The politics of migration, refugees and national security
Transcript
(This transcript is partly AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies.)
Danielle Ireland-Piper
Welcome to the National Security Podcast. I'm Danielle Ireland Piper, Academic Director and Associate Professor at the ANU National Security College. Today's podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Namburi peoples, and I pay my respects to the elders past and present. In many ways, national security is a type of guardianship. And to that end, I acknowledge the guardianship performed and honoured by First Nations people throughout the millennia.
We know that migration is inherently human. People have always moved for food, shelter, to escape conflict, for love, for adventure. But of course, when people move, it does create its own element of security risk. It can pose risk to social cohesion and to who and what is coming and going out of a given country at any given time. To that end, today's pod will consider the politics of migration, refugees and national security policy.
I'm so pleased to be joined by three experts in this field, Professor Alan Gamlen, Professor Kate Ogg, and Professor Dorota Gozdecka. Welcome all.
Thank you. So we'll get started with you, if you don't mind, Kate. In 2022, you published a book with Cambridge University Press, I believe titled, Protection from Refuge, from Refugee Rights to Migration Management. Could you tell us a little bit about that book? What prompted it and what's it about?
Kate Ogg
Thanks. Well, what prompted it was actually a study by an anthropologist, Michael Collier, and he wrote about the ways in which refugee journeys were often presented as linear, but were in fact incredibly fragmented. And we can see that in the way we talk about migration or asylum seeking. So, you know, say post-World War II in Australia, they came from Germany to Australia, or in the more contemporary times, they came from Sri Lanka to Australia seeking safety. But in reality, asylum seeker journeys are incredibly fragmented. And in the contemporary day, that's often because of the ways in which states try to constrain refugees' mobility often because of, for example, national security concerns.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
If I could pick you up on that, when you say it's fragmented, does that mean that a person's journey will take place in many parts? Or does it more mean that the journeys are not uniform in that everyone's journey is different?
Kate Ogg
It means that the journey takes place in many parts. So it's the idea of someone having to move backwards in order to move forwards, being trapped in a particular place, finally reaching a place of, a feel of, that they have a sense of safety and then being sent back to another point along their original destination.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
That, would boat turn backs, for example, play a part in that or detention in a migration centre, for example?
Kate Ogg
Absolutely. So refugee camps, offshore processing, boat turn backs would all play a part in that fragmentation. But my question as a legal scholar was, well, what are the role that courts are playing in these fragmented journeys? Because often to be able to continue your journey, for example, to leave a refugee camp, you need to seek the intervention of a court. So my question was, well, are courts hindering or assisting these fragmented journeys? And in particular, are they hindering or assisting these journeys for particular refugees? Is this a story where we see the traditional story of courts fashioning legal tests that are more sympathetic to a typical male refugee experience? Or in the 21st century, are we finally seeing courts more sensitive to factors such as gender, age, disability? And what I found, actually, before I go to the findings, I'll say what's interesting about these cases, and I call them protection from refuge cases, because there's situations where refugees are not making the typical claim of, “protect me from persecution in my home country.” Instead, they're saying, “protect me from a place of refuge.” So for example, “protect me from a refugee camp. Protect me from Nauru, protect me from Trump's America.” And so there are two issues that really come into the judicial arena in conflict to each other. And it's one is states interest in constraining refugees mobility for a number of different reasons. And as I said, national security is one of them. And the other competing issue is this sense of you could call it refuge, hospitality, sanctuary, this, tradition we have across so many religious cultures, legal frameworks about offering protection to those who come from outside and ask for it. And what I found is that courts, when these cases first come and they've occurred across five continents, is they're really creating these very strong victories for refugees. So really facilitating their journeys and really giving rich understandings of what refuge is or what it should be and really also understanding the different vicissitudes of displacement according to factors such as gender, age, disability. But then they've all clawed back, they've all watered down these precedents that were initially set. And so the figure that I come up with to try and encapsulate this all at the end of the book is the figure of Tantalus from Greek mythology, who was perpetually hungry and thirsty and he was required to stand in a pool of water underneath a fruit tree and every time he reached up to grab the fruit it would retract and he'd reach down to drink the water and the water would recede from him. I sort of said this is sort of what courts are doing to refugees in the sense that they're building these really vivid pictures of refuge by setting these really powerful precedents. So almost indicating that these legal avenues and physical avenues to reach a place of refuge are there and they're realisable, but then they're also retreating and retracting them as well. So circumscribing these legal avenues to reach a place of safety.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
Look, as a Greek mythology nerd myself, I can really sympathise with the analogy. Thank you, Kate. Before we move on to talk to Dorota and Alan, can I just get you to clarify, of course, in common parlance, sometimes the term asylum seeker, migrant and refugee are conflated. When you're talking about refugees, I'm assuming you're talking about someone who's been found to be a refugee for the purposes of the relevant international convention?
