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Immigration

Australia Inspired The Inhumane, Child-Imprisoning US Immigration Policy, And We Should Have Seen It Coming

Nobody can look away from the horror on the Texas border – and it goes back to last year, when Donald Trump praised Australia as the gold standard in calculatedly cruel border policy.

Amid a month bursting with bad news, a human rights fiasco is playing out before our eyes on the Texan side of the US-Mexico border.

Over two thousand migrant children caught crossing the border have been separated from their parents and incarcerated in cages, tents and even a disused Wal-Mart, operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, as part of the Trump Administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy on illegal border crossings.

Parents jailed elsewhere, the children have appeared in viral photographs packed into austere holding cages, huddled together on gym mats or shepherded into large white tents at the newly erected “overflow centres” in Tornillo, Texas.

Languishing in these cages, they are left to despair when – if ever – they will see their parents again. Pre-verbal children are held in facilities dubbed, horrifyingly, “tender age shelters”. (Trump has since signed an executive order to end the family separations, though no immediate plan to reunited the split families in detention has been proposed.)

The confronting photographs of distressed toddlers, the chilling audio featuring what one Border Patrol agent jokingly calls an “orchestra” of crying children, the accounts from the frontlines of the border – it’s all a lot to take in.

But for Australians, it’s a familiar tapestry. We’ve seen this all before.

For Australians have been locking away children as part of a cruelly evolving “border protection” strategy since 1992, when detention for unauthorised arrivals was made mandatory by Paul Keating and the ALP. And we’ve been operating a so-called “zero tolerance” at our borders ever since John Howard’s now-infamous words in 2001, “We will decide who comes into this country and on what terms”. Using the children of refugees as political footballs? We practically invented that during the shameful “Children Overboard” scandal.

But while we have a decades-old playbook to reference on how to run lunatic border policy, perhaps the germ of this US border disaster can be traced back a mere 320 days, to the release of a certain telephone transcript and to three eerie sentences.

“Why haven’t you let them out? Why have you not let them into your society?”

Donald Trump asked this question of Malcolm Turnbull over the phone in mid-2017. The call concerned a deal, where the US would accept Australia’s interred asylum seekers, which Turnbull was afraid Trump would renege on.

“Okay,” Turnbull responded, “I’ll explain why.”

Turnbull proceeded to explain Australia’s unique offshore detention policy, and to feed Trump the Liberals’ long-held party line about “stopping the boats” – allegedly to deprive people smugglers of “product” to export from desperate circumstances to our supposedly boundless plains.

At the end of his pitch, Trump uttered three troubling sentences: “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”

Now Trump is not entirely wrong here. While Australia can claim the moral high ground when it comes to sensible gun-control policy and universal healthcare systems, our track record on humanitarian refugee and migrant policy is otherwise abysmal. Our offshore camps have been condemned by every major human rights organisation in the world, by doctors and psychologists and even by former prime ministers as a deep and unnecessary cruelty.

Since implementing offshore detention, twelve refugees have died in these tropical prison camps, which leak controversy and chaos at an almost constant rate. Just last week, a 26-year-old refugee, Fariborz Karami, committed suicide in the centre on Nauru after repeated requests for psychiatric help.

“The thought of suicide doesn’t ever leave me. I am suffering intensely every day,” the Kurdish former student wrote in his most recent plea for a doctor. He had been held on Nauru for five years.

The figurehead of this horror is our tuber-headed Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton. The former Queensland cop has concocted a militarised clan of federal agents dubbed the “Border Force”, an absurd fascist-lite fantasy that sees public servants dressed in uniforms and assuming military-style ranks.

No one from the Turnbull government will dampen Dutton’s disturbing ambitions. Rather, it remains steadfast in its implementation of a despicably cruel “border protection” policy – and receives no opposition from federal Labor.

Which brings us back to Trump and the “zero tolerance” family separations at the US border. Though leaders before Trump have reportedly considered family separations as part of a stricter border-protection policy to discourage Mexican crossings, none have proceeded with a policy that would clearly be too extreme and too unpopular.

Not Trump, though – a man unafraid of extremity and apparently immune to genuine unpopularity, and aided by determined offsider like Attorney General Jeff Sessions and odious senior advisor Stephen Miller.

There’s no escaping that niggling reminder of those three hideous sentences uttered by Trump on the phone to Turnbull last year.

“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”

Trump and the GOP have walked back the family separations — though their policy of indefinite detention remains. It’s a move that’s strikingly similar to the hysterical 2017 Travel Ban – so similar, in fact, one wonders whether this practice of creating an outlandish scandal, then backpedalling to territory that suddenly looks more appealing to his horrified opposition, is not simply Trump’s entire political strategy.

Regardless, what’s interesting is how the fallout will land in Australia. I’m too young to remember how Australians responded to the initial refugee crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. But I know how many Australians treat asylum-seeker issues these days: with disdain at worst, or fleeting sympathy at best.

In the US, there is outrage over the notion that children would be separated from parents and put into what pundits are calling “concentration camps for kids”. Back here in Australia, even the disturbing drawings of suicidal five-year-olds do not move most of us. Something, anything needs to shift our apathy.

Perhaps watching a similar shame play out on an international stage will force us to inspect our own policies under a harsher spotlight. One can only hope.