The Biden administration is reportedly considering making temporary changes to asylum rules issued earlier this summer harder to undo by increasing threshold numbers needed to end the rules to likely unattainable levels — effectively causing them to be permanent. President Joe Biden signed an executive order in June changing how migrants coming to the U.S. could apply for asylum. Previously…
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In June 2021, Kamala Harris was on her first foreign trip as vice president, to Mexico and Guatemala. During a press conference with then-Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, she issued a warning to Guatemalans and others who were considering trying to enter the United States without proper documentation: “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and…
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The dishonour board is long. Advisors from Australia, account chasing electoral strategists, former Australian cabinet ministers happy to draw earnings in British pounds. British Conservative politicians keen to mimic their cruel advice, notably on such acid topics as immigration and the fear of porous borders.
Ghastly terminology used in Australian elections rhetorically repurposed for the British voter: “Turning the Back Boats”, the “Rwanda Solution”. Grisly figures such as Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Rishi Sunak, showing an atavistic indifference to human rights. The cruelty and the cockups, the failures and the foul-ups. Mock the judges, mock the courts. Soil human dignity.
All this, to culminate in the end of the Rwanda Solution, declared by the new Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, as “dead and buried before it even started”. Yet it was a sadistic policy of beastly proportion, offering no prospect of genuine discouragement or deterrence to new arrivals, stillborn in execution and engineered to indulge a nasty streak in the electorate.
In April 2022, the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced the Asylum Partnership Arrangement with Rwanda, ostensibly designed “to contribute to the prevention and combating of illegally facilitated and unlawful cross border migration by establishing a bilateral asylum partnership”.
Mysteriously, British officials suddenly found Rwanda an appropriate destination for processing asylum claims and resettling refugees, despite Kigali doing its bit to swell the ranks of potential refugees. In June 2023, the UK Court of Appeal noted the risks presented to asylum seekers, notably from ill-treatment and torture, arguing that the British government would be in breach of the European Convention on Human rights in sending them into Kigali’s clutches. In November that year, the Supreme Court reached the same conclusion.
These legal rulings did not deter the government of Rishi Sunak. With lexical sophistry bordering on the criminal, the Safety of Rwanda bill was drafted to repudiate what the UK courts had found by denying officials and the judiciary any reference to the European Convention of Human Rights and the UK’s own Human Rights Act 1998 when considering asylum claims.
The bookkeeping aspect of the endeavour was also astonishing. It envisaged the payment of some half a billion pounds to Kigali in exchange for asylum seekers. The breakdown of costs, not to mention the very plan itself, beggared belief. The Home Office would initially pay £370 million under the Economic Transformation and Integration Fund, followed by a further £20,000 for every relocated individual. Once the risibly magic number of 300 people had been reached, a further £120 million would follow.
Operational costs for each individual kept in Rwanda would amount to £150,874 over the course of five years, ceasing in the event a person wished to leave Rwanda, in which case the Home Office would pay £10,000 to assist in the move.
With biting irony, the UK government had demonstrated to Rwanda that it could replace the supposedly vile market of people smuggling in Europe with a lucrative market effectively monetising asylum seekers and refugees in exchange of pledges of development.
By February 2024, according to the National Audit Office, the UK had paid £220 million to Rwanda, with a promise of another £50 million each year over three years. It was a superb return for Kigali, given that no asylum seekers from the UK had set foot in the country. When asked at the time why he was hungrily gobbling up the finance, Paul Kagame feigned serenity. “It’s only going to be used if those people will come. If they don’t come, we can return the money.”
With an airy contemptuousness, the Kagame government has refused to return any of the monies received in anticipation of the policy’s full execution. Doris Uwicyeza Picard, the central figure coordinating the migration partnership with the UK, was blunt: “We are under no obligation to provide any refund. We will remain in constant discussions. However, it is understood that there is no obligation on either side to request or receive a refund.”
In another statement, this time from deputy spokesman for the Rwandan government, Alain Mukuralinda, the sentiment bordered on the philosophical: “The British decided to request cooperation for a long time, resulting in an agreement between the two countries that became a treaty. Now, if you come and ask for cooperation and then withdraw, that’s your decision.”
