Last week, a US conservative governor unceremoniously offloaded 50 unsuspecting asylum seekers into Democratic heartland. This stunt is just the latest in a race to the bottom across many western democracies – including Australia – that have seen refugees fighting for recognition of their humanity.
The 50 individuals reportedly journeyed for two months from Venezuala to seek asylum in Texas, where Florida Governor Ron DeSantis then paid to have them transported to Martha’s Vineyard – a wealthy Democratic-voting enclave that is home to, among others, former President Barack Obama.
Over the decades I have worked with refugees and asylum seekers, there have been many occasions where I thought we had finally reached the bottom in this game of political football that ignores the legally enshrined right to seek asylum.
The first of was the ‘children overboard’ affair in the lead up to the 2001 Federal election, where the Howard Government was later found to have mislead the public and exploited voter fear over illegal migrants by asserting that asylum seekers on a sinking boat threw their children into the sea in a bid to gain asylum in Australia.
In 2012, our government once again lowered the bar by introducing ‘offshore processing’ for people who seek asylum by boat – a policy that left individuals and families languishing for years in detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea.
These incidents are representative of a trend across western democracies, where politicians are capitalising on fears of the record levels of global displacement by introducing dehumanising deterrence policies. Policies like the UK’s recent Rwanda deal, where people who cross the English Channel will soon be transferred to Rwanda to seek asylum – effectively offloading this ‘problem’ to a country that campaign groups argue is an unsafe destination for refugees.
It is a sad state of affairs when we begin to lose sight of our share humanity and instead see displaced people as opportunities for political point scoring. One bright spot has been the progress we’ve seen on our own shores, where our incoming government has committed to introducing a mechanism to offer a permanent home to thousands of refugees left in limbo thanks to deterrent measures of the past.
We are living through history – a time where 89.3 million people are forcibly displaced from their homes by persecution, conflict, violence and human rights violations. This figure has more than doubled in the last 10 years, but we cannot address this with cheap political stunts designed to inflame base instincts like selfishness and fear.
As White House spokesperson Abdullah Hasan said of Governor DeSantis’s stunt: “Luring asylum seekers under false pretences and then abandoning them on the side of the road thousands of miles away is not the solution to a global challenge”.
The US asylum seekers were transferred to a more suitable settlement location – which conservative commentators both in the US and Australia have now tried to characterise as left-wing NIMBYism.
Is that how far we have dropped the bar? Is that how far we have descended into tribalism – that we would ignore the fact that 50 people seeking asylum were used as a real-life political experiment to test a right-wing hypothesis about Democratic voters?
The events of the past week serve as an important reminder that we must maintain our principles and set standards that we do not go below. We cannot accept politicians using human lives for political point scoring.