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Professor Maley: I think in a lot of host countries there's a disposition to see refugees as the Other; people who are intrinsically different from us and from whom we are, therefore, remote and distant in the responsibilities that we owe them.
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Yes that's right. There are two different dimensions to this issue. One is the disposition of people in wealthy countries to complain about the burden they're carrying, whereas if you look at the distribution of refugees worldwide only 6 percent are in Europe. The vast bulk is in Africa and different parts of Asia. So even a basic statistic raises questions about where the "crisis" is.It's also the case, however, that refugees are very much a product of the system of states. If you don't have states and borders then people simply move from one part of the world to another. This is very much a phenomenon of the late 19th and early 20th century; until the First World War it was relatively simple to travel the world without a passport. Visas came in in the 1930s largely as a device for preventing the entry of Jews from Germany who already had German passports.
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There's no doubt historically there have been deeply ingrained prejudices, which have come into play in animating a disposition to reject refugees. At the Evian Conference in 1938, which President Roosevelt called to address the problem of refugees from Germany, the Australian delegate, T.W. White, stood up in front of all the other delegates and said, "Since [Australia] does not have a race problem, delegates will understand that we are not anxious to acquire one." About a chilling a statement as you could imagine. And, yes, these days one doesn't have to dig far to find similar attitudes articulated by what in the past would have been fringe politicians but who now are making their way closer to mainstream politics.Your area of expertise is Australia. Let's talk about the recent revelations of tortuous conditions in the Australia's offshore refugee detention camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Is there sufficient political will to get them abolished?
The Supreme Court of Justice in Papa New Guinea has ruled the center established in Manus is in violation of the constitution of Papa New Guinea. So that's a hot potato that's bounced into the lap of the Australian government. The pressure is certainly building up within Australia to do something about these dreadful places. On the other hand, the Australian government may well be calculating that the continued existence of this is a way of attracting the votes of the far right. Given the government in the July 2 election was returned with only a slender majority in the House of Representatives, it really can't afford in terms of its own interests to alienate politicians on the right, whether it's members of the ruling party—the Immigration Minister is a pretty far right figure—or the racist One Nation Party, which has returned with four senators in a finely balanced Upper House.
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In 2001 the office of the Defence Minister issued an instruction that "humanising" images of asylum seekers rescued from boats in the Indian Ocean were not to be distributed – really one of the most chilling directives I've ever heard surfacing from an Australian ministerial office. And I think that was because of a recognition from the government at the time that the moment ordinary people can put a human face on the victims of these policies it begins to change the dynamics of discussion. Politicians who do this kind of thing know what they're doing.In the final chapter of your book, you sketch some potential solutions to the crisis, emphasising that "arguments based on economic costs… might carry more weight [than moral ones]". But if we start arguing that we should accept refugees because business will like that we can get them to work for low wages, aren't buying into a logic that sees them as quantities rather than humans?
I don't see the argument based on economic factors as the predominant principled argument for offering protection to refugees; the argument for offering protection flows from their humanity. It's simply a point which is often neglected by the people who want harsh refugee policies: the policies they're advocating are very costly, both in terms of the direct cost from running systems of detention and deterrents, but also in terms of the economic losses that flow from it. But, for me, the overwhelmingly important arguments are the ethical arguments.
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