In an official note from Kigali, the government haughtily declared that the partnership had been initiated by the UK to address irregular migration, “a problem of the UK, not Rwanda.” Rwanda, for its part, had “fully upheld its side of the agreement, including with regard to finances”. Redundantly, and incredulously, the note goes on to claim that Kigali remained “committed to finding solutions to the global migration crisis, including providing safety, dignity and opportunity to refugees and migrants who come to our country.”
The less than subtle message in all of this: Rwanda is ready to keep cashing in on Europe’s unwanted asylum seekers, whatever its own record and however successful the agreement is. Kagame has no doubt not lost interest in Denmark, that other affluent country keen on outsourcing its humanitarian obligations. While Copenhagen abandoned its partnership with Rwanda in January 2023 regarding a similar arrangement to that reached with the UK, it is now showing renewed interest, notably after hosting a high-level conference on immigration.
In opening the conference on May 6, the Social Democratic Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, speaking in language that could just as easily have been associated with any far right nationalist front, decried the “de facto” collapse of the “current immigration and asylum system”. Those in the Rwandan treasury will be rubbing their hands in anticipation.
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On June 18, President Joe Biden announced that he would be taking executive action to protect undocumented spouses of American citizens, providing them with a pathway to citizenship. This would extend protections, work visas and citizenship to potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals, many of them DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients and Dreamers. In response…
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With much of the southwest baking under record temperatures, immigrants’ rights advocates worry President Joe Biden’s decision to effectively close the border to asylum seekers for the foreseeable future will endanger lives and further marginalize climate-displaced people seeking refuge in the U.S. Their concerns come as a heat dome lingering over Mexico and the southwestern United States has…
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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is vowing to sue the Biden administration after President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday that severely restricts the number of asylum seekers who can enter the U.S. The order authorizes the immediate deportation of asylum seekers at the border if they did not enter the U.S. through a legal port of entry. It goes into effect when such border…
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President Biden has issued one of the most restrictive immigration policies ever declared under a recent Democratic administration. It will temporarily shut down the U.S.-Mexico border, deny asylum to most migrants who do not cross into the U.S. via ports of entry, and limit total asylum requests at the southern border to no more than 2,500 per day. The ACLU has threatened to sue the Biden administration over what reporter John Washington, who covers immigration in Arizona, calls an “excruciating and likely deadly” decision. “An illegal asylum seeker is a contradiction in terms,” Washington continues. “People have the right, according to U.S. law, to ask for asylum irrespective of how they crossed the border or where they are or what their status is. And this rule really flies in the face of that.”
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President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday that authorizes officials at the U.S.-Mexico border to immediately deport asylum seekers if they have entered the country in any manner other than through a legal port of entry — a move that will put thousands of people who are fleeing persecution in their home countries in jeopardy. The executive order, announced by the Biden White House on…
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What a stinking story of inhumanity. A country intent on sending asylum seekers to one whose residents have actually applied for asylum and sanctuary in other states. But the UK-Rwanda deal, having stalled and stuttered before various courts and found wanting for reasons of human rights, has become law with the passage of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill.
The story of this deal has been a long one. On April 14, 2022, the government of Boris Johnson announced the Asylum Partnership Arrangement with Rwanda, which was intended “to contribute to the prevention and combating of illegally facilitated and unlawful cross border migration by establishing a bilateral asylum partnership”. Rwanda, for a princely sum, would receive those whose asylum claims would be otherwise processed in the UK through the “Rwanda domestic asylum system” and have the responsibility for settling and protecting applicants.
This cynical effort of deferring human rights obligations and not guarding asylum seekers and refugees from harm has been made all the more hideous by Kigali’s less than savoury reputation in the field. Refugees have been shot for protesting over reduced food rations (twelve from the Democratic Republic of Congo died in February 2018). Refugees have also been arrested for allegedly spreading misinformation about Rwanda’s less than spotless human rights record. And that’s just a smidgen of a significantly blotted copybook.
Notwithstanding this, UK home secretaries have gushed over Kigali’s seemingly falsified credentials. Suella Braverman, who formerly occupied the post, was jaw dropping in her claim that “Rwanda has a track record of successfully resettling and integrating people who are refugees or asylum seekers”. This is markedly ironic given that the Rwandan government has been accused of creating its own complement of refugees running into the tens of thousands.
