[Introduction to the pamphlet Asylum! A Socialist View of the Refugee Crisis (2022).]
Our world is in chaos. Within countries and between countries, tens of millions of people in the Third World are on the move — they are fleeing war, oppression, gang violence, grinding poverty and escalating climate change. They are desperately looking for a way out.
And now the Russian invasion of Ukraine has produced a fresh crop of refugees. Being forced to leave your home and seek safety in another country will always be traumatic but for various reasons the Ukrainian refugees are generally being treated differently to those from the Third World.
As climate change bites deeper and deeper, the refugee crisis is only going to get radically worse. Whole regions of the world are on the cusp of becoming uninhabitable. This will result in very large-scale population displacement.
Misery caused by the West
The misery of the Third World is a result of the rapacity of the giant Western corporations and the wars fought by the Western powers to maintain their world empire. Climate change is fundamentally due to the mad, unsustainable profligacy of the imperialist West and its refusal to make the urgent, large-scale transition to renewables that is necessary to avert catastrophe.
Australia is an integral part of this apparatus of madness. It was a loyal supporter of the United States in its criminal war in Afghanistan and it supported the Sri Lankan regime in its war against Sri Lanka’s oppressed Tamil minority — two conflicts which generated the largest cohort of those who tried to reach Australia by boat. And as the OECD’s highest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases and the world’s largest exporter of coal, Australia is a significant contributor to climate change.
The solution is really very simple. We need to reverse course and work to create a better world — a world without war and misery — and take urgent steps to tackle climate change. Then people wouldn’t be forced to make desperate attempts to find sanctuary in faraway places.
But while the solution may be simple, actually achieving it will require a stupendous political struggle by hundreds of millions of people and the creation of a society which decisively puts people’s needs before business profits.
Building walls
The Berlin Wall served the West well as a symbol of “communist totalitarianism”. When it came down in 1989, there was a tremendous outpouring of triumphalist propaganda. Whether the wall was good or bad or why it was erected, the West’s response to it was pure hypocrisy and that is so evident today.
In fact, the Western governments are 100% in favour of building walls around their own countries to hold back the tide of refugees and they are constructing them at a great rate.
As the article by Nathan Akehurst in this pamphlet shows, Europe has built a “wall” through the Mediterranean which it is constantly strengthening — at tremendous human cost. The European Union also subsidises the authoritarian Turkish regime to keep several million Syrian refugees away from Fortress Europe.
On June 3, 2021 the Danish parliament voted in a proposal of the Social Democrat-led government, allowing it to detain asylum seekers outside the country while their claims are processed. Discussions have been held with the government of … Rwanda, a desperately poor country in the middle of Africa! Australia’s cruel offshore detention regime is now being emulated by other imperialist countries. The United States has a wall on its southern border to hold back the tide of desperate refugees from Central America, fleeing the chaos and violence in their countries — chaos ultimately created by Washington.
There is definitely no room at the inn. Costa Gavras wonderful 2009 film, Eden is West, shows the journey of one young asylum seeker as he travels from an unknown country to Greece and eventually to Paris, in constant danger of apprehension by the police and deportation back to his starting point. It is the story of so many.
‘Border protection’
Our government and the media fan the hysteria over “border protection”. A major task of our navy seems to be the interception of wretched boatloads of refugees and turning them back to Indonesia. There is a even a TV show called Border Security: Australia's Front Line doing its bit for xenophobia and Fortress Australia.
Of course, the real threats to Australia’s ordinary people come not from outside our borders but from inside — from the capitalist corporations and their Lib-Lab governments which are steadily destroying our economic security and civil liberties and now the very climatic conditions which make life on earth possible.
Internal climate refugees
In Australia, the devastating floods along our eastern seaboard in March this year have undoubtedly created a large number of internal climate refugees. The northern NSW town of Lismore has effectively been destroyed. Thousands of residents are now homeless: their homes are gone, often they were not insured and it’s clear that the town will have to be rebuilt somewhere else — somewhere safer.
There is plenty of money for the confected “national security” promoted by our leaders — the planes, missiles, submarines, tanks etc. designed to plug Australia into the US war drive against China. But if “national security” means anything surely it should mean protecting the lives and living standards of the people who live here. First of all, this means drastic action to tackle climate change at source. But it also has to include people protection measures such as a massive program of quality public housing to shelter people forced to relocate (by floods, fires, extreme heat and rising sea levels).
Our leaders will resist such a rational and people-before-profit policy with all their might. And all the while they sow hatred and division to divert us from a struggle against their profit-mad system which is responsible.
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The government must be forced to change its policy on those who come here seeking asylum. For a start: it must shut down all the detention centres, offshore and on the mainland; allow all asylum seekers to immediately apply for asylum in Australia; and let all asylum seekers seeking refugee status be accepted into the community.
Socialist Alliance’s refugee policy provides a comprehensive list of demands for a humane approach to those who come to Australia seeking safety.