Immigration policy, without any official announcement has been dramatically changing.
Unlike previous years, not one person who arrived illegally by boat in Australia this year has been granted refugee status, according to latest departmental figures. The change comes amid growing hostility to illegal arrivals.
This week, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock made public the fact that Australian taxpayers paid $55 million to support illegal boat people in the past nine months. The figures come after break-outs from immigration detention centres at Woomera, in South Australia, and Port Hedland and Curtin, in Western Australia.
The cost, in fact, is the least of the Government’s worries. $55 million sounds a lot but it is quite trivial on a governmental scale. On a per person annual scale, Australians are paying less than $4 per person per year to house illegal immigrants. Cheap at double the price. But the department and minister are engaging in tactics to engender public support for their detention policies. The message is that Australia faces floods of refugees and unless we are very tough there will be even more of them. Those we have cost enough, the message seems to be, so we cannot risk having many more, so support the get-tough policy.
The department and minister are also engaging in a message-sending exercise. They hope that the illegal immigrants either send no message back or send a message back that they have been put into hellish camps in the middle of nowhere.
Like all policy-making is it a balancing act.
On the cynical plane, the Government does not want to lose votes on the immigration issue. That is a danger given the votes obtained by One Nation last election – even if most did flow back to the coalition after preferences. One Nation’s national president, Pauline Hanson, was at it again last week. She said Australians were sick of being the “”soft touch” on refugees and that “”unless we are seen to be getting tough we will see a flood of boat people coming here”. She wanted the refugees turned back at sea and she raised the question of them carrying contagious diseases. All very populist, scare-mongering stuff. The trouble is that it drags the debate down that direction, at a very dangerous time. At least the Government has not stooped to the contagious-disease argument and has not responded to Ms Hanson’s incitement to murder – for that is what turning refugees back to sea would amount to. In any event, the Navy would not do such a thing.
On a practical plane, the Government has been faced with a growing difficulty over the past year which is not well recognised. The boat-people problem has increased dramatically. The department’s response has also changed dramatically.
There have been four waves of boat people to Australian shores. Pre-1989 (and mostly in the late 1970s) there was a wave of boat people out of Vietnam and Cambodia escaping the communist takeovers there. It was a fairly small wave. Nearly all got refugee status and stayed. Australia felt some moral responsibility after its role in the Vietnam war and both sides of politics were (in a subdued way sympathetic). Coupled with this boat-people wave (of only several thousand people) was a fairly large legal influx by scheduled commercial aircraft of immigrants from South-East Asia under family reunion and economic categories as well as a fairly large number of illegals arriving by air.
The second wave came from 1989 to 1997. They were mainly Sino-Vietnamese at first, and later people sfrom mainland China brought by people smugglers. They averaged a couple of hundred a year, but peaked in 1994-95 with 1000 arrivals. This wave was dealt with by fairly good diplomatic work by Australia with both China and Vietnam. The upshot was that the overwhelming majority returned home.
Overlapping with the second wave but strengthening in 1998 were a large number of small boats containing people from Bangladesh. Once again, the Bangladeshis have nearly all been sent home. In 1998, there were about 150 Bangladeshis and about 50 Chinese boatpeople, also successfully sent home.
Then in 1999 the whole boat-people picture changes. For the first time in Australia’s history more illegal immigrants arrive by boat than by air. In the first half of 1999 about 750 people arrive by boat. The number in itself is alarming as among the highest number in a six-month period in Australia’s history. But it is compounded by a more difficult factor. These boat people are coming from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Australia could not do, and had not done, the diplomatic work to enable their repatriation. Worse, they had not come all the way from their homeland by boat, but had been smuggled overland or by air to Indonesia first. Then in the second half of 1999, things got worse. The number of arrivals shot from 750 to 3300, the highest in six months on record. And in the first five months of this year 1240 people have arrived. With better boating conditions in the north in the second half of the year, we might expect another 4000 in the second half of the year, unless there is a policy response.
And there has been, though it has not been publicly trumpeted.
Before getting too alarmist, the boat arrivals should be put into perspective. There have been about 8000 illegal boat arrivals since 1989. It is a very insignificant proportion of the 900,000 or so immigrants to Australia in that time.
Of the 8000, 3200 have been sent home, leaving 4800. Boatpeople represent just one half of one percent of Australia’s immigration in the past decade.
Nonetheless there is now cause for concern. In the past year, illegal boat arrivals (if they are all allowed to stay) would represent about 5 per cent of Australia’s immigration. And let’s face it, the chance of repatriating people to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan is fairly remote. It is a tenfold increase.
It is a big mistake to see recent boat arrivals in the same light as earlier arrivals. Hanson, stupidly lumps them in under the umbrella of yellow-peril Asian hordes swamping Australia. A lot of people seem unaware of the difference between this wave and earlier waves. This wave is bigger and there is less chance of turning the people back.
That environment requires some policy changes and a policy juggling act.
Untrumpeted the government and the department have changed tact significantly.
Last year it gave more than 1000 boat people refugee status and a further 420 got temporary protection visas. Only 183, virtually none from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan (IIAs) departed. The departures were mainly top China. In 1999, the Government detained about 1900 people, nearly all IIAs.
The policy of handing out refugee and protection status so readily (to a third of arrivals), however, just seemed to attract more illegals. So this year things changed. Not one person who arrived illegally by boat this year has been given refugee status, according to departmental fact sheets. Of the 1238 illegal arrivals, 1066 were put in detention, 133 got humanitarian visas and 39 departed.
The last arrival to get refugee status came in August last year.
The return rate (usually around 80 per cent) has collapsed.
Sure, there is a processing backlog, but it seems that the Government cannot force returns and instead is doing its best to send a message back to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Don’t bother coming to Australia. You are better off staying at home, or going to Europe. It is probably doing this not so much because the 4000 or so illegals who arrived in the past year present a huge problem themselves. They could easily and more cheaply be allowed into the community. No; the lesson is that if the influx could go up so dramatically so quickly in the past year, it could go still higher and then there would be a problem. It might engender resentment, voter backlash or even ugly incidents.
It is almost on par with terrorism policy. Do not give in because it invites more strife later. That argument may have some merit, but it causes terrible suffering early on, particularly to people who have fled horror in their homelands. As Ruddock will attest, immigration is a political no-win in Australia.
Incidentally, despite last week’s events, the incidence of permanent escape is trivial, under 10. And the refugee longest in detention has been there for two and half years.