Human Cargo (16 page)

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THE DETENTION OF
asylum seekers has a long history in the United States. Introduced along with the first immigration controls in the late nineteenth century, it was abandoned in the 1950s, only to be revived in the 1980s in response to the influx first of Haitians and then of Cubans. They were incarcerated in camps and federal prisons in an attempt to deter too many others from following. To this day, the rule of limited parole for pregnant women, juveniles, and other vulnerable people, and blanket detention for the rest remains in place for all those reaching the United States without valid entry documents. Once they pass a screening interview, and provided they satisfy certain criteria, they are in theory eligible to be paroled, but many continue to be detained just the same. Though not criminals, they can be—and often are—held indefinitely: for six or seven months before they come before a judge, then for the two or more years before the appeal, then many more months while the law winds its convoluted course, only then to be denied bail and not told when they will be released. The conditions in which many are kept are both inhuman and degrading. They can be stripped, searched, shackled, manacled, chained, and denied access to lawyers and to their families. Though in theory the conditions of detention of asylum seekers are regulated by UNHCR, of whose executive committee the United States is a member, these rules are routinely breached, and, since September 11, increasingly so.

The numbers of detained asylum seekers keep on growing. People are held in state and local jails, in federal prisons, in private contract facilities, and in “servicing processing centers.” Most are places singularly unsuited to long stays. Frequently denied access to interpreters
or the help of nongovernmental organizations, shunted from prison to prison without explanation or warning, many of those detained are reported to be falling ill, the trauma of what they have fled exacerbated by the fresh trauma of uncertainty and hostility. Lawyers visiting their clients report a sense of growing helplessness and confusion and say that the women detainees in particular suffer acutely from fear, loneliness, and an inability to understand what is happening to them. Physicians for Human Rights and the Bellevue/ NYU Program for Survivors of Torture not long ago carried out a series of interviews with detainees who had been held between one month and four and a half years. They found that 86 percent of them were suffering from measurable levels of depression and half were diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder. Even when bail and parole are recommended, many asylum seekers cannot meet their requirements; so they remain in detention.

A number of the detainees are unaccompanied children: that is, they are under the age of eighteen and have traveled the world alone, without other members of their families. Like adults, they are obliged to prove that they can meet the definition of a refugee under the 1951 Convention. Under several different international rulings, including the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, children should be imprisoned only under exceptional circumstances, and then for the shortest time necessary. Yet the number of unaccompanied children detained in the United States doubled between 1997 and 2001. And although the United States has sought to draw up humane rules for these wandering children, none are in fact binding. Not long ago the care, custody, and placement of unaccompanied minors was transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS has a long history of dealing with refugee children). Guidelines were drawn up for newly arrived children traveling on their own, drawing heavily on the liberal spirit of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In practice, however, a third of these children wind up in secure jail-like facilities, originally designed for young offenders, where they can spend months or even years.
Amnesty International, in a 2003 report on children in immigration detention,
Why Am I Here?
, found widespread human rights violations across the country: children spent long periods in solitary confinement and were subjected to physical and verbal abuse, strip searches, and the use of shackles.

“I am tired of seeing so many depressed people,” an immigration judge told the director of one of the detention centers not long ago. “You should do something about it.”

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I
n the summer of 1966, when I had just left university in London, my father took me and my younger brother, Richard, to Australia. It was, in some sense, to take us home. Born in Melbourne soon before the First World War, the eldest son of a writer and journalist, my father had left Australia for Europe in 1937, to catch and report on the last days of the Spanish Civil War. What he wanted to do was join the other young writers and painters drawn so powerfully abroad by a longing for a culture and history that they felt Australia lacked. Europe, thought my father, would be fun; it would be where he
would learn about life and music and writing. His first real story, filed for the
Daily Express
, whose staff he had just joined, was about the refugees streaming across the Spanish border into France, the loyalist soldiers and their families escaping Franco’s reprisals.

All his life, my father would retain a feeling of ambivalence about the country in which he was born. He loved its smells, the color of the light, and the constant heat, and wherever he went he remarked on eucalyptus trees; and later, when he came to build his own house in Italy, he surrounded the terrace with them. We grew up on what he called chop picnics: fires made on the beaches of Greece and Italy, over which he grilled the lamb chops of his boyhood journeys into the bush; but he felt trapped, whenever he went back to Melbourne, by the sense of loss of people and ideas. Australia remained both home and not home; he would return again and again, at first a little resentfully, later, after he became ill, with growing pleasure and recognition. His ambivalence about Australia, his longings and his rejection, colored the constant moves of our childhood.

We sailed for Perth from Naples, early in July, on board the
Leonardo da Vinci
, pride of the Italian shipping lines, making its last journey to Australia. Air travel had put the long sea voyages out of business. On board were 1,700 migrants, people who had accepted Australia’s generous invitation of citizenship and a new life. The scenes of farewell on the docks at Naples were noisy and tearful and the
Leonardo da Vinci
sailed out of harbor festooned in paper streamers spinning in the wind, to the sounds of a brass band playing jauntily on the quay. Far out at sea, sad people continued to wave from the upper decks. The journey was very quick, by the standard of most crossings: fourteen days, with a single stop in Aden. The only episode to mar the boisterous feeling on the lower decks was when the captain announced, over the loud speaker system, that it had just been decided in Canberra that the draft for Vietnam would henceforth apply to new settlers. A mutiny threatened, but it was quieted, if I remember rightly, by an assurance that military service could also be deferred.