Kate Ogg
Well, someone actually doesn't have to be found to be a refugee, to be a refugee. They just have to meet that definition in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or another regional treaty, or we have what's called complementary protection. So they might be entitled to international protection, for example, under the Convention Against Torture. So that is what we would call a refugee. I try not to say the word asylum seeker because there is technically no such thing as an asylum seeker. Although sometimes the word asylum seeker is used in a country like Australia where we do have refugee status determination processes. So we might use the word asylum seeker to say someone who's come to Australia and who has not yet been found to be a refugee but has sought asylum.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And remind me again, the convention provides that someone is a refugee if they fear persecution on the basis of race –
Kate Ogg
-particular social group, nationality, political opinion, race or religion.
Danielle Ireland Piper
Thank you. We'll come back to Kate and some of your areas of research. If I can move now to Dorita. So you also recently published a book, congratulations, Visual Power Representation and Migration Law with Edinburgh University Press. What's this book about and what are you hoping your readers will take away from it?
Dorota Gozdecka
This book talks about how we talk about migrants really and what I'm really exploring here is the idea of legal legitimacy. For law to be seen as legitimate, we first of all have of course procedural legitimacy, right? We go through appropriate processes, we legislate, we have court decisions that become law, and this is a procedural way of making sure law is legitimate. But for law to be legitimate, we also have sort of social legitimacy that comes with it. So people need to believe that law is fair and that law is doing what it's supposed to be doing, right? So my question coming into this book was, dealing with the issue: why do people continuously expect harsher and harsher migration laws? Why do this harsher and harsher migration laws appear to be legitimate for people, right? And there is not just the feeling that they are legitimate, there is almost a demand for harsher and harsher migration laws to be introduced.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And is that the case or is it a perception of politicians that it's easy political points to appear tough on migration or is there evidence that there is actually such a demand?
Dorota Gozdecka
I think it's a vicious circle in a way, because there's a perception, first of all, in the parts of politicians that that's what the population expects. But then on the other hand, of course, when this point is being repeated and repeated and repeated, and you can see this at the moment in, say, American presidential campaign, right, these points are being continuously hammered on, then what this results in is the expectation from the population that the policies will be harsher, that there will be harsher punishment, that there will be more crime migration types of intervention. So what I try to do is examine this question of social legitimacy and understand why people think that migrants should be treated with more and more punitive measures, that they should be pushed back at the border, that they should be intercepted on the sea and sent back. And I did that by analysing predominant visual imagery that surrounds migration. And I picked up images that have been used predominantly by governments or political parties for the purpose of political or social discourse. And I tried to sort of understand what does images do to the host, and by host I mean a local population. And in the book, I argue that the host, when faced with this, very often hostile and reductive images of migrants. The host, even before meeting any actual migrant, has a certain image, a certain expectation of who that migrant coming into the country is, right? And as I argue in my book, these discourses are predominantly run through five archetypal figures. So we do have this constant discourse about bogus asylum seekers and genuine refugees, we do have constant discourse about the invisible illegal, as I call it. So we don't know what this illegality is. We don't know what these people have done, but there's predominant feeling, which again is so visible now in the presidential campaign in the US that migrants coming across the border are somewhat illegal, right? We don't absolutely know what this illegality means. It's some sort of almost catch-all phrase, but it's such a powerful motivator for the populations. Then we have this figure of an “absolute other” where we have this idea that migrants somehow are inherently different to the local population and it's focusing so much on those differences. And again, going back to the eating cats and dogs comments that we all have heard in the presidential debate, this is exactly that point, trying to create that illusion that this, you can't reconcile these differences between the local population and between the incoming population.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And in your view, Dorota, is depicting migrants and or refugees in either overly or unfairly in negative ways as you've described. I imagine that would have consequences for how we're getting on with each other in a society.
