[From Asylum! A Socialist View of the Refugee Crisis (2022).]
The spectacular August 2021 collapse of the Western puppet government in Afghanistan in the face of the Taliban offensive generated a new wave of people seeking asylum.
Prime Minister Scott Morison made it clear that only Afghans who came through “official channels” would be resettled in Australia. If you come by boat forget it — apparently, making the slightest concession to “boat people” would open the floodgates to the dreaded people smugglers. And none of the 4200 Afghans already here on temporary visas would be permanently settled. Then Defence Minister Peter Dutton weighed in, claiming that some Afghan asylum-seekers could be terrorists or pose a threat to Australia.
‘Border control’
The huge fuss about the security of our borders and the threat of “boat people” is carefully designed political propaganda, aimed at keeping people fearful and prevent them reaching out to other human beings simply seeking a safe haven in a terrifying world.
Above all, the anti-refugee propaganda is designed to stop ordinary people focusing on the real threat — the absolutely overriding threat — to their life and liberty, that is, the capitalist system which subordinates all human needs to the enrichment of the capitalist class. That’s why, despite living in such an objectively rich country, we have such massive, seemingly intractable problems in so many basic areas: Aged care, disability care, education, housing, healthcare, job security, racism and indigenous disadvantage, taking urgent action on climate change, and women’s equality and safety.
And as climate change bites ever deeper, Australia could well have its own internal refugees before too long — people forced out of low-lying coastal areas by rising sea levels, people forced out of bushfire devastated areas, and people forced out of areas which have become simply too hot for human habitation. Where will all these people go? Will our benificent governments actually look after them or will they just swell the ranks of the homeless and semi-homeless?
Anti-refugee propaganda is confected
And, we might well ask, if “boat people” are such a threat, why are “plane people” — asylum seekers who come by plane, of which there are far more — not similarly targeted? Even imperialist-sponsored scapegoating should have some logical consistency!
Moreover, in 2019, 9.4 million tourists came — 9.4 million!! If a few thousand “boat people” are supposed to frighten us witless, this figure should have us scrambling for the rocketships to look for another planet!
Furthermore, as of March 31, 2019 there were 2.4 million people in Australia on temporary visas! (This figure includes overseas students and people here for work.)
These are very large numbers, even if they are not all here at any one time. But were Dutton and Morrison jumping up and down about the dangers? Not at all. These numbers are all good and necessary for big business.
Why so many asylum seekers?
Tens of millions of people are on the move globally, both within countries and across the borders, seeking safety and a tolerable life, because Western imperialism has literally created a hell on earth. The depredations of the giant Western corporations, imperialism’s endless wars in the Third World against any challenge to its grip, and its support for a whole range of ruthless client regimes have made life intolerable in places like Central America, Syria, and Afghanistan.
The bulk of these refugees take shelter in other nearby Third World countries. For example, it is estimated that there are more than 3.3 million Afghan refugees in Iran and some 3 million in Pakistan. Turkey hosts almost 4 million refugees, 3.6 million of which are Syrians who have fled the civil war there.
And the West’s failure to tackle climate change with the necessary urgency is soon going to make whole areas of the planet literally uninhabitable — and provoke gigantic waves of desperate refugees, dwarfing anything hitherto seen.
Fundamental social change the only solution
Imperialism’s grip on the Third World has to be broken. We need radical, emancipatory liberation movements that struggle for power. The Autonomous Administration in Northern and Eastern Syria (the Kurdish-led Rojava Revolution) is an inspiring example of a feminist, democratic, pluralist revolution but it is fighting for its survival at great cost against a host of enemies — including the veiled hostility of the West.
We need massive, disinterested technology transfer and aid to the countries of the Third World to help them cope with climate change and all the associated problems (especially sustainable energy generation and food supply).
And we also need radical social change in the heartlands of imperialism.
