Immigration

• Much of this reporting is fixated on the perceived threat posed by non-citizens to the safety or prosperity of the Australian community.
• Such framing misses the real “crisis” of Australia’s migration system and the real harms it enables and produces to non-citizens.

Australia’s long history of ‘migration panic’

• Non-citizen migrants become scapegoats for perceived dangers to the wellbeing of the national population.
• Australia has a long colonial history of racial exclusion through immigration law.
• In fact, the Whitlam government commissioned Australia’s first purpose-built immigration detention centres, with Sydney’s Villawood centre opening in 1976.

Prolonged detention or precarity

• The vast majority of these people remained in Australia, first in immigration detention and later on short-term bridging visas.
• A small portion of 4,245 people were forcibly sent to Australian-run immigration detention in Nauru and Papua New Guinea between 2012 and 2014.
• They now remain either in immigration detention or on short-term final departure bridging visas.
• The recent High Court case of a bisexual Iranian man who has been in immigration detention for almost a decade is a well-known example of a person failed by this fast-track process.

Visa cancellations as double punishment

• This includes people who have been convicted of a crime carrying a sentence of 12 months or more.
• All visa cancellation decisions can be reviewed by independent tribunal decision-makers.
• Between July 2018 and December 2023, immigration ministers cancelled the visas of 4,415 people on the basis of “character grounds”, with New Zealanders being the single largest most cancelled visa nationality group.
• In response, Giles this week announced that he would revise Directive 99 to “ensure the protection of the community outweighs any other consideration” in reviews of visa cancellations.
• People impacted by visa denials or cancellations have been stuck for many years in immigration detention pending deportation.