Campbell: Failed refugees are calling Australia home, and never leaving
It’s not just the Poms who have cottoned on just how easy it is to stay here for years — with work rights — by claiming to be a refugee.
Those of you who follow the news from the UK will be aware that between two decades of stagnant wage growth and a 10-year non-pandemic high in unemployment, things over there aren’t too flash at the moment.
Even so, I hadn’t realised things were so crook Poms are so desperate to avoid going home that they’re claiming asylum in Australia. But they are.
According to figures tabled in the Senate, in the past two months 84 citizens of the United Kingdom have applied for asylum in Australia, more than those who applied from Bangladesh, Ukraine, Taiwan and Thailand, though still well behind the regular top performers of India, China, and Indonesia.
Still, cracking the top 20 is pretty good going and merited an entry on the emerging “source countries” because over the past six months it produced a monthly average of 20 asylum seekers.
As you can imagine, even under Labor, the success rate for Brits trying to persuade us they have a well-founded fear of persecution is not high.
In October, 42 UK citizens “were not granted a Final Protection Visa” which represents a “grant rate” of “00.00%”.
So what is going on? It seems the Poms have cottoned on just how easy it is to stay here for years – with work rights – by claiming to be a refugee.
To get a sense of just how nuts this is, punch “subclass 866” into the legal search engine AustLII and have a read. These are all search results of cases published in the past two weeks.
Typical is the Pakistani who first arrived here as a student.
In 2016, he was refused another student visa, a decision to the since-abolished AAT.
In 2018, the AAT upheld the visa refusal, which the “student” then appealed to the Federal Circuit Court.
In February 2019, the court backed the AAT, at which point he made an asylum application which was heard and rejected by the AAT in July 2023.
This prompted a second appeal to the Circuit court which was dismissed this month, 12 years after he first arrived.
Then there’s the Sri Lankan who arrived on a transit visa in May 2014 and made an asylum claim three months later.
It took two years for the department to make a decision on that and another three for the AAT to reject his appeal.
What he was doing over the next few years is unclear, but he was still in here in August when his appeal to the court was heard, before being dismissed this month.
Next up was a Chinese woman who arrived in 2014 and made an application for asylum in March 2015, an application which was dismissed ten years later by the Circuit Court this month.
If you think I’m cherrypicking, have a read yourself; there’s more than a hundred of these cases reported since July and they’re all more or less the same.
My favourite was a couple who arrived here from China in September 2006 on student visas.
The bloke’s student visa ceased in March 2009, but he remained unlawfully in Australia until June 2011 before he got around to making an asylum application.
His missus was a student until 2010 and like all these cases was given a bridging visa that allowed her to work while her protection claim was considered.
After going around the houses, the AAT eventually heard the couple’s appeal in 2019 and rejected it.
Don’t worry, they immediately appealed, and in November the Circuit Court upheld the AAT.
In other words, almost 20 years after they arrived and more than 15 years after they were meant to leave, authorities are still fruitlessly seeking their departure.
For a number of reasons the chances of that ever happening are remote.
Firstly because they have children who are now 10 and 14, and since the law says they have been “ordinarily resident in Australia throughout the period of 10 years beginning on the day” they were born, they are now citizens.
Even without these circumstances – does anyone really think we’d throw out the parents of two Australian kids who’ve lived here all their lives? – the chances of this pair or indeed any of these cases leaving soon are non-existent.
That’s because all of them are presumably still open to appeal in the Federal Court.
But even if and when that process is eventually exhausted, as I said, there’s only a remote chance of them leaving. That’s because hardly any leave.
In October, fewer than 10 people failed asylum seekers left Australia, 20 in September.
In the same two month period there were 3843 fresh onshore applications, which explains why in a year the number of un-deported failed asylum has risen from 88,574 to 101,976.
It’s a racket but given the choice of Noosa or Skegness, wouldn’t you try it on?
The mystery is why are we allowing it.
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