The passage of controversial migration legislation has again brought into focus the future of the asylum seeker system in Australia.
This is at a time Donald Trump is preparing to trash the rights of asylum seekers in the USA, if not completely withdraw from the 1951 Refugee Convention. His intention to use the military to implement a mass deportation plan will totally ignore asylum rights, plus large numbers of U.S. citizens wrongly being swept up in the process. Whether the U.S. courts will limit this seems unlikely given Trump’s influence on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Canadian Minister for Immigration, exasperated by a deluge of bogus asylum applications, has written to migration agents and lawyers warning of the consequences of providing or encouraging the inclusion of false information in asylum applications. The asylum backlog in Canada is over 260,000 with between 15,000 to 20,000 new applications per month. Around 14,000 students have applied for asylum in just the nine months to September 2024. The Minister has foreshadowed further changes to asylum processes to discourage bogus applications and process new applications faster.
The UK and Europe have been tightening their asylum policies for many years and will keep going further.
How will Australia proceed?
The polarised debate on the recently passed migration legislation highlights how difficult it is to achieve sensible immigration reform. My thoughts on the specific powers in this legislation are in this interview with David Speers.
The Coalition is urging the Government to go further and faster, with a clear eye to Trump’s successful use of immigration policy in his election win. Exactly what this means in practice remains unclear beyond simplistic Election messaging. The Coalition would know it will take considerable time to negotiate implementation of these new powers with other nations and that these negotiations will be difficult.
Taking a blunt and loud-mouth Trumpist approach is unlikely to be effective.
On the other hand, asylum advocates and the Greens Party have used hysterical language to describe the legislation. For example, Greens Spokesperson David Shoebridge described it as the most extreme immigration legislation since the White Australia Policy.
Asylum advocates and the Greens have consistently used the figure of 80,000 people currently in Australia being affected by the legislation. This 80,000 is an estimate of the number of people currently in Australia who have exhausted most of their legal options to remain and are potentially subject to removal.
While the new legislation has been drafted more broadly than needed, the vast bulk of the 80,000 could potentially be removed without using any of these new powers. For example, why would the Government want to pay a third country to accept a non-citizen who could be removed to their home country without any additional cost?
The extraordinary aspect of the debate has been that neither asylum advocates nor political parties have put forward any policy proposals for the bulk of the 80,000, most of whom are unsuccessful asylum seekers.
The asylum advocates and the Greens would no doubt want some sort of amnesty. There would be two main problems with a broad-based amnesty.
First, it would create a pull factor for even more unmeritorious asylum applications. But more importantly it would trash public confidence in the asylum system. What would be the point of going through an extensive asylum process with multiple appeal opportunities when at the end of the day, all unsuccessful asylum applicants are given permanent residence anyway?
The Coalition will be hungry to call for a mass deportation program copying Trump’s electoral success. But the Coalition will know that the vast majority of the 80,000 applied for asylum when Peter Dutton was Home Affairs Minister. It will also know that the cost of such a mass deportation program would be eye-watering with numerous instances of media reports about people who have become a key part of their local community.
The Labor Government has made some efforts to address the situation through a $160 million package to enable faster processing of asylum claims. This has helped reduce the primary asylum backlog from 32,807 in March 2024 to 30,505 in October 2024. The asylum backlog at the new Administrative Review Tribunal appears to be stabilising at around 41,000.
But the overall number of asylum seekers in the community continues to rise relentlessly and reached over 119,000 at the end of October 2024. The number refused at the primary level and not departed also set a new record at over 88,000. In the last five years, an average of 15-20 unsuccessful asylum seekers have been removed each month, with perhaps 1-2 of these being removed involuntarily. The number of asylum seekers in the community, particularly unsuccessful asylum seekers, will keep rising.
Immigration and asylum will be a focus of the next Federal election. Can we expect a calm discussion about the future of the asylum system in Australia or will we get more extreme language from all sides with little in the way of sensible solutions?
I talked to David Speers about some current immigration policy issues. https://t.co/XG2h1OxPSH
— Abul Rizvi (@RizviAbul) November 30, 2024
Dr Abul Rizvi is an Independent Australia columnist and a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration. You can follow Abul on Twitter @RizviAbul.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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