Asylum seekers

I have never liked the trendy use of the word ‘journey’ to describe people's life experiences. For many asylum seeker families, however, journey is the most appropriate word to describe their odyssey from oppression or terror to safety. The popular press and politicians often depict boat people in defamatory terms as illegal immigrants, queue jumpers or as people ready to sabotage their boat to ensure rescue. Political parties recognise that anti-migrant propaganda can win elections, as it may well have done in 2001 in Australia, when asylum seekers aboard the vessel the Tampa were falsely accused of throwing their children overboard to secure rescue. Politicians falsely referred to asylum seekers as ‘illegals’, when they knew that under international law, to which Australia is a signatory, a person escaping persecution is entitled to make an application for asylum in another country. The term ‘illegals’ is now widely misused when referring to asylum seekers. Politicians compete with each other to introduce increasingly draconian policies, purportedly designed to deter would-be boat people. The disingenuous pretext is that any policy that will prevent asylum seekers risking their lives on dilapidated boats is justifiable. This is strange morality indeed: asylum seekers can be transported to a distant island and locked up indefinitely without right of appeal, the argument goes, to deter them from taking the decision to risk their own lives to escape persecution. Boat people family (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat_people) The major flaw in the argument is that there is no evidence that the threat of mandatory detention on- or offshore acts as a deterrent. Successive Australian governments have used the flawed argument of deterrence to excuse appalling morality. The mandatory imprisonment of asylum seekers for lengthy periods is guaranteed to traumatise families who are already traumatised. The truth of the journeys that families make is far more harrowing than is portrayed simplistically by the media and by politicians. Those of us who run Refugee Clinics listen continually to the most extraordinary stories of families who, in their country of departure, are subjected to perpetual persecution of a nature we can hardly imagine. Many families have no rights to education or employment, so their children are doomed to poverty unless they can escape. Many families face physical persecution, beatings, torture, sexual violence and even death. But even these words do not do justice to what families are escaping. I will describe, with permission, the journey of a family I saw in the Refugee Clinic who belongs to the Hazara people. This family fled from Afghanistan to escape persecution, after the mother and her 8-year-old son were badly beaten in Afghanistan, breaking the mother's arm. The family fled to Iran, but had no rights to education or to employment in Iran. The father returned to Afghanistan but was killed by the Taliban. The grandparents, who were very important carers of the children, saved enough money to allow the illiterate mother to travel with her two sons, aged 3 and 14, by bus to near the border. Then they walked for 4 h in silence and crossed the border illegally into Turkey, mother holding her heavy 3-year-old to her chest the whole way to stop him from crying. After 6 weeks in Turkey, they obtained forged passports and flew to Indonesia, where they spent 4 months in appallingly squalid conditions in a refugee compound, hot and hungry and in continual fear of deportation and physical or sexual abuse. On the day of the boat trip, they had to sit silently in a car all day. The boat trip took 3 or 4 days and, although a miserable trip, it was only a small part of their journey. The one year it took for the family to be processed through Christmas Island and a detention centre was relatively calm for this mother, because her children were safe at last and starting to learn English. They were accepted as genuine refugees and settled in the community. I saw the youngest boy, now aged 4, because he is self-harming, having struggled with being separated from his beloved grandparents and suffering from post-traumatic stress. Do politicians honestly believe that offshore processing will prevent extraordinarily courageous and desperate families like this trying to improve their lives? Politicians want to stop the boats to avoid us having to watch the horror of innocent people drowning. They offer no alternative. Hazaras will continue to risk their lives on boats, even if fully aware of the dangers, if they consider the alternative worse. I have argued before that there have always been refugees and asylum seekers, including Moses, and always will be.1 The Indigenous people of Australia have been in the country for at least 30 000 years and constitute 2.5% of the current population. The other 97.5% of the Australian population arrived on boats or planes from other countries in the last 250 years. You would hope that such a population of recent migrants would behave charitably to people who have suffered far more trauma in their lives than anything they themselves will ever face. In this issue, Zwi and Chaney show that this is not the case and that Australia does not compare favourably with other Western countries in terms of numbers of refugees accepted, despite the recent commendable decision to increase the annual number of refugees to 20 000.2 The 90% of asylum seekers who arrive by boat are treated well after they are accepted as refugees, but are treated appallingly until then. It is little recompense that the UK uncharitably uses ‘enforced discomfort’ by limiting health care for migrants to attempt to deter or punish them.3 Australia needs to acknowledge its international duty to accept its fair share of refugees and to treat those who arrive as asylum seekers humanely and not like criminals. A punitive approach to asylum seekers is unworthy and deeply shameful.