Peter Mares: Hello, and welcome to The National Interest on ABC Radio National, and on Radio Australia and a program coming to you from the 2009 Adelaide Festival of Ideas. Today, a conversation about migration, always one of the most contentious and difficult to manage of all public policy issues. With me here on stage in the Bonython Hall at the University of Adelaide, are three people who do a lot of serious thinking about borders and people, about human movement and human rights, about the economics of migration and about its social and political consequences.
Dr Khalid Koser is a geographer, and an expert on forced migration. He's Co-Director of the New Issues and Security Course at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and a fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington. And he has a particular interest in asylum policies in practice. He's carried out extensive field work in Africa, in the Balkans and Pakistan and Afghanistan. Khalid Koser, welcome to The National Interest, and to the Adelaide Festival of Ideas.
Khalid Koser: Thank you very much.
Peter Mares: Mark Cully is an economist, in fact he's the Chief Economist with the Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Citizenship in Canberra. It's a newly-created post, created less than a year ago by the Immigration Minister, Chris Evans, and Mark Cully is also the former Chair of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, so we're very pleased to have him back here. Mark Cully, welcome.
And Julian Burnside is a barrister who specialises in commercial litigation, but spends much of his spare time deeply involved in human rights work, particularly in relation to refugees. He's often provided pro bono services in court cases where key issues and principles are at stake, but he also finds time to write, and is the author of among other things From Nothing to Zero: A compilation of letters written by asylum seekers held in detention in Australia. Julian Burnside, thank you for joining us at the Festival and on ABC Radio National.
So why do we have a migration policy? Khalid Koser, do we have a migration policy to keep people out or to let them in?
Khalid Koser: I think ultimately we have a migration policy to serve the national interest of countries to which migrants are going; that includes Australia as much as any other country around the world. Migration is intended to foster economic growth in the countries to which migrants are going. It's one way of fulfilling international commitments towards humanitarian migration, refugees and asylum seekers, and it's also one way of fulfilling developmental goals for many destination countries to.
But let me just say three things if I could that perhaps will provoke further conversation as we go through:
First, it's important to recognise that migration policy alone can't achieve any of those three things I've just said: economic growth, humanitarian commitments and development. We shouldn't overestimate the importance of migration policy in achieving larger goals.
Secondly, looking at Australian policy on a global scale, and I'm really an expert on global migration, not on Australian migration, I'd say you're in a fortunate position and this is presumably because of the hard work of people like Mark and his colleagues, that largely migration policy in this country works. It doesn't in many other parts of the world, including many advanced economies. A very famous migration scholar was driven to write an article in the European Union entitled Why Migration Policies Fail. And they largely do in many parts of the world; I would argue that don't in Australia.
And the third thing I would just say to stimulate some discussion: we shouldn't overestimate the role of migration policy in determining who moves into and leaves countries. There are larger forces at work, global disparities in development and demography and democracy; the growing role of the private sector and private industry, a growing migration industry including smugglers and traffickers too.
Peter Mares: Mark Cully? We've had some high praise there for Australia's immigration policies. You can take credit, having been with the Department, what all of six months?
Mark Cully: All of six months. Well, well-deserved I think. Look I completely agree with Khalid that from our perspective it's really serving the national interest while having regard to our international obligations. And I think maybe just to give people some idea of the scale to which this country has been built by migrants, when Arthur Caldwell was appointed Minister for Immigration in 1945, he was the very first Minister to be so appointed, and the Immigration Department was established then. It was the first country in the world to establish a Department of State for Immigration.
Roughly seven million people have migrated to Australia since 1945, of whom, 700,000 as refugees. And the extent to which those waves after waves of initially people from southern Europe, and then from South East Asia, have enriched our nation, both culturally but also economically, can never be overstated really.
In terms of the title we've got, Peter, for the session about migration being a partly open door, I think clearly our door is partly open. There are a couple of ways in which we explicitly keep people out. And I think the other thing we probably - and way may want to come to this - is we need to understand the extent to which we've got these two-way flows and people coming here temporarily, we've got something like a million Australians living abroad, and many of them do come back, and they come back loaded with ideas that they've picked up from overseas, and they too, enrich our nation. And we also have very large stocks of people who come here temporarily as students, as working holidaymakers, and again, we benefit tremendously from that. But no doubt we'll pick up some of those issues later.
Peter Mares: Julian Burnside, the question I posed initially was 'is a migration policy there to let people in, or keep people out?' Mark described it as it's described in the title of this session here at the Festival as being a partly open door. That is, there's lot of people who want to come in and the government opens the door a certain amount and lets certain numbers in. So by its very nature a migration policy is discriminatory, isn't it?
Julian Burnside: I don't normally quote with approval things said by John Howard, but I'll make an exception: he famously said that we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstance in which they come. As a statement of migration policy, I think that's pretty close to the mark and that involves deciding who will - letting people in and keeping people out. However we need to distinguish very clearly between migration policy to which that sentiment applies accurately, and refugee policy to which utterly different considerations apply.
