profits and racism
Prisoners of the global enclosures make a break for it.
Angela Mitropoulos, June, 2000
Within less than 48 hours, over 750 asylum-seekers had broken out of three
remote refugee prisons in Australia, experiencing freedom for the first time
in over 6 months. The vast majority of the asylum seekers are from Iraq and
Afghanistan. The Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, told reporters that
the escapees had the choice of returning to detention or face charges which
could see them disqualified for visas under migration laws which require that
applicants to be of "good character". Con Sciacca, from the Opposition
Labor Party and Shadow Minister for Immigration, said that the escapees would
not be getting any sympathy from the public.
All three refugee prisons are in remote, desert locations where nightly temperatures
regularly reach freezing. At least 10 people have been taken to hospital having
collapsed from exhaustion, cold and a lack of food. Since Thursday, many of
the escapees have been returned to their respective prison camps, but many remain
free, if without any support, including food and shelter. Each of the prison
camps is located hundreds of kilometres from major cities.
The siting of the refugee prisons in remote locations has an economic and
political basis. It has made access to legal aid, community support and media
scrutiny almost impossible to sustain. Since 1994, a series of laws have also
restricted access to legal information, including communications from the Australian
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.
Moreover, the convergence of a restructuring of rural economies and the explicit
peddling of xenophobic explanations for rising unemployment and declining incomes
by all major parties (Labor, National, Liberal, Green and Democrats) in the
last decade -- a tactic which prompted the subsequent rise of the openly racist
One Nation in 1996 which targeted migrants and indigenous 'welfare bludgers'
as the cause of rural misery -- has resulted in the political isolation of asylum
seekers. No political party in Australia is prepared to defend the right of
asylum seekers to justice, including freedom from arbitrary and lengthy imprisonment.
The refugee prisons highlight the racist exceptions to the rule of law in
Australia, including the singular exception to the principle that someone be
charged and tried before a court before being imprisoned. This 'external' exclusion
from the rule of law adheres to the same racist logic as that of the 'internal'
mandatory sentencing regime for petty property crimes, currently practiced in
two Australian states, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, whose indisputable
target is indigenous peoples.
On Thursday, over a hundred people tore down the barbed wire fencing at the
Woomera prison camp and headed for the middle of the nearby town to stage a
protest against poor conditions, overcrowding, refusals to provide access to
telephones and newspapers and the slow processing of visa applications.
During the rest of the day, another three escapes were mounted bringing the
total numbers to around 600. They joined others in the centre of the town chanting
'We want freedom!' They have been held in the Woomera prison camp for over 6
months.
On Friday morning, after having endured cold, without food since Wednesday,
and with the only available water from a bore well, the group -- made up of
men, women and several children -- approached the local church to ask for asylum
and humanitarian aid. A church staffer told them to remain where they were and
refused to allow them to sleep inside the church during the night or to give
them any food.
After negotiations with a representative from the Department of Immigration,
over half of the escapees from Woomera returned to the detention centre with
assurances that applications for asylum would be processed faster and that the
protesters would not be disadvantaged by having undertaken the action. Under
half of the escapees have refused to return to the prison insisting that they
did not trust the Department of Immigration to stick to any agreement. By Friday
morning, approximately 120 people broke out of the Curtin detention centre and
began walking toward the nearest town of Derby, which is 50 kilometres away.
Police set up roadblocks in the path of escapees heading for Derby, and by nightfall
had forced a return to the detention centre.
Late Friday, reports appeared that several more had escaped from another
detention centre, Port Hedland in Western Australia, by scaling the barbed wire
perimeter fencing.
Incarceration industries make money from xenophobia
Businesses in nearby towns tend to see the refugee prisons as a source of
revenue, if not exactly jobs, since the collapse of mining and other local industries.
Moreover, with rural towns providing some of the most significant support for
racist organisations like One Nation, the building of refugee prisons near those
remote towns has been welcomed both politically and economically. A number of
shire councils and rural commerce bodies have lobbied the Federal Government
to open a refugee prison near their towns. The head of the Christmas Island
Chamber of Commerce has been lobbying the Federal and State Government to establish
a permanent detention centre there citing dwindling revenues from the Christmas
Island Casino. Kambalda, a town in the Western Australian goldfields, has made
representations to the Federal Government to build a permanent detention centre
there in the hope of creating a new industry after a series of mine closures.
The automatic imprisonment of all onshore asylum seekers since 1994 has seen
the construction of a number of new refugee prisons around Australia in rural
areas. It has also meant that whilst the refugee prisons are welcomed, local
burghers remain unconcerned about the treatment and health of the asylum seekers.