Dorota Gozdecka
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think this is going to the point of social cohesion, and you want to discuss, I think, in this podcast as well, that we often assume that it's the migrants who pose difficulties to social cohesion, but I would like to push back on that assumption. And it's actually very often those perceptions of migrants that actually post difficulties for social cohesion, because there is actual incitement to violence, for example.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
So in a way, the narrative is actually more dangerous than, than the reality. That's right. And we can see that around misinformation and disinformation in relational security context as well. Thank you, Dorota. We'll come back to the issue of crimmigation, which you've also mentioned. I'll move now to Alan. Now, you're the director at the ANU Migration Hub. What can you tell us about the hub and the work it does? And I also know that if you don't mind me mentioning you, there's a whole lot of best book awards on your CV. So I'd be really interested to hear about the issues that those engage with as well.
Alan Gamlin
Great. Thanks, Danielle. And real pleasure to be here and to engage with the NSC. Yeah, so the Migration Hub is a cross-campus network across the ANU of experts in various aspects of migration, many different aspects of migration from refugee legal scholars to demographers working on population movement and change to political scientists and international relations scholars working on the politics of migration and the geopolitics of migration to health and medicine scholars working on, the psychological aspects of the integration of asylum seekers and refugees to people working on ancient migration flows and what that tells us about what it means to be human by looking at how people move around. And so the aim of bringing together this group of people across campus, there's more than 110 of us at the ANU, you know, very deep pockets of expertise, some world leading experts on migration from, from all these different disciplines, is to get a common thread of conversation going so that we start to have some shared ideas and facts about migration, which improves the quality of our discourse about the issue and ultimately improves the quality of the decisions that get made about it. At the moment, we've got a major problem that migration is one of the most politically contentious and salient issues in current day, current day politics and public affairs, but a lot of the discussion is taking place in a kind of a fact void. And we're seeing decisions being made that affect hundreds of millions of people's lives, potentially billions of people's lives, trillions of dollars that are being made on the basis of misinformation and deliberate disinformation. So we really need the community of experts on migration to come together and start talking to each other and to feed the public discourse about migration with accurate information, timely information that will make sure that policies and decisions are based on evidence and on facts, not on fear and misinformation.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And I imagine this is only going to become increasingly more important. We're not seeing a reduction in armed conflict globally. And we're also, of course, at five to midnight, if not closer, with the warming of the climate and potential displacement of persons that will come from increasing levels and intensity of natural disasters. So I imagine engaging with facts is going to, the issue's not going to, it's becoming increasingly important. And I did note, Alan, that's a nice segue, into the issue of some of the problems with looking at migration and refugee policy through a security lens. And I know you recently wrote a piece, I believe in The Guardian, titled, it Comes to Migration, We Must Separate Fact from Fiction and Be Skeptical of Political Tough Talk. What do you mean by that? And what's the problem with political tough talk? Often it comes from a place of security.
Alan Gamlen
Yeah, well, there are a couple of things going on here. One is the incentives for political parties to talk a particular way about migration and act another way. And then another is a broader securitisation of the issue, which is more related to international trends. the first, maybe talk about the first, which is really about domestic political issues. So we tend to think of politics as divided into left wing and right wing parties. These are indeed still the main vote getting machines in the politics of liberal democracies, but increasingly the biggest divides in politics are not between left wing and right wing, they're between open and closed factions within left wing and right wing parties. So there's an open wing on both the left wing and the right wing and that open wing is pro-globalisation, broadly speaking, they like international trade, they like global finance, and they like an open labour market, they like international migration. Now, their left-wing open faction, let's call them the liberal intelligentsia, they like migration because they like diversity, they're socially liberal, they like diversity, they like human rights. The right-wing open people, they're economically open.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
So it's a free market.