The UK government has a patchy legal record in trying to defend the legitimacy of the exchange with Rwanda. The Court of Appeal in June 2023 reversed a lower court decision on the grounds that those asylum seekers sent to Rwanda faced real risks of mistreatment prohibited by Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Rwanda, it was noted, was “intolerant of dissent; that there are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech; and that political opponents have been detained in unofficial detention centres and have been subjected to torture and Article 3 ill-treatment short of torture.”
The government also failed to convince the UK Supreme Court, which similarly found in November 2023 that people removed to Rwanda faced a real risk of being returned to their countries of origin in violation of the principle of non-refoulement. That principle, by which persons are not to be sent to their countries of origin or third countries if they would be placed at risk of harm, is a cardinal rule in several instruments of international law and enshrined in British law.
In what can only be regarded as a legal absurdity, the Safety of Rwanda bill essentially directs the home secretary, immigration officials, courts and tribunals to deem Rwanda a safe country in accordance with UK law and UK obligations to protect asylum seekers. It also bars decision makers from considering the risk of refugees being sent by Rwanda to other countries and disallows UK courts from drawing upon interpretations of international law, including the European Convention of Human Rights. Effectively, a sizeable portion of the UK’s own Human Rights Act 1998 has been rendered inconsequential in these determinations.
A final, nasty feature of the legislation is the grant of power to a Minister of the Crown to decide whether to abide by interim measures made by the European Court of Human Rights regarding any removal to Rwanda. This is astonishing on several levels, not least because it repudiates the binding nature of such interim measures.
Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, could barely believe the passage of such an obnoxious bit of legislation. Not only did it fly in the face of obligations to protect refugees, it constituted a direct interference in the judicial process. “The United Kingdom government should refrain from removing people under the Rwanda policy and reverse the Bill’s effective infringement of judicial independence.”
Shadowing these proceedings is an unmistakable, ghoulish legacy of Australian origin. The former Home Secretary Priti Patel openly acknowledged that elements of the “Australian model” of processing asylum claims in third countries were appealing and something to emulate. The particularly attractive element of the plan was the refusal by Canberra to ever permit those found to be refugees to ever settle on Australian soil. Other countries, including such European states as Denmark, have also chosen Rwanda as an appropriate destination for unwanted asylum seekers.
The entire affair is a stunning example of political entropy, a howl from an administration marching before the firing squad. With each failure, the Tories have tried to claw back respectability in the hope of appearing muscular in the face of irregular migration. They have accordingly cooked up a scheme that is not merely cruel, but one of staggering cost (each asylum seeker of the current cohort promises to cost the British taxpayer £1.8 million) and ineffectualness. Sunak, a laughably weak and unpopular prime minister, is, politically speaking, at death’s door. Despite getting the legislation through, legal struggles from potential deportees are bound to tear into the arrangements. What Britain’s judges do will prove a true test of character.
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In a recent interview with Spanish-language cable network Univision that aired on Tuesday, President Joe Biden suggested that he would soon issue an executive order using the same authority former President Donald Trump used to enact racist immigration policies. Lamenting that thousands of migrants are seeking asylum in the U.S. daily under current policy, Biden said during the interview that he…
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Hasan*, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has spent all but one of his 24 years of life in the United Kingdom. He does not speak Hebrew or Arabic fluently, and depends on British medical care. In 2019, Hasan was informed that he was to be deported to Israel, separating him from his family in the U.K., so he filed an asylum claim. In 2022, that claim was denied, forcing him to appeal.
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After four months in limbo about his refugee status and heavily in debt, Hung has some advice for anyone from Vietnam planning to work in Australia on a tourist visa:
“If you are keen on coming to Australia, you’d better choose a legal way,” said the part-time laborer from Hanoi, who was duped into paying an immigration service company to apply for an entry visa on his behalf.
“Arriving with a student or skilled labor visa is OK, but you should think twice about using a tourist visa,” he said.
For years, Hung made ends meet in Hanoi on a monthly income of 10 million dong (US$400), but was unable to build any savings due to the high cost of living in Vietnam’s capital.
After hearing stories of other Vietnamese landing good-paying jobs while visiting Australia, Hung, who spoke to RFA Vietnamese using a pseudonym due to security concerns, decided to travel the 5,000-odd kilometers (3,100 miles) southeast to try his luck.
