Australia currently has immigration programs that allow people to live permanently on the territory on various demands. These include the Migration Program, which required high levels of English and Australian qualifications and the Humanitarian Program, which targets refugees. Overseas visitors living in Australia can also apply for permanent residence after four years and twelve months without leaving the country.

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This article will focus, however, on illegal migrants who are those entering Australia without authority or overstay their visa. The Migration Act requires that unlawful migrants be subject to mandatory immigration detention and to deportation unless given permission to stay in Australia. The majority of asylum seekers who have illegally landed in Australia come from Middle Eastern and South-East Asian. Those people travel often under the guidance of people smugglers. Refugees are, by definition, people fleeing persecution and in most cases are being persecuted by their own government. It is often too dangerous for them to obtain travel documents or they don‘t have time due to rapidly deteriorating situations that’s why most of the time they are forced to flee this way. In the Asia-Pacific region, very few countries have signed for the Refugee Convention, which is not the case of Australia. Therefore, countries have no legal obligation to provide protection to refugees. The standard of protection for refugees they have to provide is the most basic of human rights such as access to an asylum process, protection from arbitrary detention, health care and access to basic education for their children. However, this standard is not always respected. In the case of Australia, many of these asylum seekers are turned away due to the excision of some parts of Australia from the official migration zone.

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Such excised areas include Manus and Nauru Island. Manus Island and Nauru first became the locations for Australia’s offshore immigration detention centre in 2001, when John Howard the Prime minister launched the Pacific Solution. Nauru is located 3000 kilometres from the Australian mainland and Manus Island lies 300 km north of the island of Papua New Guinea. However those detention camps were reopened in 2012 as part of a plan to prevent asylum seekers arriving by boat. Liz Thompson, a former migration agent involved in refugee-assessment described this process as a “farce”, saying, “Manus Island is an experiment in the ultimate logic of deterrence, designed to frustrate the hell out of people and terrify them so that they go home." Offshore detention is designed to be so brutal, that asylum seekers are forced to go back home. However, these people fled in order to escape from violence, pain and death hoping to live in different conditions. Unfortunately for immigrants coming to Australia their reality won't change…

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There were 410 asylum seekers and up to 500 people recognised as refugees on Nauru on 31 August 2016 and 823 people detained on Manus Island. On Nauru, according to Dr Robert Adler, a paediatric psychiatrist who worked there providing medical services, “Families were living under a marquee, separated from one another with plastic sheets, with no easily accessible toilet or kitchen facilities, no privacy and no air-conditioning in 40 degree heat”. Infections and skin diseases are rife among the asylum seekers. About one in six people living on Manus Island contract malaria each year. Medical and other services are grossly inadequate. Furthermore they face a series of bashings, robberies, murders and rapes every year. Conflicts between locals and migrants have increased as well, since locals blame them for “taking jobs” and bringing high-handed Australian expats to their island.

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On 26 April 2016 the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court held that detention on those Islands was unlawful and the detention centre has to be closed. PNG is a poor country that is unable to welcome refugees permanently. Neither Nauru nor Manus Island can provide safety or a future for asylum seekers or refugees. In fact, their lives are in danger if they stay but there is nowhere else for them to come except Australia. The government’s efforts to find other countries to agree to resettle them have so far failed. What is certain is that the asylum seekers and refugees must be brought to Australia and the offshore detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru must be close. 

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Elona W.