Alan Gamlen
They like an open labour market. could get one of their key constituents as employers. But there's also a closed wing in both of those parties. The closed wing on the left is the unions, the union movement. They like a protected labour market, which means regulated migration. And on the right wing, there's a closed faction who dislike migration because it dilutes national identity. So there's these four kind of, in very simplistic view, four quadrants of politics on migration. And what that means is that the leaders of both parties, have to be, they have to win control. If you're a political entrepreneur and you want to get voted into power, you've got to win control of one of the main vote-getting machines, a left-wing or right-wing party. And you do that by speaking to the party in a particular way. But if you want to actually govern, you have to talk across the aisle. And that means there's strange bedfellows on migration. So it means that, for example, a conservative party needs to talk tough on migration to appease its anti-immigrant base, which typically consists of that closed nationalist, closed right-wing faction which dislikes migration for national identity reasons. But you've also got to act open in order to keep your businesses, your employers happy with cheap labour. So there's an incentive to talk tough about migrants. That's what I meant in that article. But, um that's slightly different. Sorry, long winded answer.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
No, that's great.
Alan Gamlen
That's slightly different from the securitisation, which is really, really something broader that's happened in the wake of 9-11 and the Bali bombings and so forth. So that's more an international…
Danielle Ireland-Piper
Perspective, yeah. And I've heard you say, actually, if you'll forgive me, I think maybe at a conference or maybe I've misremembered that you actually think that securitisation of migration policy isn't a great thing, but we'll come back to that in a moment.
Alan Gamlen
Let's.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
I'm going to move back to Doritah. So you mentioned the phrase, crimmigration. Crimmigration. Yeah. Would you mind unpacking that a little bit, what you mean and explain what is actually the issue with using criminal law in an immigration context?
Dorota Gozdecka
That’s not a phrase that I invented. So I'd like to credit to Juliet Stumpf who came up with that phrase, well, probably over 20 years ago now. So initially as she argued, immigration matters and criminal law matters used to be traditionally separate, right? You had criminal law to deal with crimes and you would go to court and you would argue the case and then well, if you were found guilty, you would be appropriately punished. What started happening more than 20 years ago now already is the merging of these two areas and the use of criminal law methods to regulate migration. So we have normalised things like detention, which nowadays happens almost universally across the globe.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
because the context there is that…
Dorota Gozdecka
The context is that it's a security issue, that there might be criminal behaviour. We need to assess this. We need to put you in detention. Now, we need to remember that detention measures sometimes last for years, right? This is not something that is assessed within three weeks' time. And of course, issue is that seeking asylum is not necessarily a crime in and of, it's not a crime in itself. And we also need to remember that the vast majority of people who migrate are not criminals, despite the discourse that is predominant here, right? So we do have a situation where we do have people who have committed absolutely no crime ever sitting in essentially jail-like conditions for extended periods of time. And this is happening across the globe. And another thing that follows is the expansion of so-called migration crimes. That's a concept that didn't exist like 30 years ago, but nowadays you can violate terms of your visa by, I don't know, for example, submitting your application for renewal a week too late and you're in violation of migration law. This becomes a migration crime that then carries on consequences for the rest of your life and carries consequences for reception in any other country. Of course.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And if I can bring in Kate here too. So drawing on what Dorota’s referred to there where we've got criminal law coinciding with immigration law. Some people might point to the series of cases we've had from the High Court recently about the release of persons held in immigration detention who might have otherwise had an intersection with the criminal justice system. Are you comfortable speaking to those cases at all?
Kate Ogg
Absolutely. So the case I suspect you're referring to is NZYQ, which was handed down by the High Court late last year. To really understand that case though and its significance, we have to go back a little bit further to a case called Al-Qatab, which was decided by the High Court of Australia in 2004. So this concerned a man who was a stateless Palestinian man. He came to Australia and sought protection, refugee protection and it was found that he was not owed international protection. And Australia wanted to remove him, which Australia was by right able to do. He had no claim to international protection. But of course, because he was stateless, that was very difficult and he couldn't, there was no country that would accept him. So the issue was he was being detained indefinitely. And so the decision by the High Court was that our Migration Act, allowed someone to be detained indefinitely.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And that would even be in the absence of having committed a crime or in the instance of a sentence being complete, for example.
