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CHRISTMAS ISLAND, Australia — Deep in the jungle on this small island lost in the Indian Ocean, Australia’s new $370 million refugee detention center reaches its full power after its lights come on at dusk. Bracketed by rain forest, steep cliffs and the sea, it rises from the enveloping darkness and becomes visible from the island’s only inhabited corner, about 10 miles away.

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The New York Times

Australia detains boat people aslyum seekers who arrive by boat on Christmas Island. Flying in is much more acceptable.

International sports people are often welcome - I think there might be a special form to fill out (italics edited by cazmeister)

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Times Topics: Australia

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Kemal Jufri/Imaji, for The New York Times

Asylum seekers being taken by barge from an Australian Navy ship to Christmas Island, where a new detention center holds more than 1,000 boat people.

The center — opened a few days before Christmas but now nearly full with refugees from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka — has come to symbolize what many call one of Australia’s defining fears: the arrival of boat people from Asia.

All boat people seeking asylum in Australia are first brought here to Christmas Island, just 220 miles south of Indonesia but nearly 1,000 miles from the Australian mainland, and most are now held at enormous cost within the center’s electrified, 13-foot-high razor-wire fences.

But even as boats arrive every few days, advocates for refugees and even the government’s own human rights commission are urging the government to close the place down and sort the asylum-seekers on the mainland. They compare Christmas Island to Guantánamo Bay or describe it as a reincarnation of the many notorious prison islands in Australia’s convict history.

“They put this center way out here on this remote island, and then they built it way, way, way out on the island in the jungle,” said Charlene Thompson, a social worker who counsels asylum-seekers here. She equated the new center to Port Arthur, a 19th-century penal colony in Tasmania, Australia’s southernmost island. “It’s a jail, a high-security jail, and it feels like the asylum-seekers are being treated as criminals.”

The influx of boat people, which has swung elections in the past, has rattled the government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd a year before another election. Recently, Mr. Rudd, accused by the opposition of being soft on illegal immigration, personally asked Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to intercept a wooden cargo ship from Malaysia with 260 Sri Lankans bound for Australia.

If the Sri Lankans, now held in Indonesia, had been brought here, their numbers would probably have pushed the center beyond its capacity of 1,200. That, in turn, could have forced the government to start processing the boat people on the mainland.

“I make absolutely no apology whatsoever for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia,” said Mr. Rudd, who had initially won praise from refugee advocates for reversing some of the harshest anti-immigration measures of his predecessor, John Howard, including charging asylum seekers for their stay in government facilities.

Mr. Rudd has continued to send boat people here for processing. He has also retained his predecessor’s “excision” policy, under which asylum seekers on islands like this one are barred from the mainland’s refugee review system. At first reluctant to use the new center, the symbol of his predecessor’s policies, Mr. Rudd housed the boat people in an older facility here.

But a surge of asylum seekers late last year forced the authorities to start using the new center. Nearly 2,000 boat people have been sent to Christmas Island this year. Currently, their numbers are believed to match the island’s local population of 1,100.

The boat people constitute only about 10 percent of all asylum seekers to Australia, according to immigration officials, with most simply arriving by plane. What is more, the boat people are far more likely to be recognized as political refugees after their applications are reviewed over a period of three to four months here.

Nevertheless, the arrival of illegal boats filled with Asians evokes a primordial fear here, one that has been instilled over past decades of anti-Asian immigration policies and is still stoked by conservative politicians.

“There is considerable anxiety about people coming by boat and from the north,” said Bernadette McGrath, the director of Survivors of Torture and Trauma Assistance and Rehabilitation Service, who spent six months investigating the government’s treatment of refugees here. “It’s very deep in our psyche.”

So regardless of how close a boat may have gotten to the mainland, the Australian authorities first steer it to Christmas Island, linked to the mainland only by a four-hour flight to Perth, 1,650 miles to the southeast, that operates four times a week. A supply ship docks here every five or six weeks. Newspapers are delivered 10 days late. The Internet remains costly and slow.

Named by a British navigator who spotted it on Christmas Day in 1643, the island remained uninhabited until about a century ago, when phosphate was discovered. The British brought indentured workers from Asia to Christmas Island, which became part of Australia half a century ago. Until the 1980s, the island was racially stratified, with white Australian managers overseeing Asian workers barred from whites-only neighborhoods.

Boat people who were interviewed said they were surprised to find themselves on an island they had never heard of.

“When we studied geography, our teachers never showed us Christmas Island,” said a 17-year-old ethnic Hazara boy from Ghazni Province in Afghanistan, who had come here with his parents, two brothers and three sisters. “If we look at a world map, Christmas Island is hiding in the map. It’s so small.”

Because of the distance, building and operating the center cost several times what it would have on the mainland, according to the Australian news media.

