Abstract

This article explains how Australia's immigration programme, which has boasted one of the world's highest per capita refugee resettlement rates since 1945, has been unsettled since 1989 by a sudden and steep increase in onshore applications for refugee status. Asylum seekers were an unknown quantity for Australia: their unpredictable numbers defied established government planning mechanisms, and they diverged from accustomed images of who refugees were and how they arrived. Without a specific tradition of asylum to lean on, Australia's policy response has been torn between long-standing immigration controls and new politics of internationalization and integration with Asia. This had led to a series of uneasy and interim accommodations within the immigration programme, with asylum seekers and resettled refugees being offset against one another. The article concludes that both groups stand to lose from being locked in this configuration of competition.

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