Kate Ogg
Absolutely. So in this case, Mr. Alkadev had committed absolutely no crimes, this wasn't a criminal law issue at all. So the decision was that under our Migration Act, someone could be detained indefinitely. And I always like to point out when I talk about this case that it was a split decision. There were three justices of the High Court who wrote very passionate fiery dissents and all our justices of the High Court agreed that this decision put Australia in violation of its international human rights obligation. So the right to not be detained indefinitely is an international human right that Australia has committed to. So there was a number of attempts to try and overturn this precedent. This precedent was very much seen as a dark stain on our national soul by many law scholars in Australia and elsewhere. And then what happened in the case of NZYQ. So the lead plaintiff in this case was a person from Myanmar who did have a claim to international protection. He had been convicted, I should say, of very serious criminal offences. And I do not want to undermine the severity of those offences, though this person could not be removed for various reasons. And so the court decided in this case that once there is no prospect of a person being removed from detention, that detention becomes unlawful because the minister, the executive branch cannot engage in punitive detention. And once there is no real prospect of that person being removed, then that really becomes punitive detention. Now, I think very unfortunately… So this NZYQ was very much celebrated by refugee law scholars, refugee advocates, the human rights community in Australia and elsewhere, but unfortunately, it was very much misunderstood and mischaracterised in the media, in the mainstream media. And I think I will put it as high as irresponsible media reporting. So yes, this person had been convicted of very serious criminal offences, but had served his time. And what happened, essentially the decision of the High Court saying “this person can now be released from immigration detention,” what I think the media either failed to understand or didn't properly explain, is that this happens in Australia all the time every day. People who are convicted of criminal offences, they may be sentenced to two years or 20 years. But once that time is up, they are released. We, no matter how horrendous their crime is, we do not believe in Australia that people should be detained indefinitely. And so this case was really about treating people who are non-citizens in this country in the same way.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And it creates a division and a class of persons where if you're a citizen, you commit a crime. Once your census is done, you go free. Whereas if you're not, then you're in a very different circumstance, which of course is problematic. And the thing we have to remember is part of what we're doing when we're trying to protect the security of a nation is that we're protecting our security, our existence and our values. And part of our values in Australia is that we have rule of law. And that means that the executive can't do what it wants whenever it wants. We've moved on from off with their head days and now courts need to oversee, of course, punishment of people. It's not something the executive arm of government should be administering.
Kate Ogg
Yes, absolutely.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
Wonderful. Now, moving on from all that, what do we know about migration and its impact on a society generally? So we hear the word social cohesion thrown around a lot. What do you all sort of understand by that term? And what do we know about the impact of migration on communities? For example, I've heard it said in some media, or I've heard it expressed that perhaps refugees would have a higher level of welfare dependency, but then I've also read data that indicates that's absolutely not the case where a migrant or a refugee is permitted to work, they're actually less likely to engage in welfare dependency than a citizen, for example. And I wonder if any of you had any comment, perhaps we'll start with Alan, on the role of migration in a community generally.
Alan Gamlen
Yeah, big question, Danielle, but really important one. I guess the first thing, you know, often find people are confused about, and which it's important to point out is that there's this perception that refugee migration is really the bulk of migration, that we're somehow overwhelmed by refugees arriving by boat. And so it's important to put this in context by saying that refugees are a very small portion of overall migration, about 10%. We take about 200,000 through the migration program in Australia, but we only take about 20,000 through the humanitarian program. And second, most of the humanitarian migrants come in an orderly fashion through either being resettled as UNHCR refugees or as humanitarian entrants in a completely orderly fashion. And then only a small minority of those who arrive here on shore who arrive in Australia and claim asylum after arrival have arrived by boat. Most of them, in fact, arrive by plane. So this issue of refugees and asylum seekers arriving by boat, which many people, average people around Australia think is the biggest aspect of migration, is actually a tiny, tiny sliver of migration.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And in some ways it's a distraction to public debate. For many years there we were sort of obsessing publicly about, you know, “boat people” in commas. And meanwhile, the security agencies were actually observing more significant threats arising from the far right, for example.
Alan Gamlen
It is absolutely a distraction. And, you know, if we think about what I just said about the politics of migration, it's actually often literally a deliberate distraction from other issues, because there are political incentives to mobilise people based on this issue. So your question though was more about what are the impacts of migration on society and on social cohesion? And I think it's really important to think about this word social cohesion and what it means. In Australia, as somebody who is from New Zealand, studied in the UK and Europe, it was really surprising to me coming to Australia and seeing the way that the term social cohesion is used here. There's two things that stand out to me about that. One is that it's quite idealised and one is that it's very securitized. for example, social cohesion wouldn't necessarily be seen as an ultimate aim in many other parts of the world. And that is because there's a dark side to social cohesion.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
It's almost anti-pluralism in a way.