He hoped to earn a better salary Down Under – where minimum wage workers earn AU$70,000 (US$48,000) a year, or 14 times the average income in Vietnam – and save money to improve his living standard back home.
Vietnamese who are unable to obtain work visas for Australia are eligible for a Work and Holiday Visa, which allows people to work while traveling in the country for up to one year.
Applicants must be between the ages of 18 and 30, have no criminal record and provide evidence that they have completed at least two years of undergraduate study. They must also show that they can support themselves financially while in Australia and have attained a certain level of English proficiency.
In debt and desperate
Hung, who did not disclose his age, had no employer to sponsor a work visa and was unable to meet either the education or English proficiency requirements for a Work and Holiday Visa. But a Vietnamese immigration services company told him that he could legally work in Australia as a tourist.
Australian tourist visas have a significantly lower barrier to obtain. They are good for three months and can be extended to a full year in special circumstances. However, entrants are not eligible to work during their visit.
Unfamiliar with the application process, Hung took on debt to pay 100 million dong (US$4,000) – a substantial amount for the average Vietnamese laborer – to the immigration services company to handle his visa, as well as purchase an airline ticket, and he flew to Australia in July 2023.
Hung had hoped to live and work in Australia for up to two years, to pay off what he had borrowed in getting there and to build wealth. Instead, by October, his tourist visa was about to expire and he had only accrued more debt while supporting himself for three months in a nation with a vastly higher cost of living.
Increasingly desperate, Hung sought help from fellow Vietnamese through social media, and was advised to apply for an Australian Onshore Protection Visa (Subclass 866) as a political refugee, which would allow him to stay in Australia for longer and work legally.
He paid someone AU$1,000 (US$650) to prepare his application, went to the local immigration department to be fingerprinted, and was granted a bridging visa (BVE 050) that allows him to lawfully reside in the country while awaiting a decision on his status.
While Hung will be required to present evidence of his asylum claim, it is unclear when he will be called for an interview, due to the large backlog of applications.
Topping the list for asylum seekers
According to the Australian Department of Home Affairs, 2,905 Vietnamese nationals applied for the Australian Onshore Protection Visa in 2023, making them the largest ethnic group to do so and accounting for 12% of the total number of applicants.
Vietnamese topped the list of asylum applicants in Australia, beating out Indians and Chinese, in each of the last five months of 2023, and ranked second in three other months last year.
Many of them end up in situations like Hung’s, nervously awaiting a verdict on their claim to learn whether they will be granted residential status or forced to return home.
The bridging visa does not expire and grants holders the right to work and access a national health insurance assistance program so that they can receive medical care in Australia.
However, if asylum status is denied, the bridging visa will be automatically canceled within 28 days, and the holder will be required to leave the country. Those denied status have the right to appeal the decision with an immigration court.
The chances of being awarded political asylum in Australia are fairly low. In 2023, the Australian Department of Home Affairs processed nearly 1,000 asylum applications, of which only 53, or 5.6%, were approved.
The stakes are considerably higher for applicants who have fled persecution in Vietnam, where the one-party communist state brooks no dissent. Being forced to return home can often mean a jail sentence, or worse.
‘Extraordinary surge’ in applications
Vietnamese-Australian immigration attorney Le Duc Minh told RFA that his law firm has helped many “genuine” Vietnamese political asylum seekers successfully apply for status in Australia.
But he acknowledged that he regularly hears stories like Hung’s from people who ended up in debt after trying to work illegally in the country.
“Some people simply ask me, ‘Please find a way for me to stay longer to earn money and pay off my debts. I borrowed hundreds of millions of dong in Vietnam to make this trip. I cannot go home empty-handed,’” he said.
Minh said he was surprised by what he called an “extraordinary surge” in applications by Vietnamese for political asylum in Australia in the second half of 2023.
He said that refugee applications tend to increase after political upheavals or government crackdowns on rights activists, but described last year as “very politically stable” in Vietnam. There were no mass demonstrations and most of the arrests were only of prominent activists and outspoken individuals on social media.
Instead, Minh posited, last year’s surge was likely the result of “large-scale fraudulent activities” in Vietnam, including individuals and companies providing false information about work opportunities for foreigners in Australia in order to sell them forged documents and useless services.
