BY PATRICIA CORCORAN & ARUN PRADHAN
"Listen! Please, just for a moment. Who is crying? Who is moaning? Since long ago we detainees at the Woomera Detention Centre have been suffering. We are human ... We have got blood in our vessels like you."
This is part of a letter written by a refugee being held at Woomera detention centre shortly after 80 inmates "rioted" against harsh conditions in August last year, one of many recent instances when people who have already endured so much have risked it all again to win freedom.
The struggles by detained asylum seekers inside camps like Woomera, and the efforts of many migrant communities and human rights supporters on the outside, have put the spotlight on Australia's refugee policy, which is among the harshest in the developed world.
Fortress walls
Australia's policy is part of an international trend to raise the fortress walls so as to keep the impoverished people of the Third World out of rich countries.
Such efforts don't stop at tighter border controls or tougher treatment of asylum seekers who manage to get through; they are also aimed at delegitimising the concept of "refugee" itself.
European governments, for instance, are discussing ways to improve their exclusion of refugees. In February, British home secretary Jack Straw used a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research to flag a proposal to deny refugee status to asylum seekers.
Straw, who oversees Britain's harsh anti-refugee policy, proposed that the European Union divide all the countries in the world into three lists.
Refugees from countries on the first list, the "safe" list, would never be considered for asylum. This would include all EU countries, meaning that Basques persecuted by Spanish rule, Romany people facing discrimination or Kurds, should Turkey gain admission to the EU, would never be able to receive refugee status from another European country.
Refugees from countries on the second list would only have their applications considered if they applied from outside the EU. Applications would be presumed false unless proved otherwise; if they arrived "illegally", they can be instantly deported.
Straw was vague on the composition of this list, specifying only that it would include China, a country whose poverty and regular abuse of human rights has caused an outflow of hundreds of thousands of refugees in the last decade.
Australia already runs a similar policy with Chinese asylum seekers. In an example of what Chinese refugees deported back could expect under the Straw plan, two years ago Chinese authorities forced a woman in her eighth month of pregnancy to undergo an abortion after she was deported from Australia.
Only refugees from countries on the third list, made up of "internationally recognised oppressive regimes", would escape immediate deportation upon arrival in the EU.
Under the Straw scheme, the majority of refugees arriving in any EU country would almost certainly be denied protection and could potentially be deported back into danger.
The British Refugee Council argues that the plan would be a direct contravention of the 1951 United Nations convention on the rights of refugees. Straw, however, claims that it only contravenes the "letter" of the convention, and not the "spirit" and argues that the convention needs to be "modernised".
Straw's proposals have been greeted enthusiastically by EU governments.
Why seek refuge?
Straw's approach, however punitive, echoes that of virtually every other rich country government. Their concern centres on how to limit the number of refugees who gain entry — they are seen as a burden, or as an unnecessary expense.
But in all the government, and media, discussion of the "refugee crisis", one question is rarely raised: why are people "illegally" seeking refuge in rich countries in the first place?
The question is rarely asked because it touches on a fundamental issue: the very existence of the "Third World", and the role of the rich countries in creating and perpetuating it.
According to the UN's Human Development Report 2000, 1.2 billion people living in the Third World have to survive on less than US$1 a day; more than a billion people lack access to safe water; more than 2.4 billion lack adequate sanitation; and 100 million children live or work on the streets.
It is from among these people that the world's refugees come.
As Cuban President Fidel Castro has pointed out: "This is the philosophy of neo-liberal globalisation: free transit for capital and goods but zero transit for workers, zero transit for human beings ... If our countries were developed and they had not been colonies for so long and they had not been so exploited, this transit from one place to another would not be necessary."
The conquest of the world, and its division into a handful of exploiter countries and a mass of exploited ones, was an outgrowth of the development of capitalism itself.
Capitalism first took root in a handful of countries in Europe and North America. By the end of the 19th century, however, a situation of initial free and relatively equal competition between numerous firms had changed to one of market monopolisation by a small handful of large and centralised companies, cartels or trusts, the forerunners of today's transnational corporations.
