The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, said recently that “something strange happens” in the minds of Australians when it comes to asylum seekers who arrive by boat without a visa.

Australia’s Refugee Problem

Editorial Board / New York Times | 4 July 2014

Australia is pursuing draconian measures to deter people without visas from entering the country by boat. In doing so, it is failing in its obligation under international accords to protect refugees fleeing persecution.

Last fall, Prime Minister Tony Abbott launched Operation Sovereign Borders, a campaign involving the military to divert boats full of asylum seekers to Indonesia before they can reach Australian shores. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison now says that no boat has arrived in Australia in the last six months, and vows to take “every step necessary to ensure that people who arrive illegally by boat are not rewarded with permanent visas.”

Mr. Morrison has also moved to impose a freeze on granting permanent protection visas to about 1,400 people already in the country and already judged to be legitimate refugees fleeing persecution. In addition, he introduced a bill last month to lower the threshold for deporting asylum seekers. For instance, people will have to prove that they have more than a 50 percent chance of being harmed if they return to their home country. Current rules stipulate that asylum seekers cannot be returned if there is a “real chance” of harm.

Australian politics is fraught with debate on this subject. Before the hotly contested federal election last September, then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd pledged that no one who arrived by boat without a visa would ever be granted permission to settle in Australia, and adopted a tough policy of sending asylum seekers to a refugee-processing center in nearby Papua New Guinea; those found to be genuine refugees would be resettled there. But as a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Refugees, Australia is legally obligated to grant anyone fleeing persecution and seeking asylum the right to enter the country.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, said recently that “something strange happens” in the minds of Australians when it comes to asylum seekers who arrive by boat without a visa.

Horrible instances of hundreds of people dying in unseaworthy boats may play a role in this thinking. So may xenophobia. Curiously, though, the hostility to people who try to arrive by boat does not seem to extend to asylum seekers in general. Australia is fairly generous about offering protection to refugees, as long as they apply for protection from overseas, obtain a visa, then enter Australia.

In 2012, there were 29,610 such applications and 8,367 were recognized as refugees. Between 2001 and 2008, when Australia imposed mandatory detention of visa-less asylum seekers at offshore processing centers, 70 percent of the 1,637 asylum seekers were recognized as refugees. But there is something about the boat people that has provided politicians with an exploitable issue that does Australia’s otherwise commendable record on refugees no good.