Slam shut your borders or pay a terrible price

From Australia’s ex-premier, who ruthlessly solved his country’s migrant crisis, brutally frank advice to Britain

FORMER Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott was in charge of his country’s tough immigration policy, closing the door to illegal and economic migrants. This week, speaking in London, he urged Britain to follow suit in dealing with one of the gravest problems of our age . . .

Naturally, the safety and prosperity that exists almost uniquely in Western countries is an irresistible magnet. these blessings are not the accidents of history, but the product of values painstakingly discerned and refined, and of practices carefully cultivated and reinforced over hundreds of years.

Implicitly or explicitly, the imperative to ‘love your neighbour as you love yourself’ is at the heart of every Western policy. It expresses itself in laws protecting workers, in strong social security safety nets, and in the readiness to take in refugees.

It’s what makes us decent and humane countries as well as prosperous ones — but, right now, this wholesome instinct is leading much of Europe into catastrophic error.

all countries that say ‘anyone who gets here can stay here’ are in peril, given the scale of the population movements that are starting to be seen.

there are tens — perhaps hundreds — of millions of people, living in poverty and danger, who might readily seek to enter a Western country if the opportunity is there.

Illegal

Who could blame them? yet no country or continent can open its borders to all-comers without fundamentally weakening itself. this is the risk the nations of Europe now run through misguided altruism.

On a somewhat smaller scale, australia has faced the same predicament and overcome it.

the first wave of illegal arrivals to australia peaked at 4,000 people a year, back in 2001, before the government first stopped the boats.

It did so by processing illegal arrivals offshore; by denying them permanent residency; and, in a handful of cases, by turning illegal immigrant boats back to Indonesia.

the second wave of illegal boat people was running at the rate of 50,000 a year — and rising fast — by July 2013, when the [labour] government belatedly reversed its opposition to offshore processing.

then my government started turning the boats around, even using orange lifeboats when people- smugglers deliberately scuttled their vessels.

It is now 18 months since a single illegal boat made it to australia.

the immigration detention centres have all but closed; budget costs peaking at $4 billion (£1.86 billion) a year have ended; and — best of all — there have been no more deaths at sea.

that’s why stopping the boats and restoring border security is the only truly compassionate thing to do.

Because australia once more has secure borders and because it’s the australian government — rather than people-smugglers — that controls our refugee intake, there was massive public support for my government’s decision, just last month, to resettle 12,000 members of persecuted minorities from the Syrian conflict. Per capita, that’s the biggest resettlement contribution any country has made.

While prime minister, I was loath to give public advice to other countries whose situations are different.

But because people-smuggling is a global problem, and because australia is the only country that has successfully defeated it, our experience should be studied.

In Europe, as with australia, people claiming asylum invariably have crossed not one border, but many, and are no longer fleeing in fear by the time they engage the people smugglers.

Now they are considered economic migrants because they had already escaped persecution when they decided to move again.

Our moral obligation is to receive people fleeing for their lives. It’s not to provide permanent residency to anyone and everyone who would rather live in a more prosperous country than their own.

that’s why the countries of Europe, while obliged to support the countries neighbouring the Syrian conflict, are more than entitled to control their borders against those who are no longer fleeing a conflict but seeking a better life.

this means turning boats around for people coming by sea. It means denying entry at the border for people with no legal right to come; and it means establishing camps for people who currently have nowhere to go.

It will certainly require some force; it will require massive logistics and expense; it will gnaw at our consciences — yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it for ever.

Deterrent

the australian experience proves that the only way to dissuade people seeking to come from afar is not to let them in.

Of course, working with other countries and international agencies is important, but the only way to stop people trying to gain entry is firmly and unambiguously to deny it — out of the moral duty to protect one’s own people and to stamp out people-smuggling.

So it’s good that Europe has deployed naval vessels to intercept the people- smuggling boats in the Mediterranean.

But as long as they are taking passengers aboard rather than turning boats around and sending them back, they’re acting as a facilitator rather than a deterrent.

Some years ago — before the Syrian conflict escalated, extended into Iraq and then spread like a cancer into the ungoverned spaces of libya, yemen, Nigeria and afghanistan — I got into trouble for urging caution in a fight that was ‘baddies versus baddies’.

Now that a quarter- of- amillion people have been killed, seven million people are internally displaced and four million people are destitute outside its borders and considering coming to Europe, the Syrian conflict is too big and has too many ramifications not to be everyone’s problem.

the rise of IS has turned it into a fight between bad and worse: between the assad regime in Syria, whose brutality is the Islamic State death cult’s chief local recruiter, and a caliphate seeking to export its apocalyptic version of Islam right around the world.

Given the sheer scale of the horror unfolding in Syria, Iraq and everywhere IS gains a foothold — the beheadings, the crucifixions, the mass executions, the sexual slavery — and its perverse allure across the globe, it’s striking how little has been done to address this problem at its source.

Wicked

the u.S. and its allies, including Britain and australia, have launched air strikes against this would-be terrorist empire.

We’ve helped to contain its advance in Iraq, but we haven’t defeated it because it can’t be beaten without more effective local forces on the ground.

Everyone should recoil from an escalating air campaign, perhaps with Western special forces on the ground, in a part of the world that is such a witches’ brew of danger and complexity.

yet those who won’t use decisive force where it is needed end up being dictated to by those who will.

looking around the globe, it’s many years since problems have seemed so daunting and the solutions less clear. yet the worse the times and the higher the stakes, the less matters can be left in the ‘too hard’ basket.

More than ever, Western countries need the self- confidence to stand up for ourselves and for the universal decencies of mankind lest the world rapidly becomes a much worse place.

like the countries of Europe, australia struggles to come to terms with the local terrorism that IS has inspired. like you, we are trying to contain IS from the air while waiting for a Syrian strategy to emerge.

But, unlike you, we have at least solved one of the wicked problems now afflicting Europe: we have secured our own borders.