The migrants were, of course, all white. Most of them were Italians,
in the late 1960s still among the most numerous of Australia’s postwar settlers, the destination for migrants from the south and Sicily having long shifted from the United States to the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney. “Italians,” read a government poster of 1951, “make good Australians.” There were some British, a few central and eastern Europeans, a handful of Spaniards; but no Asians, no one from the Middle East, and certainly no Africans. There was no sign of the small number of “distinguished non-Europeans” the government had said it was keen to welcome.

In Perth, our first port of call, the passersby were conspicuous by their whiteness. In the middle of the nineteenth century, significant numbers of Chinese coolies had been allowed in to work the Victorian gold fields, followed by Afghan camel drivers and Japanese pearl divers. But since 1901 a White Australia policy, an unashamedly racist process of selection among immigrants, had been in place to keep out “all peoples whose presence was, in the opinion of Australians, injurious to the general welfare”—people who were not, in other words, white. In the language of the day, the 7,500 Jews who found safety in Australia soon after the shameful Evian Conference of 1938—at which world governments declined to accept all but a very small number of Jews fleeing the Nazis—became “reffos” (refugees), as did the other “aliens,” the Baits, Czechs, Slavs, and Poles whom Australia agreed to take in the postwar years of displacement and labor shortages. But still no yellows or blacks. As T. W. White, the Australian delegate to the Evian Conference, had said, Australia had no racial problem and “we are not desirous of importing one.”

And the reffos did not always have much of a life, the young men living in strict, segregated camps, many having just come from the displaced persons camps of occupied Europe. They tended to be regarded little more favorably than the Aboriginals, whose harsh treatment continued to be widely disregarded even by contemporary historians, whose settler forebears had chosen to recognize only an empty continent, waiting to be claimed and redeemed by early British settlers. And it was now that the idea of the “good refugee”
was born: the one who, fleeing Communist persecution, waited patiently in a camp far away to be selected as “genuine” and invited to Australia.

When Gough Whitlam, Australia’s first postwar Labor prime minister, finally brought to an end the White Australia policy in 1973—six years after my visit—declaring that the country needed to “turn a decent face to the world,” it was with two important provisos. One was that Canberra’s politicians, be they from the right or left, would tacitly agree not to play the race card in their electioneering by appealing to voters’ fear of refugees; the other that the new nonwhite Australians would be selected with the greatest care. The late 1970s were the years of the Vietnamese boat people, and Australia’s immigration officials chose their settlers directly from the refugee holding camps of Malaysia, Indonesia, and China with a keen eye for their suitability. In the ten years that followed the fall of Saigon, Australia took 95,000 boat people, all but 5,000 of them arriving in the approved orderly manner, having been selected and processed. Australia was no longer white, but a neat and cautious system was in place. “We are all,” declared successive ministers with pride, extolling their own ancestral roots among the early British settlers, “immigrants, each and every one of us.” The prior existence of the Aborigines was seldom mentioned.

If the United States nurtured an idea of itself as a country opening its arms to Europe’s huddled masses, and Britain chose to regard itself as an early champion of political and religious dissent, Australia framed a different myth. It was that of a continent to be explored and colonized by a nation of hardworking white people, with the help of a small contingent of carefully selected white foreigners, living in the hopes that the yellow hordes of Asia, growing at a terrifying pace not far from their shores, would not cast their eyes covetously in their direction. And when events did conspire to threaten this myth, Australia, the land where all but the Aboriginals are indeed immigrants, chose to introduce one of the most exclusionary
immigration policies of any democracy, against a small number of people, some of them children.

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WHEN SISTER CLAUDETTE
of the Sisters of Mercy first visited Port Augusta in the 1970s, it was in answer to a call for help from Aboriginal people living in a reserve not far from what was then one of the largest ports in South Australia, transporting iron ore, lead, and silver from the Flinders Ranges. Like the Native Americans in the United States, many Aborigines were by now gathered on reserves. Reaching the camp, Sister Claudette found that the call had come from Aboriginal grandmothers, who had been taken from their parents as children all but illiterate and sent to work as domestic servants, some of them members of the “stolen generation,” the generally half-Aboriginal, half-white Australian children removed from their mothers between 1910 and 1970 and sent to remote institutions with the purpose of destroying their Aboriginal roots. Now, growing old, the women wanted to learn to read and write so as to be able to help their grandchildren with their homework. It was, says Sister Claudette, who is an energetic and friendly woman in her sixties, shocking to discover these reserves fall of people who had to ask permission to leave. “I knew about poverty,” she says. “I had been working in the townships of South Africa. But here the Aborigines had been stripped of everything. They had no dignity left.” She stayed with them for ten years, not unhappy, though in the summer the temperature rose to 114 degrees. She cannot forget that good Catholics in her congregation in Port Augusta did not choose to visit her reserve.