It seems to me that the country can make selfish choices about the voluntary migrants whom it accepts, but it should not make selfish choices or apply the same migration principles to people who come here in desperation asking for help. As an analogy, you could say as a person who owns a home: ' I will decide who comes into my home and the circumstance in which they come'. And if you're sick of entertaining and you say, 'I'm not going to welcome visitors until Thursday week'. But if you see an 8 year-old child running down the street, escaping a rapist and she knocks on your door asking for help, you would have to be one heartless person to say, 'No, come back Thursday week.' So I just want to make that distinction very clear at the outset.
Peter Mares: Well I think that's a really important distinction and perhaps we should turn to the refugee issue early, because while there isn't a migration issue as such, the two are often discussed together. And the example you use is a very clear one, the 8 year-old girl and the rapist. The problem Khalid Koser, with people seeking asylum is that the case is often not that clear-cut. You get what are called 'mixed flows': mixed flows meaning a group of people coming, some of whom may be asylum seekers, some of whom may be refugees, some of whom may not be. Then the question is, how do you manage that?
Khalid Koser: You're right to point that out about a very difficult issue. The current legal definition of a refugee was laid down in 1951 really dealing with a particular historical circumstance. These are people who've been displaced as a result largely of World War II and persecution in Germany. It focuses on political persecution, it focuses on individual persecution, and I think there's a strong argument that that historical definition doesn't really apply to the global realities of refugees and people moving from their homes today. For example, for reasons of climate change, examples of reason of desperate poverty which I would argue the global financial crisis may be increasing. So it's increasingly hard, I agree, to find people who fit that very specific, very historically contextualised definition. Mixed flows are people who are moving - well there are two ways of defining mixed flows. Firstly, in the same boat, and I know boat arrivals are something that are of concern in this country. You may have people moving for different reasons. Some people fleeing persecution say, in Afghanistan, others basically moving for economic reasons and leaving Afghanistan to improve their lives. By the way I think there's nothing wrong with moving from a country to improve your life.
The more difficult situation is where you have individuals moving for mixed motivations. I would argue that increasingly in the world today, it's very hard to identify a single motivation for any individual to move. Most people move for some mixture of motivations. Even if you're fleeing a conflict zone, even if you're fleeing a tank coming down the pathway towards your village, you may also be fleeing because you want to make sure that you can make some money, or educate your children, or feed your wife. So there's always an economic motive. There may be a social motive: you're leaving to try to join family abroad and so on and so forth. It's increasingly hard I think to disentangle different motivations that make people move, and let's not underestimate how big a decision this is for many people. These are people who are leaving their homes, leaving ancestral burial sites in some parts of the world, these aren't decisions that are taken lightly, and I think you have to understand the motivation to move is a very important human motivation.
Peter Mares: Julian Burnside how do you deal with that, then, as someone who has stood up for the rights of refugees? The fact that you do get these mixed flows, even in the head and heart of a single person.
Julian Burnside: I think if the problem of mixed flows is going to be reflected in policy settings, we need to look at the reality of the situation. Now in Australia, boat arrivals are a trivial number. You know, we are quite unlike Europe and North America. I think on average since the what, late 1980s, the average arrival rate has been about 1,000 people a year, of whom the overwhelming majority have been assessed as genuine refugees. Now if that's the fact you're dealing with, then the policy settings will reflect that fact. Mixed flows are not really a feature of our boat arrivals, probably because it's very dangerous and very difficult. The odd thing is that in recent years, we've treated much more leniently people who've arrived here with papers as students, and then have immediately applied for protection. That's where you see the mixed flow, and yet the policy settings favour those people who are less likely to be refugees.
Peter Mares: They find it easier to get work rights, to live in the community and so on and so forth.
Julian Burnside: Exactly so.
Peter Mares: And I suppose the argument is they have arrived lawfully, whereas someone arriving on a boat doesn't arrive lawfully.
Julian Burnside: Yes, and yet the Refugees Convention says that we should not discriminate against people on account of the way in which they arrive. And by the way, at some point, let's talk about people smugglers. You know, in recent times it has been very fashionable and popular amongst all sides of politics to bag people smugglers as if they are unmitigated evil. I think we need to tease that apart, because I don't think all people smugglers are quite that evil, such as the nuns in The Sound of Music for example.
Peter Mares: Well we will certainly come back to the idea of people smugglers. Mark Cully, one thing I wanted to point out, you mentioned the ways, we have a few ways in which we keep people out. One of the ways in which we keep people out is a universal visa regime, so to come to Australia, you need a visa, and what we do is, we post liaison officers at airports around South East Asia, and places like Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, also I think in Harare now, and it is the job of those people to detect false passports, false visas, people trying to get to Australia without proper papers. Now that's fine, that's all in accordance with our laws, but the perverse outcome of that is that people are more likely to come by boat, because if they really are seeking asylum, it's the only option left.