Alan Gamlen
Fascist societies are extremely cohesive. They prioritise social cohesion. The trains run on time, but you're living under fascism, totalitarianism. So at the extreme, social cohesion is a kind of totalitarianism. And you know, if you look at the arguments about sort of the dark side of social capital, for example, we see that, you know, certain types of social cohesion, for example, the social cohesion that occurs in gangs is really negative. it's not exactly a marketplace. Yeah. in Australia, it's sort of surprising to me. And I think it's something that's worth interrogating that in Australia, we see social cohesion as somehow even an overarching aim of what we're trying to achieve in government or as a society. And the other surprising aspect about social cohesion as a term in Australia is how closely connected with security it is. So in other places, we'd be talking about things like social capital, the value inherent in people's relationships and connections, or we'd be talking about integration, the ability of people to get along in the labour market or in housing.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
Almost from a wellbeing perspective.
Alan Gamlen
Exactly, yeah. Whereas here, really when you hear, particularly in Canberra and in Federal agencies, if you hear somebody talk about social cohesion, we're really talking about fear and can I even say sometimes paranoia about security threats. I think just maybe those are just contextualizing points, Danielle, that a lot of the perceptions of the threat of migration come from this, you know, misperception that arrivals by boat are a major numerical issue for Australia. They're tiny. This is a distraction. And from the sense that social cohesion is something that's an unmitigated good and that is directly connected to maintaining a really strong security state. And I think all of those things are questionable.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
Yeah, that's great. Thank you for challenging the premise of the question. It's actually really helpful for us to think about those terms before we use them or what we're actually aspiring to when we say that. Kate?
Kate Ogg
I, yes, wanted to say I share some of Alan's sort of reticence about the term social cohesion, the concept of it. When I think of a socially cohesive society, one of the first things I think about is the handmaid's tale. So Margaret Atwood.
Alan Gamlen
Super social cohesion.
Kate Ogg
Absolutely! Completely a socially cohesive society, but certainly not a society I would volunteer to find myself in. But the way, I think, and certainly as a refugee law scholar and a law and society scholar, that question has been put to me before about refugee law and social cohesion. I think, it's the opposite. It really creates so much division in our society and to plug some ANU research, the Australian Election Study shows that in some of our election years in the 21st century, refugees and asylum seekers have been one of the most significant non-economic issues for Australian society and voters are divided. And going back again to Alan's comments, I mean, that is sort of ludicrous in a way that we're talking about such small numbers, such small numbers. But I think it creates cohesion in a different and I think sometimes surprising and perhaps unexpected way. And one of the things I've found in my research talking to people who work for civil society, who have volunteered with refugees is when you say, well, why have you got involved in this? And often it's in reaction to some of Australia's really draconian laws. So laws such as boat pushbacks, mandatory detention, offshore processing have actually mobilised people in Australia into these volunteer community groups or into civil society to create that sense of cohesion and pushback and to, you know, I've heard people say, look, we want to show that Australia is a welcoming society. So I think that's really interesting.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And I think your project, your Australian Research Council project that you were recently awarded, aren't you focusing on community efforts to welcome refugees through housing or something?
Kate Ogg
Absolutely. So along with others, I'll just note them, Professor Susan Neibone at the University of Melbourne, Dr. Anthea Vogel at the University of Technology Sydney and Dr. Nathan Gardiner at the University of Melbourne. So we've got an Australian Research Council discovery project on community sponsorship of refugees. So this is the idea where community groups get together and they welcome refugees, help them settle into Australian society in the Australian context. we are seeing now more and more countries developing these types of programs. And I think what's really interesting is that in Australia, when a new pilot study started up, because we have already got so many community groups mobilised around refugee advocacy and refugee rights, it was quite easy to get the first few groups together.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And then, and I guess in a way like helping people live in some ways is more productive for how we get on as a culture rather than aspiring to some sort of level of homogeneity or non pluralism of views.
Kate Ogg
Yeah.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And what about you, Dorota? Do you have any comment on that, on the issue of sort of what we know about migration, how communities get along?
