USA follows old Australian road on immigration detention

As Australia moves away from some of our past discredited, damaging, expensive and inhumane policies in the area of immigration detention, it seems the USA and Italy have moved in the opposite direction.

While there is room for further improvement, there is no doubt Australia has made major advances in recent years in the laws and practices surrounding immigration detention.  Current approaches are more transparent, fairer, more effective, less harmful and much less expensive, and this looks likely to soon move further in the right direction.

Unfortunately, while Australia is finally trending in a positive direction, it appears that other parts of the western world are descending very rapidly towards the sorts of human rights abuses Australia is finally abandoning.

A report released by Amnesty International USA sounds tragically familiar to the recent past in Australia.

From News Daily:

According to Amnesty, tens of thousands of people languish in American immigration detention facilities every year — including a number of U.S. citizens — without receiving a hearing to determine whether their detention is warranted.

From Bloomberg:

Since 1996, the number of people detained has multiplied three times to more than 30,000 from 10,000, according to the report, released today. In some cases, U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents have been incarcerated for years before getting the opportunity to prove their status, the report said.

And from The Washington Independent:

Conducted by Amnesty researchers based on interviews over the course of a year with immigration lawyers and judges, asylum seekers, government officials and non-governmental organizations, the report finds that U.S. immigration policy has increasingly detained immigrants – including lawful residents and even some U.S. citizens – without a meaningful ability to challenge their detentions in an objective judicial proceeding, without access to a lawyer to help them determine their legal status, and often in inhumane conditions, commingled with criminals and denied access to minimal health care.

The recent treatment of asylum seekers by the Italian government on the island of  Lampedusa also sounds very much like several leaves have been taken out of the discredited, dehumanising book which until recently was followed as a matter of policy by the Australian government – including efforts to “extra-territorialise” the problem by offloading asylum seekers to third countries where there is no obligation to properly assess refugee claims, or detaining them in inappropriate facilities with little access to legal assistance.

Whilst some political rhetoric and posturing on this topic is still happening from time to time in Australia, the fact that all the members of the federal Parliament’s Immigration Committee, from both major parties, signed off on  a report which recommends more changes beyond what the federal government has done to date is a major signal of just far things have progressed in this area.  The only dissension in that report was from 2 Liberal and (less surprisingly) one Green MP who felt the further reforms recommended in the report didn’t go far enough!

The significant shifts in policy, legislation and (mostly) in public debate in Australia in a relatively short time frame are a reminder that poor practices can be turned around. Things might need a change of government before they will improve in Italy, but there are growing calls for the Obama administration to reverse the systematic human breaches that built up during the Bush era and introduce comprehensive reform in the content and administration of immigration laws.  Immigration and the rule of law are two key factors in what built the USA into such a major economic, political and cultural force.  Obama would be wise to move quickly to reverse the damage that has been done in those two areas.