Valerie Suckling, "Australia & Asylum Seekers: Towards a New Response."

MARCH 2007

ISSUE 9 - ISSN 1448 - 6326

Australia & Asylum Seekers: Towards a New Response

Valerie Suckling

Abstract

As a population of immigrants, the Australian experience of exile and isolation; an awareness of what it is to be a foreigner – a stranger in a strange land – has been a significant inter-generational one. The convicts, our first non-indigenous inhabitants, would have had a powerful sense of the injustice of such harsh dispossession and disenfranchisement from their homeland. Yet, in our current response to refugees and asylum seekers, there is no indication that we share an awareness of the pain of their experience. What is it that motivates and seems to dominate this kind of response? In our increasingly interconnected global context, we are closer to each other than ever before, and we have a gathering awareness of our communal destiny. The way we encounter foreignness or otherness, then, has never been a more present and challenging reality. Within the Western milieu, the sources that have the appearance of delivering the safety and identity we crave in our rapidly changing society are found in an extreme form of individualism, which encourages the creating of a self-sufficient island of existence; or in tribalism, which defines us by clan, religion, nationality, or politics. But neither of these identity sources is hospitable to the current human experience of globalisation, nor to multiculturalism, nor to the dispossessed and disenfranchised who seek safe haven on these shores. If we want to enhance human dignity, improve the chances of peace and avoid a clash of civilisations, we need to perceive and approach otherness in a different way. This calls for a radical reorientation of our ways of seeking identity, so that life meaning and purpose are sought not in the isolation of instrospection, nor in retreating behind exclusive tribal boundaries, but rather in the face of the other – including the faces that look to us for hope – for meaning and purpose - through the barbed wire of our detention centres. Only in the face of the other can we see the irreducible and unrepeatable value and uniqueness of every human life, and only then will we hold as paramount responsibility for the other in motives and acts that lead to, enhance, and sustain human life.

Introduction

In the Book of Genesis, after killing Abel, Cain’s retort to God’s questioning the whereabouts of his brother was: “I don’t know! Am I my brother's keeper (Gen. 4:8-12)?” Had Cain been willing to hear, God’s direct response would have surely been: “Well, yes…You are!” But there are many ways, other than acts of murder and physical violence, in which we can deny another life – we can simply neglect to respond - diminishing the significance and the uniqueness with which every human life is endowed. Nowhere is the call to response more confronting than when we encounter the ‘foreigner’ – the other - anyone who is so completely different that they cannot at all reflect sameness - ‘I’ - back at us. We Australians hold high, as an integral part of the fabric of our political and social mores, the ideals of social justice, but the reception we currently give refugees who seek safe haven on these shores, casts aspersions on the integrity of this ideal.[1] Against the raw reality of this backyard context, I look more broadly at our Western milieu and at what it is that seems to motivate and dominate such responses. Then I look at the kinds of questions we are asking ourselves about life’s meaning and purpose, and find that the answers are not so much in introspective exploration, as in the face of the other, and in the sources of identity we draw upon. I discover that it is in a rethinking of these questions that life's meaning and purpose emerges, making possible a radical reorientation that sees the irreducible and unrepeatable value and uniqueness of every human life; holding as paramount responsibility for the other in motives and acts that lead to, enhance, and sustain human life.[2]

Asylum Seekers – The Current Australian Response

There are around 14 million refugees in the world today, over one million asylum seekers, and a further 25 million who are displaced by political turmoil within their own homelands.[3] In the year 2000, India and Pakistan , who can ill afford additional mouths to feed, each received one million refugees.[4] Australia accepts 12,000 each year, and the painful reality of the experience facing those exiled from their homelands that seek a place of safety here, is a prolonging of the hardships from which they have fled.[5] Refugees are excluded from the economic, social, and political entitlements allowed all others living in or coming to Australia , arbitrary and extended detention is practiced, and applications for residency involve a lengthy process. Refugees have in common, an experience of oppression of all kinds in their country of origin. They know too well the dictatorial regimes that practice a politics of oppression in civil wars that destroy the best of their youth; in economic structures that give those who have wealth yet more - taking from the poor even the little they have; and in social mores that justify practices that deny even basic human rights.[6]

As islanders, we Australians are all either boat people, or the descendents of boat people.[7] The experience of exile and isolation then; the awareness of what it is to be a foreigner – a stranger in a strange land - has been a significant inter-generational one. Since the earliest days of white settlement here, the pain of separation from homeland, from loved ones, and from all that was comforting and familiar, was wholly present. In addition, for the convicts, there would have been a powerful sense of the injustice of such harsh dispossession and disenfranchisement. Awareness, however, of these beginnings has been relegated to the shadows of Australian consciousness,[8] and it may well be that our overly defensive policies regarding asylum seekers, simultaneously reflect and tap into the anxiety that the memory of dispossession evokes.[9] But wherever we are motivated by the drive for self-protection, anxiety distorts our responses so that they are characterised by safety-seeking limitations and controls and by an objectivising approach to the other, of an I-It dialectic. In doing so, we deny both ourselves and the other the possibility of mutual life-affirming and life-giving relatedness.[10]

