Australia extends a conditional welcome to refugees

While supporting the ideal of a multicultural nation, people want their government to have total control over border security

They can come: A protest in Sydney against a government decision to cut welfare assistance to some 100 asylum-seekers transported to Australia for medical treatment .

Outwardly, they look like any other office in Sydney’s bustling Surry Hills area. However, the Refugee Council and the Refugee Talent organisation, situated in the heart of the New South Wales capital, are institutions dedicated to the furtherance of one of Australia’s most remarkable experiments in expanding social diversity: its evolving refugee intake policy.

Waiting to meet a group of visiting international mediapersons at the Refugee Council was Deena Yako, of Iraqi of Assyrian-Mendaen heritage, whose inspiring journey, laced with incredible hardship, has made her a champion for others seeking asylum in Australia.

 

Her family, when she was a child, escaped imminent execution in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Her story, of being carried in her parents’ arms through freezing, danger-laden border areas to Iran in the dead of night, speaks not only of the resilience of today’s burgeoning global community of asylum seekers but also shines a spotlight on the critical role of countries such as Australia, Canada, and the U.S. in accepting these migrants.

Ms. Yako now works with the Refugee Council of Australia, an umbrella organisation for refugee-focused NGOs, where she runs the ‘Face To Face’ campaign. The campaign helps refugees travel across Australia and tell school children, university students and others their personal stories, thus dispelling myths and bringing a sense of reality to an ongoing process of social diversification in this country. “I owe my life to the people-smugglers” she says, referring to the network of persons who helped her flee Iraq, described as “criminal gangs” and “human traffickers” by government officials here.

Fleeing Syria

The story of Nirary Dacho, a Syrian refugee who fled his hometown of Al Hasakah in 2015, as Islamic State (IS) militias advanced upon his town from their bastion of Raqqa around 200 km away, is equally reflective of the power and generosity of the human spirit. Arriving on foreign shores, he did not let the sheer newness of his surroundings in Australia get in the way of his entrepreneurial intentions.

Instead, tapping into the skills that he had developed through his master’s degree in web science from Syria, Mr. Dacho teamed up with a refugee welfare specialist, Anna Robson, to set up RefugeeTalent.Com, a large and expanding database that matches job applicants from the refugee community worldwide to employers seeking that ideal mix of professional skills and social diversity.

It is a testament of their success that they have placed 100 refugees in jobs in a mere eight months, that around 250 businesses have signed up to search their databases for potential refugee employees, and that they have now teamed up with Talent Beyond Boundaries, a U.S. counterpart funded by the State Department, to bring more refugee communities in other nations within their ambit.

Complex questions about refugees and asylum-seekers are constantly playing out in the national discourse here, and policies are evolving as rapidly as the key global crises of people displacement.

 

From a figure of 13,000 refugees per annum earlier, the number of refugees hosted by Australia jumped to nearly 25,000 in 2016 in light of the massive outflow of people from the Syria-Iraq area. In 2017, the figure is expected to be around 16,250, but may rise to 18,750 in 2018, officials said.

There has been a total crackdown on unauthorised boat arrivals since June 2014, which implies a policy of banning all such asylum-seekers from ever obtaining refugee status in Australia, and, where the arrivals could not be returned to their country of origin or otherwise resettled, transferring them to offshore detention centres on nearby Manus Island and Nauru.

 

Boat arrivals have since dropped to zero, 68 ventures have been stopped, including one unconfirmed case involving the Sri Lankan nationals from camps in Tamil Nadu, 570 persons linked to organising such ventures have been arrested outside Australia, and nearly 2,500 people have been prevented from boarding boats to this country.

The argument behind this approach, which officials across the board affirmed to The Hindu , is that 85% of Australians support the ideal of a truly multicultural nation, yet their support for a generous, welcoming policy toward refugees is entirely conditional on their government having total control over immigration and border security.