Having thoroughly dominated their home markets, these monopolies sent their "surplus" capital to the non-industrialised world, seeking super-profits by buying up cheap raw materials and labour. To protect their investments, they also began to exert political control — those foreign markets which weren't already colonies rapidly became colonies.
These colonies' economies were then distorted to serve the needs of their rulers. They were not allowed to develop in the same way as their colonial masters did; rather, their economies were based on a few primary commodities with little processing or manufacturing, keeping them in backwardness.
The rise of anti-colonial struggles in the Third World after the second world war successfully broke direct control over the colonies.
But the underdeveloped nations found themselves still under the control of their former rulers: transnational corporations continued to exploit through trade, finance and direct investment. The major imperialist governments, the US especially, ensured political and military subservience and, using the lever of the Third World's burgeoning debt, Western-run international institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were handed the power to intervene and restructure economies almost at will.
The international economy, controlled by imperialist governments and big business elites, has impoverished the majority of the world's population living in the Third World — and now rich countries are constructing formidable walls to protect their bounty, walls that the world's poor are not allowed to climb.
Free trade, exploited labour
An example of this is the relationship between the US and Mexico. The US government has long promoted closer economic ties with its southern neighbour, culminating in the two countries and Canada signing the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993.
One of the results of NAFTA has been a new "freedom" for US companies to set up assembly factories, or maquiladora, along the US-Mexico border, which now employ more than one million workers.
The companies like the maquiladora because wages are dirt cheap: in Tijuana, a worker receives no more than 50 pesos (US$5) a day.
But the results for ordinary people have been devastating: over the 1980s and 1990s, Mexicans lost 76% of their purchasing power, 40 million now live in poverty and 25 million in extreme poverty and, according to union estimates, more than 9 million people, a quarter of the work force, are unemployed.
Is it any wonder then that many seek a better life in the United States, scampering across the border to join their northern neighbour's four million-strong army of undocumented workers?
When they settle in the US, however, the pattern repeats itself. Because they are "illegal", they have no rights, are viciously exploited and badly treated.
US immigration law ensures this remains the case. The threat of deportation always hangs over the undocumented worker's head; if they demand better pay or form a union, back they go.
The Mexican-US example is not an isolated case. In the Dominican Republic in the 1980s, real wages declined by 46%, the wages paid by US companies were only a bit over one-third of the cost of living — and the number of immigrants from the Dominican Republic to the US increased from 17,000 to 41,000.
The alternative
So what's the alternative? The plight of world's refugees cannot be solved without radical solutions.
Step One: Build the campaign to free the refugees. Mandatory detention of refugees in the middle of the desert is an extreme abuse of human rights. The injustice of the federal government's anti-refugee laws has to end, they must be repealed and replaced with laws which offer genuine protection and full civil rights to asylum seekers. We have to win the mass support for doing so, beginning now.
Step Two: Blame the system, not the victims. We have to reject racist scapegoating that blames the "refugee crisis" on those who are fleeing persecution and deprivation, and lay the blame where it belongs: on a capitalist system that maintains and relies on a super-exploited Third World. Capitalism is creating the poverty, oppression and instability that results in the mass migration of peoples across the globe.
Step Three: Beyond the blame game, build a socialist alternative. Addressing the refugee problem at its root inherently means fighting for systemic change.
As citizens of a first world country we must choose sides in the war against the Third World. Are we to side with local capitalists and major corporations in maintaining the status quo, or do we side with people of the world who are struggling for change?
Mass migration is induced by the capitalist system. If the poor peoples of the Third World had a real choice, mass displacement would cease and migration would become a free movement of individuals.
But a truly free choice will not be possible without replacing global capitalism with a system of genuine global equality and democracy — that is, with international socialism.
When productive resources are democratically allocated and political power is exercised by the majority, there will be a greater and more frequent interaction between the world's people. The democratic ownership, control and distribution of productive resources will impel practical, grassroots cooperation across all frontiers and gradually erode the barriers of chauvinism and racism.
That would be a globalisation that we could support — a globalisation of peoples, of freedom and of solidarity, rather than of corporate power, of exploitation, of persecution and fear.