The Significance of the Human Person – Our Western and Global Context

A paradox of our Western culture today is that on some levels, never before have we had such liberty and significance. Yet, immersed as we are in mass civilisation, mass communication, mass production, and mass consumerism, never before has the human person’s significance and life meaning been so called into question. Our materially driven culture depersonalises by identifying people as consumers, or defining the worth of individuals in terms of units of productivity. Bombarded with a multiplicity of contradictory voices that compete for our allegiance, and in an age that heralds the ‘death of the subject,’ we are at risk of becoming strangers to ourselves and to each other.[11] Inconsistency and foreignness seems, everywhere, to transcend consistency and sameness.[12] At the same time, we are closer to each other than ever before and there is a gathering awareness of our communal destiny. How we encounter the other then, has never been a more present and challenging reality.

Efforts towards seeking distinctiveness and a sense of continuity in the midst of a rapidly changing society seem increasingly to occupy polarised positions, characterised by an extreme form of individualism and older forms of tribalism.[13] This brand of individualism seems to encourage us to make of our own singular segments of life, ‘utterly self-sufficient islands of existence.’[14] While tribalism, on the other hand, whether defined by clan, religion, nationality, or politics has the appearance of delivering the identity and safety we crave. [15] But neither of these identity sources is hospitable to the current human experience of globalisation, nor to multiculturalism – the foreigner in our midst. Nor does it deliver to the individual what is hoped for. The polarisation of views of self and other created in a retreat to tribal responses that claim their particularities as universalities, or in the self-absorbed pursuit of individualism, in effect heighten rather than lower, our fears and anxieties. As long as we are threatened by the other, demanding the false security of sameness, our position and our approach objectivises the other, and in so doing opportunities for and experiences of mutual trust give way to suspicion and incomprehension.[16] The nature of the I-It dialectic in approaching dialogue with the foreigner, refuses to work in the functional ‘getting by’ kind of way that it often can. When the other is so unfamiliar to us and, what is more, seems to hold determinedly to their distinctiveness, the discomfort of the space between us is wholly present. Then, the more the I-It attitude of dialogue persists – insisting on relationship on its own terms – the more precarious is our destiny – both individual and mass.

In the emerging global landscape, the rising threat of terrorism and the very existence of weapons that have the capacity to bring destruction on an enormous scale, make it clear that, if we want to enhance human dignity, improve the chances of peace and avoid a clash of civilisations, we need to perceive and approach otherness in ways different from that which we have always done.[17] But the choice is ours. When encounters with the other become confronting enough, we can suspend the impulse to avoid the discomfort of this space, or we can continue drawing upon its fears, demands, and projections, in strident efforts that seek to control it all. In light of present-day realities, there is a call upon us to see our nearness, our interdependence, and our uniqueness,[18] with an accompanying grasp of the need not to avoid face-to-face encounter with the ‘foreigner,’ and a need to reorient our responses in ways that acknowledge, emerge out of, and reflect the awareness of this calling.

Toward New Ways of Being and New Ways of Living

As conscious beings, we are called to more than simply being-in-the-world. We are continually being-challenged-in-the-world, and the degree to which we meet the challenge to be more – to do more – to wrestle for meaning – is the measure to which we are alive. [19] Human life is a task, a problem, and a challenge, and the more we try to escape that which life calls us to, the less human we become – and the less life we have![20] What we perceive as the most significant questions that we can ask ourselves about life’s meaning and purpose, then, makes a critical difference to our being and our living in the world. Indeed, the way we encounter ourselves and others is conceived in these questions and either grows or atrophies in the answers they deliver. If our questioning arises solely from philosophical approaches that ask - ‘Who am I?’ - or solely from psychological inquiry that asks - ‘How am I?’ - the answers yielded in the interiority of the search here, are likely to be unsatisfying to the heart and the intellect of the human being, and to lead ultimately to inadequate response in human living.[21]

Religion is the attempt by humans not only to understand and answer the deepest questions about life and the universe, but to meet the problem of separation and estrangement from ourselves and from each other, as well.[22] When the most challenging and fundamental question in our hearts is a religious one - ‘What is required of me?’ - there is an inversion of our orientation regarding self and other. Transcending interiority and the interests of our own existence, then, this question presupposes an awareness of being called upon to do much more than ponder in splendid isolation, life and its meaning, in a sharp awareness of the challenge to be an answer.[23]

All human relations, actions, institutions, political systems, and nations are or are not genuinely human to the degree that they manifest responsibility for the other, and any society in which people move around side by side rather than face-to-face, avoids the calling to this human responsibility and meaning.[24] We can hold to fears and anxieties inherent in our current attitudes and policies regarding refugees, thereby being complicit in supporting the oppressive systems under which they have suffered in their own homelands. Or, motivated by a desire to be forces for peace, and for the justice and compassion upon which peace ultimately depends, we can turn to face the call of the dispossessed foreigner in our midst. Existence, for its own sake is not our ultimate meaning; rather, it is existence for the other,[25] and in the face-to-face encounter, the sense of burden we each have for human life is a phenomenon in which all of our life is somehow grounded.[26] Discovered here too is transcendence of self, derived not in seeking our own reflection, but only in the face of the other – especially the one in need - who calls us to respond.