“The distance also keeps the activists, lawyers and media away from the boat people,” said Gordon Thomson, president of the Christmas Island Shire. The government has barred journalists from touring the center. So far, only two have been permitted inside the visitors’ room, where they have interviewed detainees.

According to a recent report by the Australian Human Rights Commission, a government organization, the new center “looks and feels like a prison.” It called the security measures “excessive and inappropriate for accommodating asylum seekers.” Inside the main fence, the report said, each compound is enclosed in a separate fence, and walkways are “enclosed within cagelike structures.”

The Immigration Department rejected the commission’s recommendation to stop using Christmas Island for detention. It described the use of islands like this one as “essential components of strong border control.”

About 50 asylum seekers, mostly families with children, have been permitted to stay in residential neighborhoods on the island. Despite some local grumbling about the flood of boat people and immigration workers, the asylum seekers said they felt welcomed.

“People here are all good,” said a 35-year-old Iranian man who was staying with his wife and two sons on a block with Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum seekers, and whose refugee application had just been approved.

The Iranian, who like others asked that his name not be used because of fears that his relatives might suffer back home, said he and his wife had felt in danger after converting to Christianity four years ago and joining the Iranian branch of the Assemblies of God. He said he had paid $70,000 to smugglers to take his family from Tehran through Malaysia and Indonesia, and finally on a 11-day boat trip toward Australia before being intercepted by the Australian Navy.

That has been the most common route for asylum seekers. But more recently, since the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka in May, many Tamils from northern Sri Lanka have boarded boats bound directly for Australia, more than 3,000 miles away.

A Sri Lankan family of four still waiting for a ruling on their refugee application said they had spent one month at sea with 70 other people before being brought here three months ago.

The other morning at a local public school that the refugees’ children attend daily, the young immigrants practiced English composition, played polo hockey or baked chocolate chip cookies.

“The children’s knowledge of Australia is very limited,” said Mary Ford, 29, who began teaching here five months ago after moving from the mainland. “They wouldn’t know Australia’s cities.

“None of them have ever heard of Christmas Island. Most Australians haven’t. I didn’t know, geographically, where it was until I moved here. People kept asking me, ‘Christmas Island? Where’s that?’ ”

 

Sign in to Recommend More Articles in World » A version of this article appeared in print on November 5, 2009, on page A6 of the New York edition.

in the international news again I hear. This is a bit of Australia that our previous govt declared not part if Australia for migration purposes and built a multi-million detention centre to keep asylum seekers off the mainland. Please Google 'pacific Solution' or "nauru last refugee'

OK posting before reading may not be wise.

or this writer is getting more info that I am. (just back from hols). this may be part of a larger west australian islands and water newsblackout  - see other posts on oil leak.

but 'even as boats arrive every few days' is not happening.  define every few days

Refugees obtain residency

Seventy-eight Tibetan refugees who had overstayed their visas have been granted resident status in Taiwan, the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission said yesterday. Of the total, 40 have received work permits, it said. The commission is still reviewing the applications of the rest, adding that it would provide them with services such as job-matching, emergency aid, medical care and counseling. Amendments to the Immigration Act (入出國及移民法) passed in January provide that stateless people from India and Nepal who entered Taiwan on fake passports between May 21, 1999, and Dec. 31, 2007, and Tibetan refugees who have overstayed their time in Taiwan are eligible to apply for residency certificates. The law was amended after more than 100 Tibetan refugees in Taiwan staged a sit-in protest in December asking the government to grant them asylum.

I am glad this story has finally reached a reasonable conclusion. The Tibetans held a 24 day sit in protest at Freedom Square in Taipei from 9 December 2008 to 1 January 2009. I have a photoset at flickr detailing the sit in. It also includes links to related news articles.

Update: More news from the Taipei Times: Seventy-eight Tibetans granted residency, 56 denied (21 November 2009)

Bob Ellis asks:

Which brings me to the beautiful children we are tormenting now. Why do we not take them? We took in the end 92 per cent of the people on the Tampa, and they are good citizens. None of them have gone to jail. What is the problem? Malcolm Fraser let in a lot of Vietnamese boat people fleeing another civil war. It cost him no votes, as taking these Tamils would cost Rudd no votes. The Australian people tend to follow the Prime Minister's view in these matters. And the Prime Minister is no longer John Howard. Or is he?

“The single most common question that we got asked when we there was, ‘UNHCR has found me to be a refugee. What am I still doing here?’,” recounts Taylor. “We would explain that you have to wait for a country to invite you, and that’s when they said ‘Oh.’ There’s a feeling that they’re going to be waiting a long time which is why they’re then getting on boats.”

Most of the people that Taylor met were very reluctant to risk their lives on a boat journey to Australia. But increasingly, says Taylor, as people fell victim to depression, anxiety and hopelessness their language became “quite dramatic”. “‘Look I can’t stay here,’ they’d say, ‘If I get to Australia and live that’s great, if I sink in the ocean and die that’s fine too.’”