how come "economic" doesn't count as a legitimate variety of refugee?

just in case you missed it rudd has announced a radical new scheme for dealing with refugees coming to australia by boat. long story short if he has his way then those arriving by boats will never ever have the change to live down under, and rather will -at best- have the opportunity to become proud PNG citizens.

from a political perspective it isint hard to understand the rationale behind it: by stepping to the right of even abbott, rudd has effectively taken the winds out of the liberal party sails

i feel this cartoon from a newspaper sums it up pretty well:

and dont get me started on what he's done to the beloved carbon tax

rather than resist the hysterical media rudd has embraced their xenophobic worldview, knowing very well that he likely wont lose any votes to abbott because most right-minded voters would never vote for the liberals under abbott in a million billion years no matter how much they might despise him.

judging from what ive seen on my facebook and twitter this announcement has split people right down the middle. ive seen the new policy attacked as "sick and inhumane" and heard the lamentations of the gillard supporters, but ive also heard the decision energetically defended by a spectrum of different people

personally i'm pretty negative about the new rules for refugees arriving here:

i feel it's a cop out on our international obligation as one of the (supposedly) most advanced, well-off and humanitarian-minded nations to assist the desperate.
it provides another neat reminder to the rest of the world that australians are more xenophobic and ignorant with each passing year,
it shifts the national dialogue on the issue even further to the right, perhaps forevermore,
and it seems like a REAL dick move to proudly wage illegal war alongside the hegemon for a decade+ and then denounce refugees originating from those same nations and regions as opportunist boat people.

however, those who support the new decision (and there are many, at least for now) do have some credible points to make. if the policy slows or halts all the deaths at sea we've seen recently it will at least have accomplished some limited good, just as if it ends up driving more people to vote green as they abandon labor.

here is one of the more eloquent defenses i've come across (ripped, for convenience' sake, directly from facebook)  

It's more than obvious that this method of seeking asylum has been hijacked by a criminal business model that needs to be broken, and that the passage by boat should be discouraged absolutely because of the danger associated.

That model also convolutes the "genuine" nature of asylum, by accommodating economic refugees, which only blurs the lines further and disadvantages those who've been waiting in UNHCR refugee camps waiting for migration, hence the queue jumper jargon thrown around.

UNHCR refugees arrive vetted and ready for integration, orderly migration is where the focus should be, and I think CAN be if we curb the issue of boat arrivals and remove the possibility for economic refugees or people smugglers detracting from legitimate humanitarian concerns.

I don't really see this as punishment - this is removing the false hope that people smugglers offer, years of uncertain detention in Nauru, Christmas Island and our other detention centers is the reality of what they offer, that or a watery grave.

one aspect of the above argument i have a particular gripe with; the idea that economic refugees are both "non-genuine" and are not justified in seeking to get to australia.

"economic refugee" is a strange term if you think about it. it seems to refer to someone who is fleeing their native land not because he/her fears for the safety of themselves and their loved ones but because they are pessimistic about the long-term prospects in their own county and desire a better life.

according to conventional reasoning someone fearing for their life is a victim and must be assisted, but someone fearing for their quality of life is an "economic refugee" and does not deserve assistance. by differentiating between "economic" and "genuine" refugees we are explicitly rejecting the idea that human beings should have the same right to movement between borders as capital does, or that people born in a developing country have the right to pursue a first-world standard of living for themselves

if a multinational company relocates its factories to a third-world nation to save money on regulations and labor then that's a good thing, it is commonly held. the company can produce items cheaper and the locals get the chance to earn something like a dollar a day.

but if an individual from a third-world country relocates at great risk and expense to the developed world for a chance to earn far, far more money than he ever could have at home; that's a bad thing. that man is stealing first-world jobs, why, he's an economic refugee! exactly the type of hard-working entrepreneur we don't want in our society that supposedly values hard work and entrepreneurship. imagine the nerve, trying to come to this country for a better life.

the reason we can't allow economic refugees to count as legitimate refugees is because without billions of people essentially trapped in the region of their birth (and desperate for money) we simply couldn't maintain the system of global exploitation on which we currently rely

now this is not to suggest that those fleeing terrible economic prospects are in quite as desperate need as those fleeing war or that they should be given priority over them, but i do think it's a little rich to punish someone for not being happy with working for a subsistence wage in awful living conditions their whole life.

the fact that any sum of money, however large, may be moved and used all over the world while the global poor don't share the same right to free movement, is immoral. in such a world national borders serve as little more than barriers between zones where the price of labor differs.

i mean what would you do if you were born on the wrong side of the world, (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWSxzjyMNpU ) would you stay in your country of birth and meekly accept your wage-slave fate?

somebody fleeing the ravages of a globally entrenched system that denies them a chance at a decent life while enriching the already well-off qualifies as someone genuinely deserving of help to me

it would be impossible for australia to accommodate the entirety of the world's poor, obviously. i offer no solution whatsoever to the dilemma of desperate people risking their lives to travel to australia. if we were to suddenly offer succor to the needy without reservation i can envision a situation in which there are many more deaths at sea.

i only wish to make the point that the vilification of economic refugees as somehow lacking a "genuine" reason to risk their lives on a dangerous boat ride doesn't make sense. it is entirely rational, as i see it, for someone from the global south to try and get to australia.