Mark Cully: It's no surprise I think that the border security shows, one of the top-rating shows on television, it very much excites the public. I'm not sure I agree with you, Peter. I think I'm more in Julian's camp with the people who are arriving here by boat. I mean they're fleeing war and persecution in the main; they're not really what you might call economic refugees. There is a certain proportion of people who do come here in that mixed flow sense in which you said, where more typically they'd probably be seeking to come here as a tourist.
Peter Mares: But I guess my point is, I was actually meaning if you are someone who is a refugee, then the boat is the only way to get here, because you will be stopped at the airport in Bangkok from getting on a plane without a visa. I mean we ensure with our migration controls that in fact the only route to get to Australia to seek refugee status is via a boat, for some people.
Mark Cully: Except, as Julian pointed out, there are roughly I think 4,000 or 5,000 people a year who get off a plane at Sydney airport or what-have-you, and seek protection.
Peter Mares: Khalid Koser, do you have a view on this? I mean whether border controls in themselves create the market for the smugglers, I guess that's my point.
Khalid Koser: Sure. Before I answer that Peter, I would just point out that unlike most countries in the world, and I think Canada and the USA are the two other great examples of this, Australia does of course have a resettlement quota, so there is a legal way to arrive in this country as a refugee which is via your I think 14,000 people a year resettlement quotas, the second most generous in the world, I think that's the way to go. To become a refugee in the UK for example, you literally have to arrive in the country and apply for asylum there, and these people really do have no alternative but to arrive effectively illegally. So I think what you're talking about perhaps applies in Europe more than it does in Australia.
Now there is a famous law of unintended consequences when you come to migration policy and irregular migration again I suspect, not necessarily in the Australian context, which is that if there are people who want to move, and also critically if there are jobs for them to do, and let's not think this is just a supply issue, irregular migrants move because there's work for them to do in the countries to which they're going, and that includes Australia. If people want to move, if there's work for them to do, but if you put up barriers to stop them moving, legally, they will find a way to come illegally, and as a general rule I think that applies to that.
One of the greatest examples of this is when the hugely expensive wall was built between the USA and Mexico, of course intended to keep out illegal, irregular Mexican migrants, the immediate impact of the wall was to make sure there were more irregular Mexicans in the USA and not less. Because before the wall was built, Mexicans would come for six months, go back to Mexico, then come back next season to work again. Once the wall was built, they knew they'd never back in to the USA, so they ended up staying. So this huge investment in a wall between Mexico and the USA resulted in more, not less, irregular Mexicans in the USA. And that's a classic example I think of an unintended consequence.
Julian Burnside: Can I just take up Khalid on one point, and that is the generosity of our offshore resettlement program. I agree it is a good program. To talk about generosity is maybe skewing the picture a little bit, because what it has done in practice, or what it can do in practice, is to reintroduce the same selfish considerations as informs ordinary migration flows. And John Menadue tells the story against himself when he was Secretary of the Department, of going to some godforsaken camp somewhere in Africa, and asking the person in charge of the camp whether they had any engineers or doctors, and was told ruefully, No, they only had widows and orphans. Now, you know, we shouldn't be using offshore resettlement in order to fill what we perceive as demographic needs in the country.
Khalid Koser: I agree completely with that, and I think you made this point right at the beginning, Julian, the criteria for selecting refugees is humanitarian. It's about need, and international commitments to protection; it's nothing to do with economic value and so on and so forth. I would still argue that the resettlement method is still better than the non-resettlement issue that we have in Europe for example, where frankly, to get to the UK to apply for asylum you need to pay a smuggler $10,000 which means by definition you're middle-class and well educated. So I'd say that that process is even more than your process keeping out people who truly have need. But neither is ideal I think you're right.
Peter Mares: If I can just mention there too, I mean we in recent years the example of Malcolm Fraser and the Indochinese boat people resettled from camps in South East Asia, has often been held up as a great example of good policy, a good policy response to an international crisis. But at that time too, Australia was cherrypicking, for want of a better word, from the camps, as were other countries. So the people left behind at the end in those camps were often those with the drug problems, the disabilities, health problems and so on. There is a tendency here.
Now Phillip Ruddock, as Minister actually moved to try and make the humanitarian resettlement policy more focused on need. He saw that it was biased towards Europe and tried to shift the bias towards Africa for example. So Mark, I don't know if you have a comment here on the humanitarian resettlement policies at the moment, in the Immigration Department.
Mark Cully: Not particularly, Peter. Very much based on areas of need, but also for example, there's been an explicit push to take in a number of people from Iraq, you know, locally-engaged people who were helping the Australian forces and their allies in Iraq.
Peter Mares: And there's also the Women at Risk program I think, which is specifically targeting women, and so on.
I want to come back to the point we started on, which is the migration side rather than the refugee side for a moment, and the idea that we do let certain people in, and not others. So we do discriminate. At the moment in Australia since the end of the White Australia Policy, we've had various shifts in the way in which we discriminate. Currently, the discrimination is very much in favour of skills. We allow migrants in who have a set of skills and the demographic profile in terms of youth, the English language and so on, that we think will benefit, or the Australian government thinks will benefit the national interest. Khalid Koser is this the most common approach to migration now, globally?
