“[We have seen how] in the last instance private property has turned man into a commodity whose production and destruction also depend solely on demand; how the system of competition has thus slaughtered, and daily continues to slaughter, millions of men. All this we have seen, and all this drives us to the abolition of this degradation of mankind through the abolition of private property, competition and the opposing interests.”

Friedrich Engels, Outline of a Critique of Political Economy

Why does Australia treat refugees like shit, even though it makes no sense at all? It is neither humane, nor strictly necessary on the government’s own stated grounds. Australia’s migration policies are ludicrously expensive, involving immense sums of money awarded to government departments and private contractors. Why does our government, usually concerned with minimising government expenditures, spend hundreds of millions on our borders for no apparent gain?

Is it a question of electability – are these policies just implemented by politicians seeking “lowest common denominator” votes among racists, a demographic amplified by the Murdoch media?

Is it the result of something lacking in the Australian psyche? The religious crowd and the NGO movement see it as something stemming from a lack of compassion. Even the more politically radical sectors of the movement sometimes reason in a circle and imply that the reason we have these policies is because not enough people are actively protesting against them.

For lack of a better word, we want to give a materialist explanation of what’s going on – an analysis that captures the why and how of the social forces at play and their relationship to class society. This is all the more important, considering how border authoritarianism now seems to have become a fixed, essential part of the international state system, not only in Australia but in Europe and North America too. Considering too, the importance of the fight to open all the borders and close all the camps.

Is capitalism inherently against refugees?

In a way, it’s easy to imagine a government that does not force refugees into offshore prison camps, torture them and force them into poverty and a legal quagmire onshore. It was only a few decades ago that Australia seemed to operate like this. Many countries still do. 

However, things have changed quite drastically. Though the victory of the Labor Party in the 2022 election will likely mean the abolition of Temporary Protection Visas, it is absolutely certain that the Labor government will continue and perhaps accelerate the policy of border authoritarianism that has been developing for the past three decades. 

In this light, the abolition of TPVs is less a sincere act of benevolence and more a bone thrown to refugees and anti-racists. The policies of refugee torture are wholly bipartisan; in a real sense, they can be traced back to the Keating Government introducing mandatory detention of boat arrivals in the early 1990s. It has only gotten worse since then.

The relations of capital, not the moralities of politicians, are at the centre of a refugee’s existence from the beginning to the end. This underpins the policies of all governments towards refugees generally, as well as the apparent differences between political parties on the matter.

Conflict is not unique to capitalism, not by any means. However, the systematic nature of war in the capitalist era, combined with its sheer scale and international nature, is truly unprecedented. Horrific wars take place with regularity across the globe, all with the same kinds of root cause: political factions of the capitalist class, usually allied with one or several imperialist state powers, attempting to assert control of particular regions. These civil wars and interstate conflicts create enormous population movements, which wider global forces like the United Nations attempt to control.

To add to this, climate change – itself driven by the capitalist drive for greater and greater profit, at the expense of both the environment and the human population – is also creating enormous movements of people. Catastrophic environmental disasters are occurring with creasing regularity and these disasters will drive more and more people from their homes. 

The function of border policy

Capitalism creates enormous movements of people that are uprooted from their homes and totally dispossessed. At the same time, it washes its hands of its responsibility for these same crimes. Your house may be bombed by an Australian jet, your hometown’s water supply poisoned by the pollution of an Australian company, but try to come here without permission and you’ll be ruined.

Increasingly, the desire of states is to control population flows like turning a tap on and off, to admit the human material it wants and reject what it does not. This is the point of our border policy, just as it is Europe’s. Refugees are placed in barbaric detention centres to deter others from trying to migrate without permission. As the number of social conflicts across the world grows, so does the desire of capitalist states to introduce new means of controlling their borders. This is not something optional under capitalism, they are making predictable decisions in response to changing circumstances.

The logic is quite plain. At times, states will admit large numbers of people in order to fill workplaces with workers. The most prominent example of this in Australia occurred after World War II, when enormous numbers of Europeans were allowed and encouraged to immigrate to serve as labourers in the new booming economy. 

