Does Being Total Assholes To Boat People Actually Work?

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When I first glimpsed headlines about the exclusion of Australia’s mainland from its migration zone I thought it had to do with birds. Like that time a New York airport blasted Tina Turner to keep all the seagulls off the runway—maybe Aussies were altering bird flight patterns to keep them out of trouble or to keep them from shitting on our heads. That's what happens when a country's standard of living is as high as Australia's. You start worrying about the little things.

Surprisingly, that's not the case. The migration zone exclusion is a weird piece of legislature, first flirted with by the Howard government, which basically says that any asylum seekers that make the journey to Australia by boat, and actually make it onto land, can still be shipped to one of the offshore processing centers like Nauru. These aren’t 5 star processing centers and definitely not Australia. I suppose the other thing that happens when you have a really nice high standard of living is that you want to keep undesirables way the fuck out. Asylum seekers arrive in Australia by air or by boat. Most who arrive by air and apply for asylum are from China. Since 2009, only 20-30 percent of these claims have ended up being granted. On the other hand, the top country of citizenship for boat arrivals is Afghanistan and 80 to 95 percent of those claims are determined to be legitimate. If most of these dudes are legit refugees, why go through the hassle of excluding mainland Australia from the migration zone? By denying them the ability to apply if they arrive by boat, is the government saving lives?

Let me tell you–if Adnanistan were a country, a guaranteed way to secure citizenship would be making a dangerous trip across the ocean in a ghetto boat, and I find it weird that Australia doesn’t see it the same way. Forget the cricket questions on the citizenship test, that's a real test of Aussie spirit. How bad does your life have to be that a boat trip across the ocean to an unknown country is your only way to a decent life? Talking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Afghani Journalist Rahmatullah Alemzadeh Haiz was stark about his choices: “If the Australian government takes me to a detention centre, they will not kill me. But if I go to the Taliban I'm sure they will kill me.''

This whole migration zone exclusion is a policy flip for the Labor, who opposed it in 2006. Labor MP Chris Bowen, who had called the 2006 proposition a stain on the national character, said this last October when introducing the Labor version, "I've changed the Labor Party's position and I changed my mind, based on the evidence, based on the recommendations of the Houston panel, and based on the evidence that this will save lives."

Do these types of deterrence strategies save lives? Howard’s Pacific Solution was lauded for stopping the boats and while the number of boats coming certainly dropped, it’s hard to pinpoint if deterrence was a factor. One of the top ethnic groups who apply for asylum are Hazra Afghanis, who are routinely targeted by the Taliban for execution, and it’s possible that the war on terror and the disruption of the Taliban was responsible for the drop in boats Australia saw after 2001. According to the Asylum Seeker Resource Center, scholars agree that conditions in the country of origin are more important than the destination country when considering refugee patterns.

Monash Univeristy sociologist Sharon Pickering notes in The Conversation that there is a lack of hard data about the accomplishments of deterrent strategies. The logic goes that we should stop the boats because it would stop deaths, but this may not even be true. Stopping the boats would simply change the way they travel to countries for asylum; it doesn’t make Afghanistan any less dangerous. People might stop dying at sea, but they would still be dying trying to get better lives.

Offshore processing on tiny ass islands, a major arm of this deterrence based policy, isn’t exactly perfect. The stakes here are Australia’s obligations to human beings. In Nauru we’re seeing processing times of upwards a year, self-harm cases, hunger strikes, and kids spending their formative years in what are basically prisons.

Pickering and others argue that Australia should be leading the charge in Asia. Between 2005-2009 Australia accepted 22, 548 refugees, or .2 percent of the world’s total. Germany took in 593, 799. Pakistan was number one with an intake of over a million. Developing nations often front the brunt of refugee crisis, but shouldn’t it be Australia, a country historically reliant on migrant workers to prosper, that takes charge on the issue?

There are more attractive avenues that could be offered to those wanting to claim asylum. One proposition starts with recognizing that the ideology of “queue jumpers” is flawed and believing that these citizens have actual claims. You know, Afghanistan is actually a kind of terrible place to live. A step to legitimizing this would be negotiating with countries to open asylum processing centers on their turf.

Considering the cost of offshore processing and the danger posed to the government’s employees turning back boats, is it such a stretch to offer air transport to these claimers? Since around 90% of Afghani asylum seekers that arrive by boat turn out to have legitimate claims, would this be such a bad idea?

If Labor wants to claim that it’s stopping boats to save lives, it’s acknowledging that it has a humanitarian imperative. You can’t wring Asia dry and gobble up all the accountants while turning away anyone who doesn’t have an immediate economic benefit. Australia needs to take charge on the issue with a systematic implementation of a positive asylum seeker policy and what better way than integrating bunch of bad asses from boats?

The difficulty seems to be even acknowledging that these claimers have an issue. Australia is a beautiful country ripe with opportunity, and a natural protectionist edge that develops as a result is unavoidable. It’s a country built on migration, openness, and humanity, and these values need to be reflected on a global scale. It’s not enough to simply suck up the world’s good migrants in order to push forward economic growth. It might not actually hurt that much to give back.

Follow Adnan on Twitter: @whotookadnan

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