Khalid Koser: It is, absolutely. As I think I said at the beginning, in all destination countries in the world, migration basically exists to further economic interests. There are humanitarian commitments as well, but the majority is to further economic interests. You use the, I guess intentionally provocative word 'discrimination'. I'm not sure I'd describe it as discrimination. I don't personally see anything wrong with a country taking in (this is refugees aside, and humanitarian issues aside) taking in people who the country thinks will contribute towards the economic growth of that country. In Australia there are particular demands in skilled labour that are required, and I think migrants can help fill those gaps.
Peter Mares: I mean I wasn't meaning to use the word 'discrimination' in a pejorative sense, I'm just saying it is by its very nature a policy where you have to 'discriminate', you have to choose between one person and another; you have to have a set of criteria.
Julian Burnside: I think you can make an argument that it would be irresponsible for governments not to take account of demographic needs when allowing voluntary migration. It would be ridiculous. You'd find yourself with too many doctors and no engineers, or whatever the case may be.
Peter Mares: Mark Cully?
Mark Cully: Yes, look we un-ashamedly select, and I think I'd prefer to use the word 'select' rather than discriminate. And look, to be serious about it, we do not discriminate on the grounds of race or ethnicity, and that's an underpinning part of our policy. The other point is that we keep families together. So it's certainly true that the weight of the places that we award under our permanent migration program is roughly two-thirds for skilled visas, but that includes what we call the primary applicant and also all their dependents. So that's an underlying principle as well about keeping families together. And then on top of that, we have about a third of the places that are available under the so-called family stream, bringing spouses and dependents together.
Peter Mares: And a family stream is very much spouses, isn't it? I mean it's not my uncle's brother's nephew.
Mark Cully: There are circumstances under which you can bring in extended family members through sponsoring arrangements and so on, but it's certainly not as easy.
Peter Mares: Khalid?
Khalid Koser: Peter you use the word 'demography' which I always think of in terms of population growth and there are certainly some countries in the world, as we know, many advanced economies, and they're beginning to suffer the so-called demographic crisis, aging populations, not enough young people to pay taxes to pay for old people and so on, and some people see migration as one element in finding a solution to that particular issue. I think the consensus in the research at the moment is it's one element, but by no means a silver bullet. And the reason it's not a silver bullet I think is twofold: first because migrants of course themselves get old. So you are importing a population that will age eventually. And second, some interesting research shows that it doesn't take long for migrants to adapt the fertility rates of countries in which they settle. So you may import people from countries where women have six children on average, but after maybe ten years in your country, you'll suddenly find they have 1.7 children like your women do as well.
Mark Cully: And certainly our demography work shows that if we want them to keep the age distribution of the population as it is in Australia at the moment intact, we would need to have migrant intakes of around half a million a year, which is well in excess of what the community will tolerate.
Peter Mares: There is another side to the demographic issue and that is that we are an aging community, and that creates new sets of needs and new gaps in the labour market: gaps that aren't necessarily the skill gaps that we fill at the moment. I'm thinking for example of aged care assistance, or people to pick fruit or do other manual labouring jobs that perhaps are not well paid enough, are too remote from our major cities to attract a labour force. So are we likely to see a move away from the bias towards skilled migration and back towards what we used to have in the immediate postwar years in Australia, of more general mass migration, or bringing in lower skilled workers.
Khalid Koser: Of course a lot of this hinges on your definition of 'skilled migrant' and there's a famous line that someone I know once used which is 'If you're looking at this as an outsider, you might argue that somebody who cleans a bedpan and looks after an elderly person is a fairly unskilled person. But I suspect to that elderly person this is the most skilled and important person in the world'. So how we define skills I think is important.
Peter Mares: But in Australia, to do that, you need a Certificate IV from a TAFE vocational or educational institution, which I think you can get in a matter of weeks doing a full-time course, so that's my point. I'm certainly not wanting to denigrate the workers in our aged care system for whom I have great respect.
Khalid Koser: I mean on a global scale it's true. Migrants tend to fill both the very upper end of the labour market and what we might define as the very lower end of the labour market, and there's a nice quote that summarises this. On the one hand migrants do work that natives can't do, haven't got the skills to do; and on the other hand migrants do the work that natives just won't do. Even in times of recession, even in times of global financial crisis, most Australians probably won't clean toilets, and whatever happens, you will need migrants to do that because other people simply won't do that , so there is a need for migrants, a structural dependence I'd argue for migrants, I think at both ends of the labour market.
Peter Mares: So Mark Cully do you see or does the Immigration Department see that we might be moving towards a situation where we might need more migrants who are less highly skilled?
Mark Cully: Look, Australia hasn't really had a proper debate about the extent to which it ought to use migration as a means of doing these lesser skilled, the so-called dirty and dangerous jobs, and I guess it is something that we will have to contend with in future years. At the same time, we ought to be mindful that the 21st century is generating new types of jobs and the proportion of jobs which are likely to be lesser skilled, will diminish.