Derby Shire President, Mr McCumstie, shrugged off reporters' questions on the
availability of water by saying that there was plenty of water still lying around
from the recent wet season. He claimed that people were happy to have the refugee
prison nearby because it boosted local businesses. It is widely believed that
the town's 'economy' depends on the refugee prison for its viability after the
rocket base -- on the site of which the prison camps was recently built -- was
closed down. Mr McCumstie went on to add, "There's been no outward antagonism
toward them at all, but that could change if they start to affect the day-to-day
activities of people in the towns." Riot police from the Australian Protective
Services cordoned off the town centre, thereby restricting access to local stores
for residents, and have actively discouraged them from contact with the protesters.
Local authorities also suggested to locals that they keep their children away
from school whilst the protesters were in town.
The running of all refugee prisons in Australia have been contracted to Australian
Correctional Management, a subsidiary of the US incarceration giant Wackenhut
Corp, which is also contracted to deport. In addition, ACM manages 30 prisons
worldwide, including a number of prisons in NSW, Queensland and Victoria.
Whilst the Government routinely draws attention to the monetary gains from
'people-smugglers -- generally, poor Indonesian fishers who can receive up to
20 years imprisonment even if no money has changed hands -- there is never any
mention of the millions of taxpayers' money that is delivered over to the migration
prohibition industries to keep out and incarcerate around 4,000 people per annum.
The illegalisation of asylum seekers is the basis for an industry in Australia
upon which at least one megacorporation makes a lot of profits. The Prime Minister,
John Howard, recently announced an additional $240m for the detection, deterrence
and interdiction of asylum seekers who arrive without papers.
Recent changes to the law & the creation of reserves of cheap labour
Under laws introduced in 1992, anyone who makes an onshore application for
asylum and is without papers is subject to automatic imprisonment. No court
is able to review the length or merit of that detention. The so-called 'mandatory
and non-reviewable detention' regime was first introduced by the Labor Government
with the support of the Liberal and National parties. Australia's is the only
western government that practices a system of automatic and non-reviewable incarceration.
It also receives and grants fewer applications for asylum, both on and offshore,
than any other western country.
This is the only instance in Australian law which dictates imprisonment without
trial, where such imprisonment is automatic, where no Australian court can review
the decision to imprison or the duration of such confinement, and where people
who are imprisoned have committed no crime or been charged with any. In the
words of the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Migration (JSC), "Immigration
detention is an administrative sanction, that is, the deprivation of liberty
other than as the result of a conviction for an offence."
According to Amnesty International, "The government's refusal to give
asylum seekers a fair chance to challenge in court why they remain behind barbed
wire for months or even years-a right granted to convicted felons-makes immigration
detainees second class prisoners although they have committed no crime ... Making
laws to declare automatic detention legal does not make the arbitrariness of
it acceptable."
The imprisonment of asylum seekers is not confined to the purpose-built refugee
prisons. The JSC noted, "If individual circumstances warrant, detention
can be provided in prisons or, for short periods, pending transfer, police cells
or remand centres." Such measures-as well as chemical and physical restraints
and isolation-are routinely used in order to remove people defined as 'trouble-makers'.
Sedation is common practice during deportation The Australian Government recently
froze all on- and offshore applications for asylum. This means that all applicants
for asylum are treated and defined as illegal. It also decided, with the support
of the Labor Party, that all successful onshore asylum applicants could only
be granted a 3-year visa, would not be eligible for welfare or medicare, and
could not bring family members to Australia. This extended the policy of the
previous Labor Government which denied newly-arrived and legal migrants access
to medicare and welfare services for 6 months -- a policy that the current Liberal-National
Government extended to the first 2 years of stay.
Through such policies, the Australian State actively creates the basis for
a pool of workers prepared to do any work for as little pay as possible, liable
to sweatshopping in manufacture, dangerous work in building, and below-subsistence
work in agriculture.
Just as 'mandatory and non-reviewable' imprisonment mirrors 'mandatory sentencing',
so too this strategy of ensuring an impoverished and inescapable segment of
the labour market is mirrored by the operation of the so-called Community Development
Employment Programme in indigenous communities. The CDEP [a work-for-the-dole
scheme], introduced in 1974 by the Liberal-National Government after the near-total
collapse of indigenous employment with the introduction of Equal Pay laws, guarantees
the continuing existence of racism as the principal instrument of labour market
segmentation, informalisation and the obstacles to unionisation.
The misery created by so-called 'globalisation' could not take effect if
it were not for the system of enclosures that maintain a supply of undocumented
and illegalised workers who are susceptible to hyper-exploitation. In other
words, without this system of global enclosures which makes the flight from
poverty and devastation illegal, there would be no meaning to the phrase 'foreigners
who take our jobs'. In this way, corporations make use of richer states and
the latters' dominance of the UNHCR to create cheap labour reserves, the bottom
rung of a world labour market which provides the precise measure to the conduct
of the race to the bottom.
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