Dorota Gozdecka
I could go on and add to what's already been said about migration and social cohesion. But this increasing amount of research that shows that migrants contribute really positively to their communities. There's research on children of migrants who, for example, achieve on average a lot better than children of local community. Yet, when we turn on the media, when we open a newspaper, predominant wave of news that comes from there is negative. It only focuses on social cohesion, dangers to the community and a host of, I think, imaginary often anxieties that host societies have about migrants. And when we talk about social cohesion in the European context, it's very often done through very nationalist lens in societies like Australia through a settler colonial lens. So, you know, we are sort of trying to create a problem in an area where problems, of course, will occur like in any other area in our society, right? There will be people who have problems with the law. There will be people who achieve really well. But somehow, when we talk about migration, we try to amplify this negative sides and we try to amplify this idea that migrants predominantly cause problems, social cohesion, which is as evidence show on average, not true.
Daniell Ireland-Piper
Not the case. And I'm really grateful for your book in shedding some light on that Dorota. Now we are getting close to time and I was so excited to get into this conversation with you all and to pick your brains, that I neglected to spend time talking about your wonderful biographies before we started. So what I might do is I might just read the biography of each of you, but also ask you to respond and explain what drew you to your research on migration and your career path in a sense. So I might start with Kate. So Professor Kate Ogg, as we've alluded to, you're an Australian Research Council Fellow. You're based here at the ANU College of Law. You undertake social, socio-legal research in the areas of refugee law, human rights, strategic litigation, and feminist theory and method. I understand that you're also involved in an Australian risk council fellowship where you're looking at strategic human rights litigation as well. So what, what made you focus on these things?
Kate Ogg
Okay. Well, it's strange that the one issue that has not come up yet in this podcast, which is surprising is the Tampa. Now, Alan mentioned September 11th. That coincided with the Tampa affair. So we talk about on the global level, what we saw was a marked increase of securitisation, criminalisation of refugees post September 11 on the global level. But I think that was exacerbated in Australia in particular because of that, I would say unfortunate coming together of the Tampa and September 11. Maybe I'm giving away my age here, but the Tampa was, happened just before I started law school. And so this really, well, it was a few years before I started law. So this really infused everything at law school. I mean, we did it in constitutional law, we did it in administrative law before, not even yet having done an elective on refugee law. The Tampa was really a persistent aspect in our legal education. But also I feel like it was my generation's climate change. The refugees, I mean, this is what we were protesting about. This was children and immigration. Detention was a big issue, you know, for example. So this was just what I was switched on to as the big political human rights issue of my generation. And it is a little bit, I think, disheartening now when I speak to my students who are similarly very passionate and engaged on refugee rights, but it's not something where they would take their career because they don't see a future in it, because they say, “we've tried everything. This is an issue that's not going to change.” So they see it as a stagnant issue, which I said is quite disheartening, but in a way I feel very sympathetic to it because they want to, you know, they're in talented, incredibly intelligent, passionate people coming out of the Australian National University who want to make a difference and they don't see refugee and asylum seeker policy as an area where they can make a significant difference. They see it as a real roadblock or dead end, which is perhaps partly maybe our failure as refugee advocates to tell the story of the successes that we have made.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
I was just thinking that, particularly in the context of strategic litigation, given the change of the very slow...period of talk to get to something like NZYQ, which in a way is a victory that reflects sustained advocacy over a period of time. And of course, these things happen incrementally and probably like yourself and a lot of people who work in migration law have very rewarding and tangible career success. So thank you very much Kate, we'll come back to you just before we finish up. If I can move now to Professor Alan Gamlen, as I mentioned. He is the director of the ANU Migration Hub and he's also a professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance here at ANU. You've got a PhD from Oxford University and you've also done a whole bunch of stuff at Oxford, Stanford, the Max Planck Society, the Japan Centre for Area Studies, Monash University and Wellington University in the spirit of someone who's interested in global issues. And I understand you've also been director of the Australian Population and Migration Research Centre as well. You're also an ARC Future Fellow, I understand, and you do so much work, including with international organizations and NGOs. So what drew you to this area?
