(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

Lots of refugee news lately, of which more shortly, but first I wanted to quote you a para from the latest Refugee Council of Australia newsletter:

Statistics fail to justify media obsession with boat arrivals

It was ironic that, while representatives of UNHCR, governments and NGOs were at the UNHCR ExCom meeting discussing the forced displacement of millions of people, the Australian media were giving great prominence to the recent arrival in Australian waters of two boatloads carrying 31 asylum seekers. By any measure, the number of people of arriving in Australia by boat to seek asylum is tiny. UNHCR reports that, at the end of 2007, there were 739,986 asylum seekers around the world with claims still pending. Australia had just 1516 people in this category (0.2% of the global total). During 2007, 468,597 asylum seekers were granted refugee status. Of these people, 1702 (or 0.4%) were granted protection in Australia. Of the relatively small numbers of people who seek asylum in Australia, the great majority arrive by air, generally with a valid short-term visa of some description, and have their protection visa application assessed with no public fanfare. Asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat currently make up fewer than 0.01% of the world's asylum seekers.

Comments

[nyssa1968.livejournal.com]

Interesting. My initial reaction is that it goes to show how much the media is trying to run this agenda (and I do remember how much Howard loved to jump on it for his own ends). As in, boats make for more drama (who cares about someone arriving with the right paperwork and following international law at an airport after all?), and they also love pumping up the unusual (things of smaller numbers always seem get the attention) at the expense of the humdrum. I imagine that any challenges either get buried, ignored or twisted... *sigh* I do despair for so-called journalism like that, but am glad for journals like the Economist that maintain the standards of true journalism.

Thanks for posting what the officials actually say about it. It's what I love about the net - while there is a lot of tosh out there, there's also a lot of sense! Thank you for being one of the beacons of sense (if sense can be a beacon...)

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Oh, ta! My gods, the amount of slag ya need to dig through to find the odd opal of fact...

I suppose after sixteen years of this bullshit it's not surprising that the press go OMG BOAT PEEPUL scrutinise scrutinise. Just have to hope that this humanises the new arrivals, rather than feeding into needless panic about how we'll all be murdered in our beds, etc.

[hiraethin.livejournal.com]

Boat arrivals are a very small fraction, no question. The trend in boat arrivals is interesting, however. And also I suspect - with admittedly only anecdotal evidence - that boat arrivals are strongly correlated with undocumented applications for refugee status. Airside arrivals have the advantage of having to pass the Immigration barrier, which requires a passport.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Well, it makes sense that since it's impossible to fly without a passport, when refugees arrive without one, they arrive by boat and not plane. But the question, I think, is not what proportion of asylum seekers arrive without proper travel documents as why any of them would arrive without travel documents. Since almost all such applicants for refugee status are found to be genuine, and none at all have been declined on security grounds, a lack of travel documents obviously doesn't indicate bad intentions. Then why? Because they weren't able to safely obtain those documents; because they were refused the documents; because they couldn't risk the wait to have the documents issued or renewed; because they had no choice but to destroy the documents en route, sometimes at the behest of the people smugglers.

I say, let 'em come, documents or no. We're an island: we're never going to get that many asylum seekers anyway, because we're just not that easy to reach. Even in the peak years, when we got a few thousand boat arrivals, those were people with the guts and resourcefulness not just to stand up to Saddam or the Taliban, but to get themselves all the way here. Australia can use people like that: it's a win-win situation.

[jebni.livejournal.com]

I appreciate the fact that the RCA quote serves to emphasise how border security anxieties have a tellingly primal and bizarre focus, but my trouble here is that by doing so, this kind of argument -- ""but most asylum seekers arrive by *respectable* means" -- re-criminalises undocumented migration within humanitarian discourse, by trying to mollify an assumed xenophobic public, and playing into the last Federal Government's "queue jumpers" model: i.e. there is a universally applicable "queue", and most people somehow "respect" it. As you suggest, making a distinction between documented and undocumented shouldn't be ethically or politically too much of a priority.

In the course of some of the community work I've been doing, I've worked mostly with refugees who arrived here via official UNHCR auspices, and it pains me that the smaller minority of refugees who arrived without papers, who were in detention, and who then received Temporary Protection Visas, have a tendency to "fall through the cracks" because TPVs basically forced them out of contact with civil society.

Sadly, it seems that the UNHCR-processed majority of refugees are encouraged to think of themselves as "respectable", but despite this, their ethico-political instincts generally reject such distinctions. Many of the "documented refugee" kids I've worked with have made a point to visit Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in solidarity with the undocumented detainees, and others have been spokespeople for Children Out of Detention (when the mandatory detention of children was de rigeur).

I've had much to learn from such solidarity.

[jebni.livejournal.com]

BTW, Chilout is a whole different thorny issue in itself -- did specifically campaigning for the release of children create a false division between "innocent kids" and adults (for whom "innocent before proven guilty" somehow didn't fully apply)?

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

A world of issues there. I have no idea whether the Chilout folks were more concerned about the kids than the adults, and if so, whether that was because the kids were the most vulnerable victims, because they were the least deserving victims, or because they'd have the most appeal to a refugee-hating public - or all three.

[jebni.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it's a mixture of motivations and complicities. Kids often play such a bizarre, fetishistic role in political life -- e.g. as pawns in the whole Northern Territory intervention debacle. But regardless of such pitfalls, I do think the vulnerability of children should be an ethical beacon that can shock people into awareness and action; here's something I put together from the testimony of a little boy who escaped from Woomera and hid in our camp, back in 2002: http://eviltwin.com.au/woomera_boy.html -- it's possibly the most heartbreaking thing I've ever heard.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

this kind of argument -- ""but most asylum seekers arrive by *respectable* means" -- re-criminalises undocumented migration

That's a really interesting thought, one I've never encountered before. I've always taken that argument as pointing out the hypocrisy of demonising one lot of uninvited guests while making no fuss at all over the other.