Walking many miles in a refugee's shoes
Refugees and asylum seekers flood into stable – or at least
more stable – countries in their millions every year. For some, like Kenya,
whose northern border is home to Da Daab, the world’s largest refugee camp, the
difficulty rests in supporting the hundreds of thousands of Somalis who have
made the camp their permanent home. Ditto Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan with
Syrian refugees. Ditto Thailand and Malaysia with those fleeing Myanmar.
There is, of course, a measure of political one-upmanship
attributed to the refugee ‘problem’ in all these countries. But in a country
like Malaysia, where there is undoubtedly deeply entrenched racism, what to
‘do’ about the influx of refugees is simply not used as a weighty political bargaining
chip – even during the recent hotly contested and long-awaited election.
The way in which the issue is discussed mutates, it seems, when
the recipient country is high income. All recipient states face the challenges
of accounting and caring for people moving across their borders – but richer
countries seem to emanate a more protectionist rhetoric.
In Australia, the politics of refugee problem – commonly
referred to as ‘boat people’ – has risen to fever pitch. Elections may be won
or lost based on who manages to control the influx. Derogatory terms such as
‘FOB’ (fresh off the boat) are thrown around; ‘Australia for Australians’ seems
to be a rallying cry that has gained far more traction than similar ‘White
Britain’ bombast in the UK.
The fact that people get in boats – from as far away as
Pakistan and Somalia – in the hope of reaching Australian territory is
certainly something to be discussed, and discussed seriously. But not for the
reasons most people are giving. Australia is not running out of room – in 2011,
less than 200 Somali refugees were granted the legal right to remain in
Australia – from a country where one million are homeless and displaced by war
and famine. Refugees are not bleeding the country dry –In fact, after 12 months
in Australia, skilled immigrants boast an employment rate of at least 90%,
while in a triumph of economics over prejudice, a full third of the Australian
workforce is made up of unskilled migrants earning their keep.
The fact that getting into a safe country like Australia
legally has been made so difficult that people are forced to clamber aboard
disintegrating wooden ships, clutching their children, with barely even life
jackets to protect them from the ferocity of the Indian and Pacific oceans, is
a terrible stain upon the country. This is why ‘turning back the boats’ is a
necessary discussion. Getting to Australia by boat shouldn’t have to be an
option.
These arguments are brought into sharp and tragic relief by
the Australian show, Go Back to Where You
Came From. I’ve recently come across this and have started with the second
series, in which 6 high profile Australians – both pro-and anti- refugees – are
sent to meet ‘illegals’ residing in Australia, and then to the countries these
people fled. The experiences on the show are punctuated with prior interviews
with the participants – some expressing great concern for the plight of people
arriving by boat and their heinous treatment in offshore processing facilities,
others expressing their concern for Australian values and the fear that the
public is being taken for a ride by foreign freeloaders.
What the show reveals is the near-total disintegration of
the moral framework of the antis.
People who have spent their lives believing that Australians
are being ‘gamed’ by people claiming to have a sob-story background and who
simply want to take advantage of Australian benefits are confronted with the
absolute morbid terror of life in Mogadishu and Kabul.
They find themselves quite unable to reconcile previous
beliefs with the lived reality of situations which force people to attempt the
journey to a better life. Persecuted ethnic Hazaras in Kabul open up to the
Australians about the number of family members they have lost. They weep as
they meet a Somali mother of four crying for joy upon being given a small tent
in the windblown Ethiopian desert, having walked for four days and lost a baby
on the way. They witness people they had formerly dismissed as fakers, illegals
and chronically work-shy barely surviving day to day amidst the carcass of a
country.
This show should not only be mandatory viewing – it should
be mandatory in the making. Every politician who makes a decision based on the
assumption that ‘refugee’ is simply another word for ‘benefit scrounger’ should
confront the experiences of the world’s displaced and terrified. And this
format doesn’t have to apply just to refugees. We could even go so far as to
say that Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne should be forced to live on the £53 per week they claim is so reasonable. The
power of this shock-doc could have vast ramifications.
I do not dispute the fact that refugees must go through an
administrative process; I also agree that they should, as far as possible, make
their way into their new country legally – to prevent them slipping through
society’s security nets, more than anything. Without authorities knowing who
and where they are, they cannot be properly protected.
But if they are fleeing torture, famine and war in a failed
or failing state, how can they be expected to find themselves a passport before
they hop on a nice Qantas flight to Melbourne? How can they pay for these legal
avenues when they cannot feed their children?
Legal purists – and there are a few on the show – dismiss
the experiences of boat people based on the ‘lack of respect’ inherent in their
failure to arrive through the appropriate channels. The law is important – but
so is understanding when to abandon it. And in the case of the vast majority of
refugees, the lack of passport is simply not enough to send them away.
