewhere else — anywhere else. This is even more true today than it was a century ago, because modern armies, given the choice, prefer to fight civilians rather than other armies (e.g., the Indonesian army in East Timor, the Russian military in Chechnya, the United States in Iraq).
Because modern war usually destroys the conditions for life, civilians are driven to flee even after a war is formally over. This circumstance allows Pauline — sorry, I meant Philip — Ruddock to label them "economic refugees".
2. Blockades/embargoes. An economic blockade is war on the cheap. Unlike the use of troops and weaponry, it costs the blockader very little; it may even turn a profit, depending upon the blockaded country's normal exports and imports. Blockades tend to kill enemy civilians more slowly than all-out war, and may thus create more refugees because the victims have more time to flee.
Often, creating refugees is one of the goals of a blockade. The US blockade of Cuba, for example, is structured so as to ensure a steady propaganda stream of people "fleeing godless communism" in small boats (most who apply to migrate by normal, less dramatic, channels are automatically refused).
3. Oppression/discrimination. The many and varied forms of national, gender, racial, ethnic, sexual, religious and linguistic oppression are an ongoing source of the refugee flow, though you wouldn't know it from listening to government ministers, who usually classify oppression under the headings "other countries' internal affairs" or "Do you want us to invade them or something?"
If our government really can't do anything about oppression in another country, then at least it ought to open the doors to those fleeing it.
All that's being asked here is to give people the same rights as money. No Australian government has ever denied refuge to capital fleeing nationalisation. Why can't we give refuge to a Chinese woman who doesn't want her womb treated as state property?
4. Poverty. In the world view of Howard/Ruddock/Beazley, poor Australians are supposed to cross the continent on the strength of a rumour of a job opening. Poor people in other countries, by contrast, are expected to sit at home, assuming that they have one, posing for tourist photographs and quietly dying prematurely.
That is not realistic, and even locking away "economic refugees" in concentration camps will not stop a proportion of the world's poor from seeking a better life elsewhere. If the money the Australian government now spends on harassing and confining refugees were converted into cash handouts, distributed at random among Third World poor, it would probably have a larger impact on reducing the refugee flow — though I'm not suggesting that that is a practical or desirable way of reducing poverty.
In short, the flow of refugees can be stopped by making the places that refugees come from more pleasant or possible to live in. I know that this is not an easy task. But one of the main obstacles to achieving it is the same politicians who respond to refugees by persecuting them.