The Aspects of Australia's Refugee Crisis

Refugees and asylum seekers attempting to get into Australia are confronted with a challenge. Prior to arriving they have faced persecution, disease and violence, and yet many of the people whom control their apparent destiny strongly oppose letting them in. This inhumane approach to the issue must be addressed. Initially, the process for the application for a protection visa will be discussed, as well as the terrible conditions inside the detention centers. The difficulty and complications involved will be highlighted. Then, an examination of their contribution to the economy will be discussed. Finally, a rebuttal to the common claim that there may be foxes in the henhouse (terrorists) will be shown.

All of the refugees who have made it to Australia’s shores after 2012 were placed into one of Australia’s nine concentration-camp-like detention centers. In 2015, there were 8,588 detainees spread around Australia and parts of the Asia pacific region. There, they await government approval of their application for a visa, usually a subclass-200 series refugee visa. In 2016 alone, there were 33,280 applications for one. This allows successful applicants the ability to permanently reside in Australia (with the possibility of applying for citizenship if eligible), work and study, enroll for Medicare, bring family members, travel to and from Australia for five years, and attend 510 hours of English classes for free. This may seem like a good option, and it would be. However, the application form alone is 33 pages long, with over eighty questions, many of which require excruciating detail. Furthermore, if you arrive in Australia without a valid visa, you will not be able to apply successfully for one of these visas. If you are able to navigate the murky waters of the application process, being approved to receive one can take up to two years. And the whole time, the refugees are locked up like dogs in a detention center. While this may seem at first like hyperbole, most dogs would be treated better than the unfortunate souls in Australia’s detention centers. In 2016, a UN official travelled to the Nauru detention center. He had “…seen a little girl of 14 years old and her father in Nauru where the mother and her siblings are in Australia for medical treatment.” He went on to describe her mental condition as being in a “catatonic” state. She had also “(not) gotten out of her room in months, (and had) not taken a shower, (and was) in a state of complete stress and trauma.” Continuing this form of what is essentially torture is not good for these sad souls, and also Australia’s public reputation. However, in 2019 a bill was passed allowing doctors to have more say in whether or not detainees should be taken somewhere else for better medical treatment. Unfortunately, this led to the re-opening of Christmas Island centre, and the ill would be taken there instead of mainland Australia, as was originally the plan. In spite of this, the process continues to need urgent revision to make it simpler fairer, and more humane.

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Once a refugee is granted access to all of the great things that Australia has to offer, what will he or she do once they arrive? Work is the answer. Some of those in the Australian government are worried about population growth, and rightly so. As our population ages, the ratio of those providing income tax compared to those actually in the workforce becomes smaller. Another example of the practical issues this may have is that education for the young may start to compete with healthcare for the more senior community. However, the government has done quite poorly in supporting the older community. Some people see immigration as a threat to population growth as well, so the government has begun to cap it. However, refugees are not really at risk of harming this balance. They are Australia’s youngest immigrant type, at an average of 21.8 years. This means they spend longer working and contributing to the economy. In addition to this, a study by F. Peterson and E. Wesley found that, from 1990 to 2015, the population grew 1.33 times, and the per-capita GDP increased by a factor of 1.7. Furthermore, an article by the New York Times analysed a report released by the government. It presented four main takeaways, and they were all in support of increasing the number of immigrants Australia allows. It showed that refugees contribute more than they consume, which is obviously an advantage. It also pointed out the already discussed point that younger migrants means younger workers. They do not depress wages, and interestingly, immigrants helped lessen the blow on Australia of the GFC. In the lead up to the crisis, growth in the working age population contributed to a 1.7% rise in GDP per person. The report says, “This suggests that migration helped the economy successfully weather the Global Financial Crisis and the slow global growth and poor economic conditions that followed.” In addition to the article, the report also suggests that migrants help bolster the economy, on both the consumer and producer side. This is because of the fact that they contribute to a higher supply/demand ratio. This also helped strength the per-person GDP. As if this evidence wasn’t already overwhelming, another study by the Centre for Global Development reported that “the arrival of 125,000 Cubans into Miami had no effect on unemployment and was followed by a small rise in average low-skill wages.” Not only were these people given refuge, they have demonstrably helped some of the American people in somewhat raising their wages. The combination of these factors demonstrates that allowing more refugees to settle in Australia would likely be advantageous.