As individuals and as a nation, then, what kind of fulfilment of being and of life can we truly enjoy while we continue to avert our faces from those that gaze back at us through the barbed wire of our refugee detention centres – faces that say ‘I am here - I’m a stranger in a strange land - don’t kill me! Don’t diminish my significance; my dignity; my uniqueness.’[27] When we bear a sense of the responsibility we have for the other, we cease asking ‘Who am I?’ Instead, the perspective becomes ‘Here I am!’ - in answer to the other’s call. All our encounters then become characterised and guided by an awareness of the universal interconnectedness of human action – that every one of our apparently random responses and acts, contributes to or detracts from life; an acknowledgement of our interdependence – the universal need for and the vital importance of enhancing community; a reverent respect for our uniqueness[28] – that the cultural ‘melting pot’ metaphor no longer holds – it never really did – and that if we are to respond well, the distinctiveness and irreducibility of the human person - of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’- must be upheld in approaches that are characterised by openness, directness, mutuality, and presence; and finally, a knowledge of the commonalities in the human experience – in the remembering that we too…have been boat people.

Bibliography

Bellah, R. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Brown, Robert McAfee. Reclaiming the Bible. Words for the Nineties. John Knox: USA , 1994.

Buber, Martin. The Way of Response. New York: Schocken, 1966.

Cain, Elizabeth. A Point in Time. Eremos 762, 2000.

Hamilton, Andrew. The Invisible Worm: Australian Treatment of Asylum Seekers. Compass 36, 2002.

Heschel, Abraham. Who is Man? Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1965. http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/hragenda-8-eng

Irigaray, Luce. To Be Two. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Kelly, A. An expanding theology: faith in a world of connections. Newton, N.S.W.: E. J. Dwyer, 1993.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity: Conversation with Philippe Nemo. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985.

Mares, Peter. Borderline. Australia ’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. UNSW Press: NSW, 2001.

Martindale, C. Subselves: The internal representations of situational and personal dispositions. In L. Wheeler (Ed.), Review of Personality and Social Psychology (vol. 1). CA: Sage, 1980.

Sacks, Jonathan. The Dignity of Difference: How to avoid the Clash of Civlizations. London: Continuum, 2002.

Tolstoy, Leo. Walk in the Light and Twenty-Three Tales. Farmington, PA: The Plough Publishing House, 1998.

[2] Emmanuel Levinas. Ethics and Infinity: Conversation with Philippe Nemo. ( Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985).

[4] Peter Mares. Borderline. Australia ’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. (NSW: UNSW Press, 2001), 35.

[6] Robert McAfee Brown. Reclaiming the Bible. Words for the Nineties. (USA: John Knox, 1994), 29.

[7] Elizabeth Cain. A Point in Time. (Eremos 762, 17, 2000).

[8] Andrew Hamilton. The Invisible Worm: Australian Treatment of Asylum Seekers. Compass (36, 12, 2002).

[9] Hamilton. Invisible Worm, 9.

[10] Martin Buber. The Way of Response. (New York: Schocken, 1966), 10.

[12] Cyril Martindale. Subselves: The internal representations of situational and personal dispositions. In L. Wheeler (Ed.), Review of Personality and Social Psychology. 1. CA: Sage, 1980.

[13] Jonathan Sacks. The Dignity of Difference: How to avoid the Clash of Civlizations. ( London: Continuum, 2002), 118.

[14] Robert Bellah. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. ( New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 50.

[16] Irigaray, Luce. To Be Two. ( New York: Routledge, 2001), 54.

[18] Anthony Kelly. An expanding theology: faith in a world of connections. (Newton, N.S.W.: E. J. Dwyer, 1993), 124.

[19] Abraham Heschel. Who is Man? (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1965), 105.

[28] Tolstoy, Leo. Walk in the Light and Twenty-Three Tales. (Farmington, PA: The Plough Publishing House, 1998), 144.

Valerie Suckling recently graduated from ACU’s McAuley campus with a dual degree in Theology and Social Science. Valerie is now involved in a St Vincent de Paul in-home family support initiative, working with families-at-risk in her local community. She is associated with Buddies Refugee Support Group on the Sunshine Coast, who provide practical assistance and social support, as well as community education, advocacy, and the lobbying of government for shifts in current policy regarding refugees and asylum seekers in Australia.

Email: noosacom@aanet.com.au

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