Alan Gamlen
Yeah, yeah. So I'm a migration nerd, as you've just summarised. You know, I'm somebody who's, I guess you could say, dedicated my career to this. And probably for more than 20 years now. And I guess it started for me by recognising that it was a major issue of our times where I was potentially well placed to make a difference. SO, you know, migration, the movement of people is something that has happened throughout the ages. It's been bound up with social change since, you know, the distant past, probably since before we were human. It's really one of those things that happens everywhere in all places and is like a sort of fundamental human experience.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
It's part of our being in the world.
Alan Gamlen
So it's something that, you know, it always happens, but at the same time, there's more of us on the planet and there seems to be more of it happening all the time and it's achieved a kind of political salience that it's difficult to see a parallel.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
And goes straight to human security, right? Like people having a home.
Alan Gamlen
Exactly.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
Dorota, you're a professor of law at the University of Helsinki in Finland, and you're a theorist of human rights and otherness as we've heard today. In addition to writing your book, on the visual power, you've also written other books on religious pluralism and the recognition of difference, as well as a number of publications on legal theory. And you've also acted as a consultant and expert for a number of international organisations, including some here in the ACT in the community centre. What drew you to writing on these topics?
Dorota Gozdecka
On topics of migration, I've always looked at why, despite the fact we've got such rich human rights law, despite principles of equality being entrenched universally across constitutions and legal systems around the world, why do we have so many practices that otherise, that marginalise, that discriminate? So this has been my focus throughout the career. I've looked at marginalisation of women, cultural minorities, and I think it was just a matter of time when migration came to the table. I'd like to add I've got a lived experience of migration. I'm a double migrant, right? I've moved from Finland, from Poland to Finland and from Finland to Australia and back. But I think it was just a matter of time when it had to come to my table because migrants are the last group that can be freely discriminated against, truly freely discriminated against through law, via law and via social discourse. And there's... there's no punishment for, you know, speaking outrageous things about migrants. And this is becoming so predominant in our time that it was just a matter of time when this issue pops up to my, to my table. And I took it up.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
Wonderful. I'm so grateful for all the work that each of you is doing. And I'll be cheeky and just extend the time by one more minute just to quickly ask you, no obligation to, but to quickly ask you if you have any recommended reading for someone who's interested in this space?
Alan Gamlen
I'd say start with The Age of Migration. It's been a sort of running books since the 1990s by Stephen Castles and then Controlling Immigration, which is another series led by Jim Holyfield and Phil Martin.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
Wonderful. Dorota?
Dorota Gozdecka
It's not a specialist book. I actually have just started reading a book which is entitled Somewhere in the world we're human. And these are stories written by migrants and poems written by migrants. And they aim to restore the humanity of a migrant. And I warmly recommend that read. It's very powerful reading and very enriching.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
Wonderful. Thank you. And Kate, final word.
Kate Ogg
So to plug again, some more ANU research for those people who are interested in particularly the Australian perspective of the Tampa and securitisation of refugees post-Tampa, William Mayley's article in the Australian Journal of International Affairs. Though for those of you who are really interested in the balance national security and refugees, which we haven't actually really talked about yet because the term national security comes up in the refugee convention a few times. There is a book by Professor James Hathaway, The Rights of Refugees. It's a massive book but go to the index and look up national security because I think there is a PhD in how the drafters of the Refugee Convention really tried to walk this tightrope of genuine balancing between national security interests, which they all valued was important, against the rights of refugees. And I would say what we have lost now is that sense of balance. So you (referring to Danielle) made a comment earlier about we're no longer in the off with their heads tradition of law and policy. I would actually say that we are, that we started off in this very nuanced balancing act between how do you balance national security and refugee rights? And we're now with the balance is totally gone and we do have an off with their heads attitude.
Danielle Ireland-Piper
Yeah. Thank you, Kate. And look, there's, there's so much there for unpacking. We may have to come back and do another podcast. And some of you who interested in this topic might be. I'm interested in looking at the work of my colleague James Mortenson, who wrote his PhD on the meaning of national security and how that impacts how we apply it in various contexts. So think there's definitely another podcast in that topic. Thank you very much, Kate Ogg, Alan Gamlen and Dorota Gozdecka for your time today on the National Security Podcast.
Kate Ogg
Thank you.
Alan Gamlen
Thank you.
Dorota Gozdecka
Thank you.