He cited an advertisement from one company claiming that applicants could take advantage of a program in Australia that would allow them to “take agricultural jobs without any expertise or English skills.”
After arriving in Australia only to learn that they would be unable to work or pay off their debts, most feel that they have no other choice but to double down, with applying for political asylum as their only option to stay in the country.
Supporting legitimate claims
Immigration attorney Kate Hoang, the former president of Australia’s Vietnamese community, stressed that “not all asylum applicants [from Vietnam] are those who want to extend their stay.”
Many, she said, were targeted by Vietnam’s government for speaking out about social injustices and were lucky just to have been able to travel to Australia to seek asylum at all.
Hoang urged the Australian government to make changes to the way it processes asylum visas to prevent those without legitimate claims from exploiting the system.
Meanwhile, Hung’s future remains uncertain as he awaits the ruling on his asylum application, and he has come to regret his journey to the southern continent.
“I paid a huge amount of money to come here, so I now have no choice but to work hard to pay off my debts, and I’ll probably just have to return home with nothing to show for it,” he said. “If I could make the decision again, I would never have gone.”
Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
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A Cambodian opposition activist released from prison last year after apologizing to then-Prime Minister Hun Sen and joining his ruling party has repudiated his defection after arriving in a “safe” third country.
Voeun Veasna, a forestry activist and former broadcaster for the online television station of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, was released in May 2023 after joining the ruling Cambodian People’s Party and apologizing to Hun Sen for a derisive poem he wrote about him.
The activist then fled to neighboring Thailand – where he was initially arrested in November 2021 following a request from Hun Sen – and filed a claim with the U.N. refugee agency as an asylum seeker.
He told Radio Free Asia in an interview that he could repudiate the decision to defect to the ruling CPP now that he was in a “safe” third country, which he declined to disclose for security reasons.
“I can’t live with communist leaders, and I can’t betray my conscience. I must resign,” Voeun Veasna said, referring to the CPP’s origins as the sole party of Cambodia’s 1980s revolutionary communist regime.
Voeun Veasna added that he had only exercised his freedom of speech and should not have been jailed in the first place.
“I was talking about how Cambodians’ living standards are not getting better like neighboring countries,” he said. “I was imprisoned unjustly.”
CPP spokesman Sok Eysan said he didn’t care about Voeun Veasna’s decision to repudiate his defection after fleeing from Cambodia.
“The CPP doesn’t need convicts to join the ruling party in order to evade prison terms,” the ruling party spokesman said.
Voeun Veasna’s announcement follows the arrest last month of prominent opposition activist Kong Raiya, who also publicly defected to the ruling party to avoid political persecution but then reneged.
Unlike Voeun Veasna, Kong Raiya revealed his decision to leave the CPP while in Thailand, and was arrested there last month before a visit by Prime Minister Hun Manet, who succeeded his father last year.
Another arrest
Separately, the Nation Power Party, a new opposition party founded in the wake of the barring of the Candlelight Party – itself a successor to the banned CNRP – from last year’s national election released a statement slamming the arrest of one of its electoral candidates, Meu Seanghor.
Meu Seanghor, also known as Kea Visal, had planned to be a candidate for the upcoming elections for Cambodia’s provincial and district administrative councils, according to the party, but was arrested on Friday in Kampong Cham province on charges of “incitement.”
The opposition party said his arrest was “an act of intimidation” and would “provoke a gloomy environment” for the May 26 council elections, in which only those already directly elected by the public to Cambodia’s 1,652 commune councils are allowed to vote.
Meu Seanghor’s wife said he was “pushed into a car” and taken away by police, and said she believed the arrest was politically motivated.
RFA reached out to Chhun Srun, the chief of Kampong Cham’s Baray commune, where he was arrested, but he could not be reached.
Translated by Yun Samean for RFA Khmer. Edited by Alex Willemyns and Malcolm Foster.
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Lorenzo Tondo in Palermo reported in the Guardian of 22 February 2024 that people and groups who assist asylum seekers are reporting a disturbing trend of escalating intimidation, with aid workers facing direct threats including being held at gunpoint and having their phone communications monitored by government authorities, according to a report from the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights.
