Growing up behind bars - Malaysia edition
July 22, 2023 2:27 AM Subscribe
New Naratif's two-part deep investigation into children in immigration detention centers and the long struggle to get them free brings hard stats together with the voices of trapped children in Malaysia's hidden camps.
Singapore manages to avoid this by flat out refusing any refugees ever, so here Malaysia is actually IMO doing better for at least having a system.
Ultimately it's all just race politics in action. Officially Malaysia's stance is not different to Singapore's, neither signed up to the Refugee Convention or Protocol.
The majority of the 180,000 refugees today in Malaysia are from Myanmar, most of them Muslim minorities. It would be politically untenable to refuse them at the border or to deport them.
On the other hand, when Vietnamese refugees fled the war, Malaysia refused them entry to the mainland and instead crammed them all into Pulau Bidong. It would have been politically untenable to let them into the mainland. In the end all 250,000 of them were sent to other countries or deported back to Vietnam.
If Malaysian Chinese were subject to persecution or genocide, I'm somewhat certain Singapore would consider them kin and accept them as refugees.
The upheaval in the past few decades is causing a global recalibration of opinion of what the US, Canada and Australia are been doing in regards to refugees. I believe the original intention was that being a refugee was a temporary state - fleeing natural disaster or conflict, and they would return within a few months, so the Convention compels signatories to house them temporarily. But the reality is that today, conflicts are increasingly intractable, and most refugees will never return to their country of origin. Which means that even the Refugee Convention isn't sufficient, because it still leaves refugees in a state of limbo for potentially the rest of their lives.
These three countries are mostly focused on refugee resettlement, which basically makes refugees into permanent residents who have full rights similar to citizens and therefore no longer classed as a refugee on the books. Over the past 10 years, about 1.1 million refugees were settled worldwide, about 580k to US, 200k to Canada, 120k to Australia. In total Australia has resettled a total of 1 million refugees into a population of 25 million people.
I believe resettlement is the only durable solution because it erases the refugee label. Three of the families in my immediate street fled the war and persecution in the Middle East and sought asylum, but they're not called refugees, they're called Australians.
posted by xdvesper at 7:21 PM on July 24, 2023 [2 favorites]
Ultimately it's all just race politics in action. Officially Malaysia's stance is not different to Singapore's, neither signed up to the Refugee Convention or Protocol.
The majority of the 180,000 refugees today in Malaysia are from Myanmar, most of them Muslim minorities. It would be politically untenable to refuse them at the border or to deport them.
On the other hand, when Vietnamese refugees fled the war, Malaysia refused them entry to the mainland and instead crammed them all into Pulau Bidong. It would have been politically untenable to let them into the mainland. In the end all 250,000 of them were sent to other countries or deported back to Vietnam.
If Malaysian Chinese were subject to persecution or genocide, I'm somewhat certain Singapore would consider them kin and accept them as refugees.
The upheaval in the past few decades is causing a global recalibration of opinion of what the US, Canada and Australia are been doing in regards to refugees. I believe the original intention was that being a refugee was a temporary state - fleeing natural disaster or conflict, and they would return within a few months, so the Convention compels signatories to house them temporarily. But the reality is that today, conflicts are increasingly intractable, and most refugees will never return to their country of origin. Which means that even the Refugee Convention isn't sufficient, because it still leaves refugees in a state of limbo for potentially the rest of their lives.
These three countries are mostly focused on refugee resettlement, which basically makes refugees into permanent residents who have full rights similar to citizens and therefore no longer classed as a refugee on the books. Over the past 10 years, about 1.1 million refugees were settled worldwide, about 580k to US, 200k to Canada, 120k to Australia. In total Australia has resettled a total of 1 million refugees into a population of 25 million people.
I believe resettlement is the only durable solution because it erases the refugee label. Three of the families in my immediate street fled the war and persecution in the Middle East and sought asylum, but they're not called refugees, they're called Australians.
posted by xdvesper at 7:21 PM on July 24, 2023 [2 favorites]
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posted by dorothyisunderwood at 2:29 AM on July 22, 2023 [2 favorites]