HIST 2052 - Migrants,Refugees & the Making of Modern Australia

The Tampa crisis, widespread fears of 'people smuggling', and the revelations about the condition of asylum seekers in detention centres have reignited the debate about Australia's immigration policy and the way that we treat refugees. There is a perception that Australia has already 'done its bit' in generously accepting waves of displaced persons and refugees since World War II, and that further large-scale intakes will destabilise the Australian economy and threaten our 'way of life'. Yet, others argue that Australia's post-war Displaced Persons Scheme was self-serving and oriented towards sourcing cheap labour for dangerous public works projects, and that while Australia opened its border to Asians and East-Europeans for the first time, our preference was always for British migrants who continued to constitute the overwhelming majority of new arrivals. From this perspective, the Australian government's current stringent migrant and refugee intake quota simply reflect the continuation of a long-standing and generally hard-hearted immigration policy. We will examine these different points of view, alongside the testimony of migrants and refugees who left behind everything and everyone they knew to make a new life in Australia.