The poor and the Aussies

  • 2001-09-06
  • Gwynne Dyer
The difference between "the poor, the huddled masses"of refugees and economic migrants who filled up the United States and eventually had the Statue of Liberty erected in their honor in New York harbor, and the huddled masses of Afghan refugees and economic migrants trapped in the hold of the container ship Tampa off Christmas Island for eight days, is merely a matter of dates. The Afghans were about a hundred years too late.

It's almost too easy to vilify the Australian authorities, whose clumsy attempts to pass the Afghan parcel to other, poorer states in the region provided the world's media with an easy target. But they richly deserve vilification.

So does the great Australian public, whose panic at the prospect of being inundated by yet more seaborne asylum-seekers from exotic places (over 4,000 in the past year, or fully 0.02 percent of a population of 19 million) reminded the rest of the planet that the country has long had an explicitly racist "White Australia"immigration policy.

A very few of the 430 people aboard the Tampa may finally end up in Australia if their claims to be refugees are eventually accepted as valid. But Canberra is promising that most of the "legitimate"ones will go to other countries, while the rest are presumably sent back where they came from.

Australia has not come well out of this episode, but the pressure of people trying to get into rich countries is such that nobody trying to cope with it walks away with clean hands.

If everybody who wanted to come actually came, those countries would no longer be rich, nor indeed even culturally recognizable. There are probably several times as many people who would move from the poor to the rich countries if all the barriers came down as the entire present population of those countries.

So there must be barriers and controls of some sort, and that's where it gets tricky. Morally tricky, because so-called "economic migrants"will suffer mainly from poverty if they are sent home, whereas genuine refugees may suffer imprisonment, torture or death - so naturally, most illegal migrants claim to be refugees.

And tricky in practical terms, because barriers will always be breached by the more resourceful and desperate migrants.

There is no tidy or consistent policy available. Barriers must be maintained to prevent a free-for-all, but millions of people have to be allowed through them both on humanitarian grounds and because the aging societies of the industrial world need immigrants. The process of choosing who gets in will never be fair, and it will not always be humane.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.

(Editors' note. Readers may ask what relation this opinion has to the Baltics. Plenty. For example, as the Baltic states become integrated with the "rich world"how receptive will they be to refugees and asylum seekers in need of help? Also, do Baltic expats in Australia have an opinion on the Tampa incident, considering that many Baltic nationals were in a similar predicament just 50 years ago when they had to flee the Red terror?)