Legacy of Australia’s Immigration Policies Haunts Survivors and Supporters

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter in Melbourne.

Last year, my colleague Yan Zhuang reported on a group of men who had been abruptly relocated to a motel in Melbourne after almost a decade of being detained in camps offshore. They had originally come to Australia seeking asylum.

Yan describes a group of people grappling with medical problems, physical and psychological scars, and uncertain futures on precarious visas. After being moved to the mainland, each had been given a few hundred dollars and accommodation for a couple of weeks and left, with the aid of a caseworker, to work their way through bewildering immigration bureaucracy.

“Reporting this story, I was struck by how hard it was for the men to comprehend the reason for their detention,” she told me. “They understood, in theory, the politics behind it, but how could they reconcile that with the scale of the loss they suffered — of a decade of their youth, their health, their freedom?”

Australia’s unyielding approach to refugees — which includes a system of indefinite mandatory detention for people suspected to be in the country unlawfully — is among the strictest in the world.

Since 2013, the country’s navy has turned back boats with migrants or asylum-seekers to prevent them from ever reaching its shores. Those who successfully make it to Australia have been held for years on end at detention centers run by private contractors on nearby islands.

The Australian government has employed extreme secrecy to conceal conditions in those detention camps, including making it illegal for employees to discuss the conditions there publicly and all but banning journalists from gaining access to them. As recently as last month, the Labor government reauthorized offshore immigration detention on the island of Nauru.