Peter Mares: Julian Burnside I want to ask you about a rights-based approach to this issue because if we see rights in a global context, then the argument should be surely that Australia should open its borders more to lower skilled migrants, because there are opportunities to work and the remittances that migrants send back to their home countries also assist the welfare of broader family networks and communities.
Julian Burnside: I don't think it's possible for a country to take the view that it owes equal obligations to everyone in the world who has a need, because it would be absurd. It would be lovely, but it would be absurd. So you get down to practical realities. I think the ethics of proximity cut in pretty quickly and if they actually arrive on your doorstep, then whether you would have chosen them or not for resettlement I think you at least owe them the obligation to treat them decently for the time being and to assess their claim for asylum fairly. Next level up I suppose the policy settings are going to determine how big your off-shore resettlement program will be and how it's administered and where it's directed. And I don't really have a complaint about that. I think it would be nice if our offshore resettlement program was larger, because I think we could cope with the numbers. Once you get to that point, I think a country is entitled to be selfish.
But there's another area where rights thinking becomes important, and that is when people come in on a 457 Visa for temporary skills ...
Peter Mares: 457 Visa is a temporary skilled worker visa also known as a business, long-stay visa, it's a visa of up to four years for a skilled migrant.
Julian Burnside: And so people come in; that reflects our selfish requirement for particular skills at whatever level of the workforce. Now once a person had been here on 457 Visa for say eight or twelve years, then I think there is a legitimate expectation that that person will be allowed to settle here permanently. In fact you can see that after a time it would be unreasonable to say 'well no matter how deep you roots in this society are, we're now going to terminate your visa and send you home again'. You may have married an Australian, you may have children born in Australia, but too bad, off you go.
Peter Mares: Well I think if you'd married an Australian you would get a spouse visa -
Julian Burnside: You'd get a spouse visa.
Peter Mares: - so it's a different context. But if you come with your wife or husband and your child and your child came at the age of 10, and is now 18 and has spent 8 of the 18 years in Australia, and you can't get permanent residency and you don't get another temporary visa, then you and your child will be expected to leave. That's the case, isn't it, Mark Cully.
Mark Cully: Yes, but these are largely hypothetical scenarios at the moment in a sense that the number of people who would have been here under a 457 visa for 8, 10 years, is trivially small. Probably more to the point is the number of New Zealanders who are here.
Peter Mares: How many are there?
Mark Cully: There are roughly half a million New Zealand born people living in Australia under the free movement labour, they're able to move freely between New Zealand and Australia, but the stock of them increases from year to year but they're in a circumstance where for example their children, if they're going to go to university, they have to pay full fees, they don't qualify for HECS. So that's an interesting conundrum that we're going to have to deal with. This issue, I don't meant to trivialise it, but it is much more pointed in Europe than it is in Australia, where you have almost from an economist's perspective, this tremendous experiment that's gone on in the European Union over the last five to ten years for the expansion of the EU, and huge influxes of people moving from Eastern Europe to Western Europe who have the freedom to move but they don't have the rights to access social security.
Julian Burnside: I have to say it does trouble me that the department has from time to time taken these cases at the edges and tried to make a point about them. You know there was a case of Stefan Nystrom, who was born in Sweden because his parents who had relocated to Australia, went back to Sweden just shortly before he was born. There were complications in the pregnancy, so he was born in Sweden and came back to Australia when he was, I think 18 days old. When he was 30 something, he got in trouble with the law and so the department cancelled his permanent residency and repatriated him to Sweden.
That case went to the High Court and I still cannot work out why it was useful or sensible for the department to try and insist on its right to remove someone from Australia who to all intents and purposes was Australian, especially since cases like that are likely to be only very few. What's the policy purpose which is served by taking that position?
Likewise with the case of Al Kateb, a man who couldn't be removed from Australia, a boat person, jailed, locked up in detention because he hasn't got a visa, he's refused a visa, he can't be removed from Australia because he's stateless, and so the department argued all the way to the High Court that he could stay in detention forever.
Now there weren't too many people in his situation. What's the policy purpose in running cases like that to make points like that, to extract the harshest possible results from legislation which probably didn't intend that consequence.
APPLAUSE
Julian Burnside: These cases of course happened before you were in the department.
Peter Mares: I was going to point out that these cases happened before Mark Cully was in the Department and he I think is not in a position to answer for the policy decisions made by Ministers, but Mark, you're welcome to respond if you'd like.
Julian Burnside: And I'm not having a go at you.
Mark Cully: Well the Minister reserves the right to intervene at the final point, and I think the current Minister's a more generous spirit perhaps than some of his predecessors on these decisions.
