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How Australia Stopped Illegal Immigration
Just two years ago, Australians were told that “push factors,” not our government’s policies, were responsible for the increase in refugee boats arriving on our shores. Fortunately, the Australian people elected a new government with new policies designed to “Stop the Boats.” The results are to your right. And no, 2014 and 2015 aren’t lacking data: they properly indicate that there were, in effect, no more boats.
To give you some background, a significant number of boats carrying “asylum seekers” began arriving in Australia in 1999. Concerned, John Howard’s government instituted a policy of immediately detaining all unauthorised arrivals before transferring them to Australian-run detention centers in nearby nations (the “Pacific Solution”), as well as creating a new visa category for those already here that could not be converted into permanent residence status. Along with a high profile detention effort (The Tampa Affair) in 2001, the message got out and the arrivals dried up. In 2002, there was just one boat with one person.
Over the next few years, the smugglers occasionally probed. Six boats arrived with 60 people in 2006. But the policy was controversial. We were turning our backs on asylum seekers (of course, very few had come directly from their place of alleged persecution).
In 2007, a new, more compassionate government was elected. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party closed down the Pacific detention centers (which, by then, has a total of one — 1! — inmate) and eased up on policy. Predictably, the boats returned. Only seven in its first full year of government, with 161 people. But in 2009, it was 60 boats with over 2,500 people. In 2012 it was 278 boats with 17,000 people. And during those few years, an estimated 1,200 would-be arrivals — four percent of the total — drowned at sea.
The Labor government insisted that their policy wasn’t to blame. It was, instead, “push factors” beyond its control. Events overseas had generated waves of displaced people, so it was only natural that the numbers had gone up. The suspicious coincidence between policy changes and arrivals statistics meant nothing. I personally saw and heard dozens of smart people — journalists, judges, academics — on TV and radio repeating this line.
The Labor government was in turmoil over internal dissension and obvious policy failures. The opposition Liberals — Australia’s conservative party — said that, if elected, they’d fix the boat arrivals. They promised to get them down to near zero in their first term (three years here). They’d re-introduce the “Pacific Solution,” temporary visas, and boat “turn backs” (when safe to do so, they said).
Panicked, the Labor government changed Prime Minister (again!) a few months before the election, and started to re-open the offshore detention facilities (it took time; they’d fallen into disrepair). But it was too late. Led by Tony Abbott, the Liberals took power in September 2013 and introduced its policies — except for the temporary protection visas, which it couldn’t get through Parliament — with a twist: it appointed a senior military officer to run the program, declared it an “operational matter” that only warranted limited, occasional press briefings, which pulled the whole thing out of the news.
Now, look at the graphs again. To my knowledge, only one boat has arrived since 2014. The smugglers have largely stopped trying. There were eight attempts in the last year, resulting in eight tow-backs.
Moral: it is not just push factors. You don’t reduce illegal immigration by increasing the number of legal places; in these days of cheap travel and millions seeking a better life, demand is effectively infinite. Instead, you have to make it thoroughly not worth the while of the would-be entrants. Don’t let them stay, and make it clear that they will get no return on the money they pay the smugglers (boat passages to Australia were around $10,000 a head).
Incidentally, on a per capita basis, under the present “heartless” government, Australia accepts more genuinely assessed asylum seekers on a per capita basis than any other country.
Published in Foreign Policy
Forgiven, of course! And I agree absolutely. The question is, how?
Actually, the answer is yes, to a certain extent. The Australian Labor Party — the party of the government that failed on immigration — has a number of seats in various cities with high proportions of mostly Middle Eastern immigrants to whom it panders. But those seats would tend to be ALP-leaning anyway, so it doesn’t significantly affect the prospects of the Liberal Party, the current party of government.
How did the Aussie Right deal with “illegal immigration is an act of love” and “diversity is our strength” and “doing the work Aussies won’t do” and “you’re heartless bastards who hate colored people” arguments we hear in the US?
No, Australia really is hard for substantial numbers of people to sneak into. Partly geography – they have to come by boat and that’s difficult (and expensive, and easier to monitor than a trickle over a land border, plus a big coastline is misleading because who tries to enter Australia from the South?) and also the best place to hide people is more people, and we just don’t have that many people. Boat people who came to Australia didn’t try and disappear into the community, they declared themselves and asked for asylum.
Which was the point of coming here in the first place – they didn’t want to wait for decades in refugee camps till they were accepted [or not] for resettlement. And which opened up the debate about whether it is legal to show up and ask for asylum or not. The consensus was that it was not manageable in the numbers we were seeing and with the trend we expected, but that it was in fact legal under various refugee conventions we’ve signed.
Most of the 62,000 illegal aliens in Australia enter on a valid visa and stay on when their visas expire. They are from (in order): China, Malaysia, the US and the UK.
Stephen – I think the influence of Middle Eastern migrants is exaggerated.
Middle Eastern and Muslim are not the same (I think we have more Arab Christians than Arab Muslims, and for much longer), but Australia’s population is only 2.2% Muslim (and I think that might go up to 4% in Sydney).
Labor does have the reputation of a migrant friendly party, certainly compared to the Coalition’s junior partner, but that is a much broader thing. Almost half the Australian population was born overseas – and while a lot of them might be ten pound poms (like our current, and possibly also last, Prime Minister), a lot of them aren’t.
Here’s a very cool interactive map of Sydney – which sadly leaves the migrant numbers for Britain and New Zealand out.
They only work in the US because there is a business lobby there which depends on cheap illegals for labor. That’s not the case in Australia.
If they enter only from the north thats still about 8000 miles of coastline. As to try to “infiltrate and hide”, if they have to do that in Australia I congratulate you again. In the US just getting their feet dry on land is about all it takes with our idiot immigration policy. And again about 1/2 our invaders are here on visa overstays too.
Not 100%. Just 100% (more or less) on boats. There are still tens of thousand of visa overstayers.
There is a big difference though. Those on boats routinely tossed their passports and identification documents overboard so as to impede story checking during asylum processing. Those arriving on airplanes obviously do have passports, etc.
Nonetheless our naval folk seem to be able to intercept them. Would-be arrivals have to head towards civilisation anyway. Most places in the north west are hundreds of kilometres from civilisation. Arrive there and you die. (There are only 23 million of us here, in a land more than 3/4 size of the US.)
It got ridiculous though. In the period with the ALP was in charge, the boats would chug out about 50 kilometres from Indonesia, call Australian authorities on a sat phone and say they were sinking. An Australian naval vessel would ‘rescue’ them.
Now when a boat is found, the people on board are offloaded and placed on a special lifeboat and sent back. Each boat costs a fair bit, but it only took a few of them to solve the problem.
Maybe the Europeans should get a few for the Mediterranean.
We have a very large legal immigration program. The left likes to conflate the two. Of course.
Better yet, they need to blockade the Libyan ports and intercept them right from the get go.
Or is it an infinite coastline?
We also got ‘creative’ with our migration zone.
Yes. It served the purpose of keeping these matters out of the court jurisdiction.