As the migration of people fleeing conditions like famine and war increases, nations around the world are struggling with how to deal with the influx while maintaining humanitarian values.
Some are not doing such a good job. The United States separated thousands of young children from their parents for months, keeping them in pens. Many of these children became sick. At least one died. Some still wait to be reunited with their families. The mandate to separate families was neither well-managed nor necessary. In fact, it was cruel and solved nothing.
In Europe, countries coping with large migrant populations have set up camps outside of main cities where families seeking asylum or awaiting passage to a third country stay in barely livable conditions for months and even years.
Although most of these nations were founded on principles of democracy, respect for all people, and equal rights, the treatment of people seeking asylum is often at odds with these precepts.
Fear is part of the problem. Such fear is often based on ignorance — a distrust of people who look different, speak a different language, and have different cultural traditions. Part of the worry is also economic: These people are coming to take our jobs. The pie will be smaller; the payout less.
The concern that asylees are terrorists or active agents of mayhem is a red herring. Based on having worked in immigration and criminal law for decades, you are much more likely to meet a Hannibal Lecter-type psychopath or a James Bond villain in the movies than among the millions seeking asylum. Terrorists are the outliers, more prevalent in fiction than in fact.
Yet even those countries which in their formation were populated by outsiders (like Australia and the United States), are now struggling with tarnished national images due to their harshness toward immigration.
This week, the spotlight turned to Australia, where immigrants arriving by sea are turned away, and instead of being processed on the continent, are posted in camps on the small island of Manus, Papua New Guinea.
That may sound like an equatorial paradise for a tourist, but as an inmate (which basically is what these refugees are), conditions are far from comfortable. First, there appears to be no time limit to how long you might be kept there. Next, there are restrictions on movement, food, and communications with the outside world, and then there’s the tremendous heat. Most of the immigrant men and boys go permanently shirtless and shoeless in efforts to cope.
That’s why it was such a surprise when, last week, Australia awarded the Victorian Premier, its highest literary prize, to a man who’s been stuck on Manus since August 2013. Behrouz Boochani fled his native Iran when the offices of the magazine for which he worked were raided by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Eleven of his colleagues were arrested and many subsequently imprisoned. Boochani, a journalist, playwright, and poet, went into hiding before making his way to Indonesia to board a boat to Australia. But when his boat was intercepted by Australian law enforcement, instead of reaching Australia, he was diverted to Manus and has been interned there since.
Largely using a cell phone smuggled into the encampment, he tapped out his memoir, “No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison.” It tells the story in prose and poetry of his trip from Iran, his imprisonment at Manus, the people he met, the lives lost.
His work was sent bit by bit on WhatsApp to a translator and ultimately published. It became a sensation and a flashpoint of controversy in Australia.
Normally, the prestigious Victorian Premier is reserved only for Australian nationals or permanent residents, but award officials believed Boochani’s work deserved an exemption both for its literary excellence and the import of its message.
Unfortunately, because of his confinement, Boochani couldn’t attend the ceremony to pick it up. He hopes, however, that the publicity he’s gained through the award and the worldwide recognition of his book will help both ameliorate conditions on Manus and win quicker asylum for those confined there.
It’s clear that the majority of people confined in immigration camps are not risks to the societies in which they seek entrance. Rather than seeking additional money to build more camps, enclosures, and walls, such funding might be better used to staff courts, fund attorneys who represent asylees, and process papers more efficiently so that those who merit the remedy of asylum can gain it faster.
Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.
Immigrant Detainees Down Under curated from Above the Law
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