Peter Mares: I just want to make a brief comment on this point too. I interviewed the Minister about the 457 visa dilemma recently, and I pointed out to him the case that you could have someone here for 8 years or 10 years who then gets no rights, who's paying taxes but has no access to services, and so on. And his response was similar to Mark Cully that these will be the very few exceptional cases. And what I didn't say to him and would have liked to say to him if I'd had a bit more time on the radio was that it's the exceptional cases that create the most trouble for government. One example is the exceptional case of the doctor in Horsham who came here on a 457 visa whose son had Down Syndrome, and when he applied for permanent residency, of course he was rejected because his son was seen as likely to be a burden on the Australian health system and the taxpayer. So I pointed that outl That created a huge fuss and the Minister displayed the generosity that Mark Cully has just described and the doctor was allowed to stay. But that showed a disparity between the rules applied to temporary migrants and the rules applied to permanent migrants, and resulted in a very specific individual case that caused a great deal of trouble.
Now, having said that, the Minister is currently trying to align more the permanent and temporary visa categories, so he is I think, aware of these issues. But I'd like to come to Khalid Koser because these kind of issues, the growth of temporary migration, these are not unique to Australia, are they?
Khalid Koser: By no means. If I could, since we have a bit of time, please let me just respond to three things that I heard from my colleagues. Firstly, the rights-based approach; I completely agree with Julian about applying rights towards entries in this country, especially in a humanitarian stream. The extension of the rights-based approach to migration is to make sure that people around the world leave their countries voluntarily and not involuntarily, and that is the extension of it. We should be looking at development aid to make sure that people can stay at home and realise their potential at home, can feed their families at home, and don't have to move to do that. And that's the long-term extension of that, the so-called 'root cause' approach.
Moving on to your particular question about temporary migration, yes, I think Mark has pointed out, this is a relatively small issue or problem in the Australian context. It's a huge issue in Europe in particular. I think there are lots of lessons, lots of things to learn about how to do it better from the European context. Starting really in the post Second World War era, the so-called Gastarbeiter era where Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, imported large numbers of labour migrants to try to rebuild their economies and their infrastructure from North Africa, from Turkey, all of these people came in initially on a temporary basis. Almost all of them of course ended up staying permanently, and there are two I think wonderful quotes from a Swiss sociologist called Max Frisch, that summarises nicely why this took place. He said very famously, 'There is nothing more permanent than a temporary migrant', and the reason he gave for this was that we asked them for 'workers', and they sent us 'people'. And people fall in love, and people develop roots and people have children, and I think you're quite right, Julian, it's absolutely unreasonable after eight years - the notion then you somehow automatically will go home, I think is a mistake, and it's unlikely to happen. It may be a small number of people, but I think it's unlikely people will suddenly uproot and go home having spent eight years developing a life and contributing towards society, let's not forget, in Australia.
Mark Cully: Unlike many European countries, we have explicitly set up a policy pathway (to use that horrible term) by which people who are here temporarily, either as students or as temporary skilled workers, can acquire permanent residence.
Peter Mares: And indeed there are many ways in which the Australian system of temporary migration is different to other countries. I'll give the example of Singapore. If you're a temporary migrant in Singapore, you're not allowed to co-habit with a national, and if you're a woman, you have to undergo a pregnancy test every six months, and if you're found to be pregnant you have to leave. In most Gulf States, which are hugely dependent on migrant labour, usually it's only a single worker who comes, the family stays behind. Under Australia's 457 visa program, the family comes too, the immediate family. So Khalid Koser Australia's system is also I suppose a bit of an international experiment, isn't it?
Khalid Koser: It is, and I think Australia's in a privileged position of having relatively small numbers of people coming. It has a geographical advantage I say, its distance from many of the main sending parts of the world, particularities it would simply be impossible to apply for example to the UK, with a much bigger population, with a much more established ethnic minority population, with large numbers of origin countries not too far away. So there are particularities that I think make it perhaps work in Australia that would make it more difficult in other parts of the world.
Peter Mares: Well and another one would be the fact that in Australia we have very few irregular migrants. We don't need to build a wall, because we've got an ocean, unlike countries in Europe, or like the United States.
And Julian Burnside, I wanted to come back to an issue that you flagged, you wanted to talk about, and that is the issue of people smugglers, these evil people smugglers. Now you wanted to make some reflections I think on the people smugglers.
Julian Burnside: Well you know, I mean it's easy to make the examples of the nuns in The Sound of Music, who were people smugglers, Schindler, Oskar Schindler was a people smuggler, and everyone knows who's read the book or seen the film would think he was probably a reasonably decent kind of guy, not unflawed, but not a bad guy. One refugee, who [my wife] Kate and I know very well, a Hazara from Afghanistan, used a people smuggler to get to Australia. His people smuggler was a Pashtun, the historic enemies of the Hazara, and he had a flat rate. It was 'This much gets you to Australia', more gets you to Europe, more still gets you to America. Well this guy could only afford the Australian rate, but this Pashtun offered half rates, half price for Hazaras, because even he could see how terribly harshly the Hazaras were being treated. Now a guy who offers his enemy a discount to smuggle into another country to safety is probably not all bad. You know, I he's probably not a perfect individual, but he may not be all bad. And you've got to also reflect on the fact that although the people smugglers typically are pretty harsh, mercenary, callous people, they are still saving the lives of the refugees they smuggle. Now I don't think you can condemn them to the outer reaches of humanity if they're doing something which is ultimately saving lives. Of course they put lives at risk, of course they behave callously, but they're still saving lives.