Opponents to the issue of refugees often claim that allows an easy way for terrorists and other such “undesirables” into the country. One such example of this was the perpetrator of the Lindt Chocolate Café siege in 2014, Man Haron Monis. In 1996, he applied for asylum in Australia. His request was granted in 2001. During this time, he lived in Iran. He also had an arrest warrant against him during this time. In Iran, he ran a “spiritual healing” business. He told some of his female patients that they had to submit to sexual molestation to receive treatment. In 2013, the year before the siege, he was charged with accessory to murder of his former wife, who was stabbed and set alight in April that year, as well as forty-three counts of sexual assault. He also wrote offensive letters to the families of Australian soldiers killed in action. He was investigated by ASIO four times, and over a ten year period, there were more than forty calls about him on the security hotline. Clearly, this man was an utter quack and his entry to Australia was completely wrong-headed. However, in this case, the cause of the Lindt café siege is not necessarily attributable to the perpetrator himself, but more to the immigration department. Give that he had a criminal record in Iran, he should not have been allowed into the country in the first place, which would have prevented the siege from ever happening, at least in Australia. However, if he was convicted and taken into custody for his other felonies, once again the siege would likely have been prevented. The above points show that it is not necessarily who is let in, it is more the fact that they are let in in the first place. Oftentimes, if the subject’s background is properly examined, it would be possible to determine whether or not they would be a threat to national security. It is likely that would have been the case in this incident.

Monis’ was not the only case of an immigrant turning out to be a terrorist. The perpetrator of the 2018 Bourke street stabbing attack, Hassan Khalif Shire Ali, moved to Australia in the 1990’s from Somalia. Before the attacks, he had moved from his home in Werribee due to substance abuse. He was known to intelligence agencies and police, and in 2015 his passport was cancelled. ASIO believed he planned to travel to Syria, however they did not deem him a threat to national security. After the attack, police said he had radical views, and also had links to the IS terrorist group. Furthermore, a sheikh from his local mosque said he was not “mentally fit”. It is also possible that he suffers some disease such as Schizophrenia, as the same sheikh said “the family told me three days ago … that [he thought] he was being chased by people with spears”. This case is somewhat more complicated than the previous, but does highlight some important issues. Firstly, that people such as Shire Ali have action such as a cancelled passport taken against them, but then not followed up by an investigation. In addition, if the authorities had known that he had links to IS, why was he not investigated? He was assessed as “not posing a threat in relation to the national security environment”, but does raise the question of why this was not the case if he did indeed carry out the attack. As with the previous issue, this appears to have been a preventable incident, but this time more tentative.

It will likely prove impossible to completely iron out every terrorist in every group of society. It must be remembered, however, just how many refugees there are, and how minute the chance is that they are susceptible to extremism. Even if we are able to completely eliminate them from the refugee group, they will continue to come here in other ways. While not necessarily nice, terrorists are smart, and the fight against them will go on for a long while. Fighting amongst us about matters such as these must be stopped, and the problem at hand must be worked. Procedures could be improved, instead of wasting time and money on an issue that can be resolved more easily, and with more humane results. At the end of the day, it will probably be impossible to completely eradicate terrorism, and so humanity must do its best to fight it whilst maintaining some empathy for our brothers and sisters.

The debate surrounding the issue of accepting refugees in Australia will surely continue for a long time. However, some things must change, such as the long-winded and complicated process of applying for a refugee visa. Furthermore, there is a big incentive to accept more refugees, as they help strengthen and stabilise the economy. Finally, while people claim that there can be terrorists amongst the ranks of the innocent, surely the benefits to being more accepting can help outweigh the risks, as well as having a more rigorous procedure for dealing with the risks highlighted.