The problem of refugee immigration
EDITOR FORWARD
Australia’s immigration history is rocky, yet while each wave of immigration into Australia has met with teething issues, our country is generally proud to call itself an immigration nation. But when it is refugees that are the immigrants, then modern Australia is deeply conflicted.
The complex issues of refugee policy are nothing new for this country; the problems existed before the Tampa, before September 11, before mandatory detention, before governments were willing to sacrifice people-in-need by soap-boxing themselves to a point of no return and no compromise.
It is therefore not surprising that Australia was debating ‘The Refugee Problem’ at what would become the most poignant moment of the modern age to be discussing immigration – in the very days before World War Two broke out.
It is often difficult to draw a direct line between government policy and material human outcomes. Yet in this case the effects of refugee policies that every nation enacted are staggeringly obvious with the gift of hindsight – every person taken in was likely a life saved.
On the eve of WWII, Australia was only just throwing off the yoke of The Great Depression; the scars of WWI were still raw. And the arguments against immigration were little different to the ones we hear howled across our current Parliament.
Yet 80 years ago, the debate about refugee policy was far more nuanced and far more compassionate. And this in a country arguably less able to afford generosity.
Today we are one of the richest countries, and immigration tends to be framed as a threat to our affluence, rather than with due consideration of the actual threat faced by refugees. In reading this article I wondered whether we have a greater understanding of the humanity of the people that were lost to the Holocaust, than we do for people whose lives are yet to be lost. How is this possible and how did we get here?
This article went to print for the September 1939 edition of – on the 1st September 1939