Peter Mares: But as you say, they are also putting lives at risk, particularly that sea journey from Indonesia to Australia, as we know.
Julian Burnside: So what do you want to do? Stay at home for the Taliban to come? Or take your chances on a boat?
Peter Mares: No, I quite agree. If I was Hazara fleeing Afghanistan with my family I would take the chances on the boat. The question is not what I want to do as a refugee, the question is what the government wants to do. What policies we can use, because if we say OK, well these people who take this risky journey are clearly likely to be refugees, we should send out the Navy to meet them and escort them in and look after them, you encourage, you create a situation where you may well be encouraging people to take that journey. So is that an appropriate policy?
Julian Burnside: Well I can understand there are great difficulties, because if you simply open the borders well then you've got an uncontrolled situation. If you make it harsh, well then people will take extreme measures. So I don't know what the solution to that is. But it does trouble me. The reason I raised the thing about people smugglers is that both the government and the opposition in recent months have been full-blooded in their criticism of people smugglers, and that seems to me to be a disguised way of saying 'We just don't want boat people', because it fails to account for the fact that the people smugglers, terrible though they may be, are still helping people save their own lives.
Peter Mares: Well then the people who end up in Australian jails for people smuggling, are often the fishermen, Indonesians who pilot the boats.
Julian Burnside: Whose ability to make a living as fishermen has been destroyed by our conduct in the Indian Ocean.
Peter Mares: Nevertheless, Khalid Koser is Julian at risk of being a little bit rose-tinted glasses when it comes to people smugglers. I'm thinking of the 58 Chinese migrants who died in the back of a lorry going through the Channel Tunnel, I'm thinking of the cockle-pickers at Morecombe beach I think it was, mostly Chinese again, who were basically employed by gang-masters to pick cockles off and who were washed away in the tide, I can't remember, but some horrendous number. How many people die trying to cross from Morocco across the Mediterranean?
Khalid Koser: Let me just say a couple of things. I understand and agree to an extent with the where Julian is coming from. Some smugglers, the Oskar Schindler example I think is well used, some smugglers do get people out of harm's way, and I think that's a positive thing, and I wish we had a world where people who were in genuine need of protection didn't have to pay a smuggler to get them out of harm's way, and there was an easier way to do it. Equally I would say that the majority of smugglers probably are fairly unscrupulous businessmen who frankly don't give a damn about the lives of the people they're moving, it's simply for them about making money. I think we do need to start looking at smuggling as a sort of business and an industry, and I'll be speaking about this in this hall tomorrow morning, as it happens.
I think the thing about migrant smuggling is it really is, it's increasingly an industry. It's about people who are using smuggling to make money, and one thing I would say is kind of another take on this, and I think this probably goes some way towards agreeing with Julian. The notion of kind of making smugglers seem some sort of demonic body I think is a mistake. I've spent lots of time doing research with migrant smugglers. These aren't sort of James Bondesque baddies with three nipples who stroke white cats in Bosnia or wherever it may be, these are travel agents who close the gate at 5 o'clock and do a bit of dealing under the counter. These are Customs officials who want to make a bit of extra money, and so take a few bribes and so on. So smuggling is as some cases, the Chinese 'snakeheads' I think is one example. But in many cases smuggling's a sort of network of people who've got legitimate jobs and they're trying to make a bit of money on the side.
I think the Australian government is doing the right thing, now it may be for the wrong reasons, but doing the right thing to focus on people smugglers, because I'm fairly convinced from my research that the individuals often don't have any idea where they're going or what they're going for, it's smugglers who run the entire thing, smugglers choose destinations, smugglers decide when the boat's going to leave, how many people will be on the boat and so on, so I think you need to target those businessmen, and it normally is men, rather than the individuals themselves. So I think focus on the people smugglers may be the right way to go.
Peter Mares: Mark Cully.
Mark Cully: I just wanted to make a point that's really for Khalid to pick up, but my understanding is that the number of people who are on the move; it's a really, really very small proportion of the number of people who've been displaced and the optimal policy setting is to use foreign aid as a means of lifting the economic development of those countries in which they've been displaced, so that they've got a life that they can build within that country.
Khalid Koser: You use the word 'displaced', and I know you used it in a broad sense, but actually relatively few globally, this may not be the case in Australia, but relatively few people in need of protection are moved by either smugglers or traffickers, it is mainly people who are moving for largely economic reasons who move with smugglers on a global scale.
Peter Mares: But it's also the case, isn't it, Khalid Koser that most people who may need to move for their own protection, actually can't afford to do so. Or who might need to improve their life chances, can't afford to do so. We tend to have and perhaps it's all the fault of the Statue of Liberty, 'Give me your poor and destitute' and so on. We tend to have the view that migrants, informal migrants, irregular migrants, people who travel through these irregular networks, that they're the very poor and desperate. In fact, they're the relatively well-off, from poor and desperate places.