Dunja Mijatović has warned of increasing harassment and in some cases criminalisation of people and groups who assist refugees, especially in Hungary, Greece, Lithuania, Italy, Croatia and Poland. [see e.g. https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/11/17/greeces-mistaken-deterrence-migrants-and-aid-workers-facing-heavy-prison-sentences/ and https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/10/09/mary-lawlor-condemns-criminalization-of-those-saving-lives-in-the-mediterranean/]
“Organisations and people assisting refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants have been subjected to beatings, had their vehicles or equipment destroyed, or have been targeted by vandalism of their property, and even by arson or bomb attacks,” she wrote.
A recent example was the bombing on 5 January of the office of Kisa, an NGO assisting refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Cyprus. [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2024/01/19/attack-against-cypriot-anti-racism-ngo-kisa/]
Mijatović said she had observed in certain member states how authorities had engaged with human rights defenders in an aggressive or intimidating manner. During the humanitarian crisis at the Poland-Belarus border, thousands of refugees from the Middle East were offered a route by the Lukashenko regime to try to reach the EU from Belarus, highlighting the restrictions by Poland on access to the border zone for people and organisations providing humanitarian assistance and legal aid.
The commissioner noted how “the emergence of an approach in which migration issues are increasingly addressed by member states from a security perspective” had led to the building of fences and deployment of military personnel, equipment and surveillance in border areas that has also affected NGOs.
“These physical obstacles deny asylum seekers the chance to seek protection and the right to a fair and efficient asylum procedure [and] this approach has also created an extremely difficult environment for human rights defenders,” she wrote.
“Those who assist refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants may be seen by states as an obstacle to the implementation of asylum and migration policies focused on deterrence and security, and therefore are faced with hostility. The rolling back of human rights, which is often part of states’ policies in this area, also leads to measures explicitly or implicitly targeting those helping.”
NGO rescue boats have also faced violence, including the use of firearms, from non-European countries with which Council of Europe member states cooperate on external migration control. NGO workers on some of these vessels have documented how often the Libyan coastguard has fired gunshots and endangered crew members and people in distress in the central Mediterranean. [see e.g. https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/12/18/international-migrants-day-the-story-of-the-ocean-viking/]
Mijatović also noted the growing use of surveillance technologies. “During discussions for the preparation of this document concerns were raised that, in some member states, pervasive surveillance activities created mounting challenges for human rights defenders, including lawyers and journalists,” she wrote.
“Governments, in the name of national security concerns, often employ advanced surveillance tools to intercept communications and monitor online activities, including human rights defenders’ social media.”
In 2022, the Greek journalists Thanasis Koukakis and Stavros Malichudis were allegedly targeted for investigating sensitive topics such as financial crime cases and migration. The Italian justice minister in 2021 dispatched inspectors to Sicily after revelations that prosecutors had intercepted hundreds of telephone conversations involving no fewer than 15 journalists and covering migration issues and aid workers in the central Mediterranean.
Mijatović wrote: “Invasive surveillance practices, whether through physical surveillance, phone and internet tapping or by using spyware not only infringes on the personal security and privacy of individual human rights defenders, but also threaten the confidentiality between human rights defenders and the refugees, asylum seekers and migrants they assist, which is often crucial to working effectively.”
She added that people helping refugees, asylum seekers and migrants often experience extremely high levels of online hate and even death threats. Human rights defenders who are themselves refugees or from an ethnic minority background may also receive racist abuse, online and offline.
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Militarized borders — comprising walls, barriers, fences and repressive border policies — have become something of the norm in today’s world, which otherwise is in favor of the free movement of goods and capital. But that wasn’t always the case. The United States, for example, had no federal immigration laws during the first century of its existence. There are strong moral…
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In 2019, I stood outside a for-profit child migrant jail in the city of Homestead, Florida. I was watching then-presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris speak out against the facility, initially opened under the Obama administration and reopened under former President Donald Trump. “It’s a human rights abuse being committed by the United States government,” Harris said at the time…
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Republicans in the Arizona state legislature have advanced a bill that would grant property owners the right to shoot and kill anyone who trespasses on their property, so long as they claim they were doing so in self-defense. House Bill 2843 expands the state’s current “Castle Doctrine” law. That statute allows individuals to shoot and kill any person who breaks into their home.