Occasionally, encouraging the migration of certain groups is valuable for circumstantial political reasons. The outpourings of official hospitality for Ukrainian refugees in Australia is an example of this. Protection visas were issued quite quickly to resident Ukrainians that wanted them, the deadlines for applications were generously extended and even free public transport vouchers were given specifically to them by the New South Wales government. Meanwhile, thousands of refugees of Middle Eastern, Asian and African descent reside in horrendous conditions in Indonesia, without work rights, permanent protection or the chance to go to Australia at all.

Certain economies, like Australia’s, are structured around the targeted immigration of certain “economically valuable” groups, defined very precisely. Even in the United States, with its immense migration policing apparatus, the economy is built on the labour of hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans. In this light, the repression seems pretty clearly directed towards keeping said migrants in a state of hyper-exploitation, preventing them from organising and forcing them to accept criminally low wages and working conditions.

However, at the same time, these governments brutally reject those migrants that it does not need, that are not useful to them, either in a strictly economic or politically circumstantial sense. There are a number of people on both the left and right who attempt to defend a more open border policy on economic grounds, pointing to the fiscal benefits of migration. These people miss the point entirely, however, and by attempting to support an open borders policy on capitalist premises they end up just reinforcing the “closed border” policies they oppose.

Arising from class rule is the fundamental need for governments to enforce border security as a means of upholding the premise of “state sovereignty”. The edifice of statehood is based on the notion that state authorities can control what passes through their borders, and an indefinite, uncontrolled flow of migrants would completely undermine this principle. The capitalist class never voluntarily gives up any of its own powers. This is why calls to loosen restrictions on migration or expand refugee intakes are so often fiercely opposed by them, even in many cases where unrestricted migration may be beneficial in a purely economic sense. The message is: we, the capitalist class, decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come. 

Refugees: left for dead

When migrants or refugees are not useful for direct political or financial gain, they are discarded, despite the talk of “human rights” by governments and intergovernmental bodies. In a critique of Malthus from 1844, Engels made a point about the logic of capitalism that has been proven true over and over again: “when there are too many people, they have to be disposed of in one way or another: either they must be killed by violence or they must starve”. While starving is the more common option, massacres are hardly rare either – September this year marks the 40th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila killings, the Israeli-sponsored massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Catholic Fascists at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut.

Violence against refugees is so regular that it is hardly even remarked upon. Australia’s refugee policy is currently structured around “deterrence” – don’t leave your home country to try and get here by boat, or else we’ll put you in a prison camp so awful that you’re likely to be afflicted with PTSD once you get out. Despite the exceptional and sadistic nature of our cruelty, it is still rather senseless to divide states into those that are “good” to refugees, and those that are “bad”, as the problem is systematic. 

The problem is not reducible to the misdeeds of one particular country, let alone one select group of politicians. Blame lies with capitalism itself, which is responsible for both the existence of refugees and their torture generally.

Countries with the most “humane” refugee policies generally only sustain these policies at the expense of refugees in more brutal neighbouring states. This is becoming particularly obvious in Europe as the EU begins to follow Australia’s lead, using poorer or less influential countries as its human holding pens, as is the case in Greece. Clearly, a demand for more “compassion” or “humanity” from our government is not enough to reverse this fundamental crisis of capitalism. The struggle has to go further.

Revolution, the only way to liberation

Our belief is that the brutalisation of refugees is not something which is “optional” for governments. This naturally points to a limit for activist groups fighting the government. In a sense this is disheartening, but it is not our intention to be pessimistic. 

Refugees, like all other migrants, are a class of non-citizens in a world structured around the privilege of citizenship. To state that the liberation of refugees is contingent on the ending of capitalism is not to state that refugee struggles in the present are worthless – in fact, it is stating the direct opposite. Refugee struggles are not simply requests for minor adjustments to capitalism, they strike at the heart of this fundamentally inhumane system and undermine the very premise of state sovereignty. Their victories are all the more significant for this.

The galvanision of these particularly exploited fractions of the working-class could have an immeasurable impact. Already, migrant workers both documented and undocumented play essential roles in sectors of the Australian economy – even moreso in the economies of the USA or UK. When migrant workers fight for better wages and conditions, this necessarily involves a fight against the state, breaking down the separation between political and economic struggles.

It’s for this reason that socialists should work to engage the rest of the working-class in Australia with refugee struggles. Not only do they improve the chances of refugees winning, but they actively heighten and give a more radical character to their own struggles in the process.