Khalid Koser: Absolutely. My sources tell me that the going rate to get from Afghanistan to Australia is something like $US10 000 at the moment. These are not people who are getting off the backs of camels, it's not peasants, as we might understand them. These are often relatively middle-class people, they're relatively educated people, they're people whose families can mobilise some resources through taking out loans or selling property or selling jewellery and so on, so in effect what you actually have is something that we began this entire conversation with. Even though your refugee policy should be based on taking in people on the basis of need, in fact it's taking in people who are middle-class and educated and can make a contribution because they need to pay to get here in the first place via smuggling networks.
Julian Burnside: I really think you need to be careful about generalising it like that. It's true that to use a people smuggler to get from Afghanistan to Australia you've got to come up with the money, but many of the Afghan refugees I know have only done that by borrowing, and they have in fact come from pretty humble circumstances. It's the exception rather than the rule to find that they are people who've had moderately prosperous lives in Afghanistan.
The second thing is even if it were the case that every single one of them came from a prosperous background, I don't see why the ability to pay a people smuggler should disentitle you to protection. You don't have to be poor to be at risk.
Khalid Koser: I completely agree. I think I probably disagree Julian in terms of the prosperity, and I don't mean prosperous people, I mean people who have at least got the wherewithal to get a loan, which is not peasants in Afghanistan, it is people with some sort of wherewithal, but I take your point, these are not necessarily prosperous people. But you're absolutely right in terms of the fact that you can afford to pay a smuggler shouldn't somehow disallow you from getting refugee status. We often make a mistake in global terms, of failing to distinguish the reasons that people leave with the reasons that people go to another country. Now just because you've chosen to come to Australia because you think you can make some money here, doesn't necessarily mean that you didn't leave your country because you were desperate and fleeing persecution, and that conflation often I think is made. If this person has the entrepreneurial spirit enough to think 'I'm in a desperate situation, I'm fleeing conflict, rather than just go through Pakistan and live in a miserable camp, I'm going to try to get further afield and do some work and earn some money, then that doesn't mean they're not refugees.
Peter Mares: In discussing the fact that it's people with some level of access to capital who move, I wasn't so much thinking actually of refugees, but one of the points I wanted to get to is that we assume that if we could raise the level of development around the world, migration would be less of an issue. In fact, if we raised the level of development a certain amount, as has happened in China, migration, outward migration will actually increase initially.
Khalid Koser: Mark is an economist and I'm sure he'll know the details of this more than me, but there is an established literature on the so-called development hump, which is as countries develop, initially there's an increase in out migration because of course people get access to the internet and get access to TV and can begin to draw down loans, and can begin to afford to travel. First they know more about what's going on in the world, and secondly they can afford to actually act on that information and move. The literature also suggests that after a while the hump then goes down again, and people tend to stay at home and realise their potential at home. But yes, it's true that in the initial five to ten years, we would expect an increase in migration, despite development.
Peter Mares: Mark Cully.
Mark Cully: Well the biggest migration movement in the world at the moment is happening within country, it's within China. So the Chinese peasantry move into cities to work in the newly-established factories there. I completely agree with Khalid on the point about the migration hump. But the other thing to put this in to a little bit of perspective, certainly while migration rates are rising across the world, it's by far the overwhelming case that a majority of people stay put within their countries. In the European Union, which I've talked about before, where people have the right to move freely across one country to another, the figure is about three per cent of EU nationals are living in a different country to which they were born.
Khalid Koser: Just if I can get global figures that illustrate exactly what Mark just said, in migration statistics you use both to alarm and to misinform as well as to inform. So famously, and I often use this to start lectures because it sounds so dramatic, there are something like 200 million international migrants in the world today. That's the equivalent of the population of Indonesia, the fourth biggest country in the world. So a population the size of the fourth biggest country in the world, Indonesia, is on the move; huge numbers, headlines, terrible we're being flooded, still only three per cent of the world's population; 97 per cent of the world's population, as Mark says, have no interest in moving frankly, there's an inertia, they want to stay at home, they're probably happy at home. Some of them probably can't move. But it's a very small minority of people we're talking about and Mark is absolutely right. If there are 200 million international migrants, there's 200 million internal migrants in China alone. So if you begin to look at internal migration, you've got to multiply this number by huge factors I think.
Peter Mares: On The National Interest on ABC Radio National, you've been listening to a public conversation from the 2009 Adelaide Festival of Ideas about immigration.
To comment on the program, click the Have Your Say button on the website. Or leave a message on our feedback line by dialling 1300 936 222.
Our guests have been Dr Khalid Koser, from the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, and the Brookings Institution, an expert on forced migration. Mark Cully, Chief Economist with the Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Citizenship in Canberra, and barrister, arts patron, author and human rights campaigner, Julian Burnside, QC.
The National Interest is produced by Erica Vowles. I'm Peter Mares, and on ABC Radio National, it's coming up to the News.
APPLAUSE
A public conversation recorded in July at the 2009 Adelaide Festival of Ideas about borders and people, about human movement and human rights, about the economics of migration and about its social and political consequences. This program was originally broadcast in October 2009.