Is Australia’s migrant policy right because it works?

Australia is a multicultural society. Melbourne has the second largest urban Greek population outside of Athens. Vietnamese and Chinese communities are flourishing. The country has changed out of all recognition since the 1960s when there was a clear color bar operated for would be immigrants to this huge continent. Yet Australia is widely condemned for its highly unsympathetic attitude to unauthorized migration. As the flow of migrants began to increase and migrant camps in the north of the country began to overflow, the government in Canberra hit on the idea of paying its poorer neighbors to look after illegal migrants. Thus camps were established in Papua New Guinea and on the Pacific island of Nauru, the world’s smallest republic.  The Australians initially said that these were holding facilities while the applications of the asylum seekers were processed.  But inevitably by no means all of the migrants qualified for entry into Australia. The question was what to do with them. They did not want to be sent back to their home countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan because they said that their lives would be in danger. Therefore, all that remained for them was to continue to live in the camps at the Canberra government’s expense. Now, as a report released by Amnesty International and a leak of 4,000 official incident reports make clear, conditions in the camp are crowded and not always pleasant. Migrants who find themselves unable to reach Australia and are unwilling to go home have been self-harming and protesting. These camps have, therefore, become places of misery for almost all their inhabitants. Yet it is only fair to look at this situation from the Australians’ point of view. What had been a trickle of migrants threatened to become a tidal wave of hopeful people put to sea by human-traffickers in overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels. The waters to the north of Australia are far less safe than the Mediterranean which has claimed at least 3,000 lives this year. Added to the dangers of the sea have been raids by pirates who rob the migrants of all that they have left in the world, seize young women and often murder everyone else.  Canberra took the view that if it copied the European Union and offered a welcome and even a rescue to all those illegal migrants who could make it to their territorial waters, this risky flow of humanity could become a tidal wave of tragedy.  Therefore, they have set out to make it clear that the chances of reaching a new life in Australia were extremely slim. And this brutal response has had the desired effect. The number of people trying to head to Australia has dropped to near zero. The tough truth is that the unfortunate occupants of the camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea and Northern Australia are being used as an example to discourage others who might think of trying to follow them.  It is a harsh policy. But it has been harsher. The Australians have in the past towed migrant boats back out to sea, given their occupants food, water and life jackets and told them to go back to where they set off.   There is, however, widespread condemnation for this tough and apparently highly-successful policy toward illegal immigrants and little sympathy for Canberra’s argument that it is actually designed to save lives.