Without fundamental social change there cannot be a solution to climate change and all its associated problems. For example, there is currently more than enough food produced to feed the world’s population. But many poor people cannot afford it, a lot of it is wasted, and a lot goes to feed livestock instead. Once the grip of the big capitalist corporations on the food supply is broken, a sustainable, people-centred system can be created.
Open the borders
Socialists have long called for open borders, that is, for the right of people to move freely between countries.
The Wikipedia Open Border page argues that:
Pervasive control of international borders is a relatively recent phenomenon in world history. In the past, many states had open international borders either in practice or due to a lack of any legal restriction. Many authors, such as John Maynard Keynes, have identified the early 20th Century and particularly World War I as the point when such controls became common.
And even today, we do have open borders in specific areas, most notably Western Europe. The Schengen Agreement creates a big open-borders area embracing the European Union and the Nordic countries: You don’t need a visa to move between these countries. (The United Kingdom was part of this until Brexit cut the link.)
Of course, these are all rich First World countries. The problem arises when people from the Third World attempt to enter the First World. Then all the various walls come into play (above all, the Mediterranean).
Clearly, a genuine open borders policy for Australia would be an enormous shift from current practice. Capitalism needs an expanding population (for markets and a labour force) so it needs high migration levels. But the numerically tiny capitalist class also needs instruments and means to keep the vast majority under its thumb.
For the capitalist class, tight regulation of a country’s borders is a key means of social control. As John Howard notoriously put it: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” Lib-Lab political leaders need xenophobia and racism to distract and confuse people. Hence the demonisation of asylum seekers who arrive by boat.
The current federal Coalition government practice of deporting back to New Zealand any NZ nationals who have served prison terms here of 12 months or more — even if they have lived in Australia almost all their lives — is another example of the usefulness of closed borders to our rulers. They want Australian residency to be conditional, easily subject to revocation, and to pit people against each other.
The campaign against “boat people” implies that if any such asylum seekers are settled in Australia most of Asia will empty out and try to come here. This is a modern version of the infamous “yellow peril” scares of the past. We can make several observations:
Firstly, if conditions in their Third World homelands were not so dangerous or simply intolerable, most people would stay put and merely leave to temporarily visit other places.
Secondly, as the tourism and residency figures suggest, even if millions of people came and settled here, Australia could cope. Of course, we need to make the big switch to a truly sustainable economy in all respects but that would be no problem if capitalism were replaced by a system centred on meeting people’s needs rather than making profits for the capitalists.
Thirdly, climate change means millions almost certainly will seek to escape and come to rich First World Australia anyway. Are we going to join Morrison and Dutton and their gang and try to repel them on the high seas or the beaches? Or are we going to welcome them and fight together to build a society fit for human beings to live in?
Spurious arguments
Australia has always had a significant baseline of anti-migration and anti-refugee propaganda.
Populationists, for example, claim that Australia has a limited “carrying capacity” and can’t support a larger population. But there is no fixed “carrying capacity”. If our entire food production system was freed from its current profit-oriented, capitalist basis, we could sustainably feed a much larger population and help the rest of the world as well.
Australian agriculture and food production today is the result of capitalist development. It is focused on profit above all. Take the water crisis in the Murray-Darling: Agribusiness diverts huge amounts of water for completely inappropriate crops (especially water-intensive cotton, rice and almonds) while towns downstream are rationed. There is actually a market in water, which many small farms now can’t afford and are forced to shut.
Other voices blame all our urban problems (bloated sprawling cities, the housing crisis, inadequate public transport, lack of green space, etc.) on sheer numbers of people and on migration in particular. But these problems are due to the absolute dominance of capitalist, profit-centred development in our cities. Governments are opposed to building quality public housing on the massive scale required because that would cut out the profit-hungry “developers” that rule here. The lack of adequate public transport networks is due to the prioritisation of private motor vehicles, a rich source of profit for big capitalist interests. And so on and so on.
The problem is not too many people, whether migrants or refugees. It is the malignant social and economic system in whose toils we are forced to live and work — capitalism with its profits-before-people DNA.