Aussie immigration architect: Europe ‘just making up excuses’

SYDNEY — At a time when European leaders are looking to Australia’s controversial asylum program for inspiration, the man who built it says all that’s needed to make it work on the Continent is the political will.

In an interview with POLITICO, Jim Molan, a retired major general and the co-author of the Australian asylum policy, said Europe’s migration crisis is not inevitable. Australia’s success is, he said, “not about the geography; it is about government resolve.”

Molan believes Europe could adopt Australia’s three-pillar approach, turning back boats on the Mediterranean, processing asylum seekers offshore and resettling them outside of the Continent, in order to stop the influx.

Policing Europe’s waters is difficult, he acknowledged, but no harder than the task Down Under. Including its islands, Australia’s coastline extends approximately 60,000 kilometers (the EU has just under 70,000 kilometers of coast), and its navy and coastguard are “tiny” in comparison to the much larger navies in the EU.

“Europeans think it’s easy in Australia to control our borders, but they’re just making up excuses for doing nothing themselves,” Molan said.

“If you think humanity can be assisted by bringing people into Europe, you can help many, many times more in places such as Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey” — Jim Molan

Now 66, Molan joined the army in 1968 and was chief of operations for the multinational force in Iraq in 2004-2005, earning the U.S. government’s Legion of Merit and Australia’s Distinguished Service Cross. He served for five years with the Australian embassy in Jakarta as defense attaché.

After retiring from the army in 2008 and in the lead-up to Australia’s 2013 election, he co-authored the then opposition Liberal-National Coalition’s asylum policy. After the election, in which the Coalition wrestled power largely on the back of its promise to “stop the boats,” Molan was appointed the prime minister’s special envoy for Operation Sovereign Borders.

Referring to himself as “the best senator Australia never had” after an unsuccessful bid for a senate seat for the Liberal Party in 2016’s federal election, Molan believes boat turn-backs (and turn-backs on land, in Europe’s case) are the most important element of the program he designed.

If boats are too rickety to make it back to where they were launched (in the case of the Mediterranean, that’s likely to be Libya), Europe could always go down Australia’s controversial path of replacing them with seaworthy alternatives.

The second pillar of Australia’s system is offshore processing. Migrants who make it to Australia illegally by boat are processed in offshore centers on the Pacific island of Nauru or (for now) on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, where conditions are notoriously brutal. (The Manus center is slated to close at an unspecified time in the future after the country’s Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.)

“If you think humanity can be assisted by bringing people into Europe, you can help many, many times more in places such as Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey,” said Molan.

Jim Molan | Chris Hyde/Getty Images

The third element is that asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat are barred from ever settling in the country, even when they are granted refugee status. Instead, they can stay in Manus, Nauru, or third countries with which Australia has struck controversial refugees-for-cash deals, such as Cambodia.

When refugees or migrants pay thousands of dollars for a seat on a boat, only to find themselves back where they started, “it destroys the people smugglers’ business model,” Molan said.

He believes Europe has turned a page when it comes to its attitude toward asylum seekers, not least of all in Germany, where in 2015 Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policy resulted in a massive influx of migrants. Merkel has since promised a refugee surge will not happen again on her watch.

“Europe is where Australia was in about 2012, early 2013” before it launched Operation Sovereign Borders in September 2013, he said. “The critics are saying, ‘It’s too hard to control the borders, it’s inhumane, we have a humanitarian obligation.’”

Legal status

For Europe, perhaps the most problematic element of Australia’s three-pronged attack is turning back boats. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2012 that Italy had violated international human rights laws by intercepting migrants on the Mediterranean and turning them back to Libya.

Australia isn’t bound by the European Convention on Human Rights. It is a signatory to the U.N. Refugee Convention, which states refugees can’t be sent to a place where they may be persecuted, or punished for the mode of their arrival. Australia insists it doesn’t break those rules, but Amnesty International disagrees. At the U.N. in 2015, when Australia was subject to its quadrennial universal periodic review, 110 countries spoke out about the nation’s human rights record, most mentioning its treatment of asylum seekers.

In August, the Guardian published a cache of 2,000 leaked incident reports from the Nauru detention center. The allegations included a guard threatening to kill a child once he moved out of detention and into the community, guards slapping children across the face and a report of a guard swapping sexual favors for shower privileges.

And yet, even as Australia’s system is condemned by the U.N. as inhumane and “immensely harmful,” support for offshore processing is gaining ground in some EU countries.

Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz | Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images

In October, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière suggested migrants intercepted on the Mediterranean should be sent to asylum processing camps in Africa. Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz has called for Europe to look to the Australian approach as a model.

“Even Merkel has admitted if she had her time again, she would do it differently,” said Molan. “It was a gross policy failure on her part that caused this to occur, and now she’s backing off from it in spades.”

Australia’s turn-backs are legal because asylum seekers generally gather from third countries in Sri Lanka or Indonesia before making the journey, Molan said.

“By the time they get to Indonesia, they have been through three countries,” he said. “They have spent months there before they come to Australia, and at that point they cannot have any fear of persecution in Indonesia.” (Molan acknowledged that homosexual asylum seekers could face persecution, but added, “You need to take that up with Indonesia.”)

Who has the high ground?

On the ethics of boat turn-backs, Molan argued that Australia has the moral high ground because it has stopped people dying as they make their way to the country. “Every Australian should be proud of what we do in relation to refugees,” he said.

In 2015, the UNHCR reported that 3,771 migrants had died crossing the Mediterranean, and that number is expected to increase for 2016.

“You can never say you’ve eradicated terrorism, you can only say you’ve lowered the probability of a successful terror attack” — Jim Molan

From December 2007 to September 18, 2013, about 1,100 asylum seekers drowned en route to Australia. From September 19, 2013 (once the center-right Coalition took power and introduced stricter border protection measures) to December 9, 2013, 39 died. Since then, none have drowned on their way to Australia, though many have died or been seriously injured in the processing centers and outside them as a result of suicide, illness or violent attacks.

And Molan argued that stopping boat arrivals has allowed Australia’s government to take in more refugees through official channels. With a population of 24 million, Australia admits some 200,000 settlers a year. Historically, between 12,000 to 14,000 of those have been refugees, though the country agreed to settle a one-off additional 12,000 due to the Syrian crisis, and has pledged to permanently increase its annual refugee intake to 19,000 from this year.

“The support of the Australian population for our migration program is critical,” Molan said. “If we subcontract our border control to people smugglers, the Australian people will not accept it, and they will not support the migration policy.”

Implementing Australia’s three-step system in the EU would also lower the risk of another terror attack on the Continent, Molan said.

“You can never say you’ve eradicated terrorism, you can only say you’ve lowered the probability of a successful terror attack,” Molan said. “There are examples — Nice, Paris, Brussels — where the link between terrorism and migration has been made. Therefore one aspect of counterterrorism should be border control. Other aspects should be about the social contract with migrants in your country, improving your intelligence organizations and internal security and increasing counterterrorism activities.”

Gaining control of its borders would boost the EU’s image, Molan said, “because if Europe can’t control its borders, organize its finances or deter Russia, what good is it?”