“Safe havens”

AUGUST 11TH, 2016 — POST 220

One of Donald Trump’s strengths is that he can’t be bothered with specifics. It’s a characteristic that has allowed him to sideline meaningful discussion of policies and talk in grand sweeping statements that cut to the heart of a violently passionate voter base. The closest Trump gets to talking about immigration policy is to shout “wall” and say that Muslims should be banned, not exactly what anyone could call action items. Trump’s running mate, on the other hand, is a politician through and through. Mike Pence this week, when asked about the party’s stance on immigration, did provide a little more in the way of specifics. As The Atlantic reports, one of Pence’s spokespeople Marc Lotter had the following to add:

“There would be safe havens established to provide safety, security, and a safe location for people seeking to leave areas that have been overrun with violence and persecution, while the vetting process is taking place for immigration to the United States.”

Now, Lotter wasn’t exactly exhaustive in terms of details, but this is an idea one can understand. These “havens” will presumably be lived-in processing facilities, the “safety” they offer ostensibly purely in their being located outside of the nations being fled from. The The Atlantic piece is focussed on what a possible vetting process inside these safe havens could mean for refugees of different religions (the Republican party has alluded to Christian refugees having an easier path to immigration in the past). But for me this isn’t as important as issue, party because, as is pointed out, preferential treatment on religious grounds is probably illegal. What’s most troubling about this position is the possibility of “safe havens” at all.

If you want a model for immigration policy not to follow, you only have to look at Australia over the last two decades. The party currently in power — The Liberals, Australia’s conservative party — won power in 2013. Whilst Australia’s budget deficit — characterised at the time as a “budget emergency” — was a powerful force for the Liberals in 2013, probably the most emblematic catch-phrase touted by eventual Prime Minister Tony Abbott were three words that have relentlessly been skewered as much for their naïveté as their darkly drawn isolationism. Those three words:

Stop the boats.

These three words tapped into the same fear that Trump’s rhetoric is currently mining: the nation you believe you own is being stolen out from underneath you by people of colour, who wear different clothes, who speak different languages, and who’ll probably work a shit tonne harder than you. Furthermore, the three words condensed the immigration policy of the previous Liberal government who since the late 1990s have had a penchant for Australia’s own kinds of “safe havens”.

For Australia, “our home is girt by sea” as our national anthem stipulates (“girt” means “surrounded” apparently). So instead of “safe havens” our politicians historically talk about “offshore processing”. Pence’s safe havens sound the same in principle: dedicated (eerily concentrated spaces) in which refugees are processed. Operationally for the Australian government — on both sides of the aisle — this means paying some phenomenally impoverished Pacific island nation — currently Nauru, but has included Manus Island, Christmas Island, and Papua New Guinea — a bunch of money to set up a “camp” for these refugees to live in. And a whole bunch of horrific stuff — from hunger strikes to failure to properly care for a woman raped inside the camp to riots — consistently occurs inside what can most accurately be termed concentration camps.

Now, drawing parallels to a long-entrenched immigration policy failure in Australia to a just-proposed policy in a conservative party across the world might be a bit of a long bow. But my alarmism is conceptually founded: if safe havens are centres to process refugees they can’t help but be centres of concentration. And even though there are questions to be asked about the status of refugees of different religious affiliations given the Republican party’s record — and the Christian voter base’s desire to “save their own” — the very status of any kind of “haven”, as “safe” as they might want to be characterised, ought to be interrogated. Australia has long fucked this up. A similar idea could be a similar fuck up. And these just aren’t trivial fuck ups.