The recent spate of asylum-seeker boats is due to the combination of an economic crisis in Sri Lanka and a view that the Albanese government will relent on turn-backs.
But the current to persist with the turn-back policy suggests these attempts will come to little and will soon subside.
The cost of these ventures,especially if some of the boats are destroyed by Australian Border Force and passengers quickly returned on aeroplanes,together with the significant danger to life,means few people smugglers will keep trying.
The media attention on boat arrivals largely misses the real challenges facing the Albanese government.
There are almost 130,000 asylum seekers living in Australia – something no previous federal government has ever inherited.
The 130,000 is in two parts. There are more than 31,000 asylum seekers associated with the legacy boat arrival caseload and another 100,000 who have subsequently arrived by aeroplane.
Of the legacy caseload,more than 19,000 are on some form of temporary protection. The new government has said it would provide to permanent residence. When that happens,the new Opposition Leader will no doubt again warn of an armada of boats.
Another 10,000 legacy asylum seekers have been refused protection. They are effectively in the same position as the Nadesalingam family before they were taken into detention.
Why the previous government and not the other 10,000 remains a mystery. Perhaps the government realised the cost of removing 10,000 unsuccessful asylum seekers would have been overwhelming?
So,are we to become more like the United States and Europe with huge numbers of unsuccessful asylum seekers,constantly exploited and abused while they work illegally in order to survive?
Or does the Albanese government have the courage to regularise the status of unsuccessful asylum seekers in Australia and prevent the re-emergence of the massive labour-trafficking scam that took place under the previous government?
Most Australians would be surprised to learn that since 2015,Australia experienced its.
This scam involved about 100,000 people being organised to arrive by plane,mostly on tourist visas.
Organisers of the scam targeted vulnerable people,initially from Malaysia and China,with the prospect of well-paying jobs in Australia,usually working on farms. The organisers apply for asylum on behalf of workers who often know nothing about the applications.
That gives them work rights for a number of years while applications are processed,during which time the organisers usually take a cut from the workers’ already meagre wages.
It is far easier and cheaper to exploit the asylum system by trafficking people on aeroplanes.
We now have almost 30,000 asylum seekers at the primary stage of application and another 37,000 at the clogged-up Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
The majority of asylum seekers are refused protection which means there are another 31,000 who have been refused at both stages but remain in the community without any support or work rights.
For this group,former agriculture minister. That was because the scam mainly supplied cheap labour to farms.
Littleproud’s amnesty was who said:“An amnesty would send a dangerous message that it is okay to flout our strong visa and migration rules,principles that this government has worked incredibly hard over a period of time to secure.”
This is the argument the Republican Party in the US has run for decades to prevent any effective action being taken to regularise the status of millions of unsuccessful asylum seekers in that country.
The Albanese government faces a critical choice.
Does it follow the path taken by the Morrison government and simply ignore tens of thousands of unsuccessful asylum seekers living in the shadows and allow the labour-trafficking scam that started in 2015 to resume as international travel returns to more normal levels?
Or does it put in place effective measures to both regularise the status of the unsuccessful asylum seekers as well as preventing the labour-trafficking scam abusing the asylum system from resuming?
No doubt Opposition Leader Dutton would argue against regularisation and suggest the Albanese government remove all unsuccessful asylum seekers.
But removing tens of thousands of unsuccessful asylum seekers,people who have been living and working in the Australian community for many years,is an impossible task. Leaving aside the massive cost,it would mean farmers losing tens of thousands of people currently in Australia.
Over the past four to five years,very few unsuccessful asylum seekers have been removed,because the Australian Border Force doesn’t have the resources.
Achieving the dual objective of regularising more than 100,000 asylum seekers while preventing labour-trafficking scams from resuming is perhaps the ultimate policy problem.
So,policy paralysis may well be the outcome.
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