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If only we could say that Peter Dutton, Australia’s federal opposition leader and curator of bigoted leanings, was unusual in assuming that granting humanitarian visas to Palestinians might be problematic. But both he, and his skew-eyed spokesman on home affairs, James Patterson, have concluded that votes are in the offing. Refugees may be accepted from the Ukrainian-Russian War, as long as they are Ukrainian, but anything so much as a whiff of a Palestinian fleeing the Israel-Hamas conflict is bound to be concerning. Ukrainians are noble victims; the latter might be terrorist sympathisers or Hamas militants.
This view started being floated in November last year, when Dutton began warning the public that visitor visas for Palestinians could result in a calamity. (At that point, 860 visas had been issued to Palestinians.) “The inadequacy of these checks could result in a catastrophic outcome in our country,” he foamed. “Taking people out of a war zone without conducting the checks, particularly those that are available to us in the US, is reckless.”
No concern was voiced about the possibility that Israelis, who had also been offered 1,793 visas, might pose a problem to the heavenly idyll of Australian security. It is also worth mentioning that Dutton, when home affairs minister, approved over 500 visas a week to Syrians fleeing the civil war. Ditto the granting of 5,000 visas to Afghans the month the Taliban resumed control of Kabul in the aftermath of retreating Western armies.
Dutton’s arithmetic is that of the typical copper: simple, direct, amateurish. Among the Palestinians, “one person, or could be 10 people, I don’t know” might be of concern. His concerns are feverishly listed: “Have interviews been conducted, do we know people’s ideologies, do we know their interest in the west, why they want to come to Australia.” This template would be applicable to every group of visitors or migrants seeking to come to Australia at any one point. No one is likely to say on their visa application: “I come to see your new country and hope to commit atrocities.”
Given the number of conflict zones on Planet Earth, Dutton was offering an obtuse statement calculated to boost flagging popularity. It was also timed within a matter of hours after the declaration of a four-day ceasefire in Gaza. While proving, at times, sketchy in her role as Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil was close to the mark in stating that, “Dutton is a reckless politician who will do and say anything to score political points – even if it puts the national security of Australians at risk.”
But Dutton did not want to be dismissed as a paranoid former police officer who sees criminals everywhere and innocence as a constipated afterthought. “The prime minister here needs to hit the pause button – I’m not saying people shouldn’t come at some point – but people should come when all the checks are conducted.”
Again, a strange sentiment, given that visa applicants tend to face a series of tests that are more demanding than most when seeking to visit the Down Under Paradise where perfection is assumed. “If a visa applicant is assessed as posing a risk to the health, safety or good order of the Australian community, their visa may be considered for refusal,” were the dull words of a government spokesperson.
With the arrival of irregular migrants on the shores of Western Australia this month, cockeyed bigotry again assumed its role on the podium of Australian politics. Seeking to tie the arrivals as connected with shoddy security credentials, the opposition fanned out the implications of granting up to 2,000 visas for Palestinians, a fact seen as particularly galling to the shadow home affairs minister. “In the middle of an unprecedented antisemitism crisis, the government should be taking much greater care in granting visas to people from a war zone run by a terrorist organisation,” bleated Patterson. “How can they possibly assure themselves there is not one Hamas supporter among them? And how will it help social cohesion if they manage to slip through?”
By this logic, no one should ever leave a war zone, an area of devastation, a territory blighted by terror. You just might be a regime supporter, a sympathiser, despite suffering possible harm, even death. But there is an inadvertent slant coming through in Patterson’s mangled world view: Palestinians, having been maimed, murdered and traumatised, might wish to take out their grievance on a foreign power, possibly one sympathetic to Israel. Ignore the survival imperative, the desire to find, rather than abandon, security; focus, instead, on the motivation for vengeance. Even this view suffers for one obvious point: those wishing to avenge their families and friends are bound to wish to stay in Gaza and the West Bank, rather than flee and plot from afar.
With the current arrivals from Gaza – some 340 or so have managed to drip themselves from the Palestinian territories – the bedwetting fantasies of terror being induced by the opposition seem absurd and callous. But absurdity is a proven calculus for electoral success – at least sometimes.
The post A Copper’s Skewed Logic: Politicising Palestinian Visas first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.