During the brief storm caused by Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Scott Morrison's remarks on the recent asylum seeker funerals, another senior Liberal praised his compassion, claiming he was deeply affected by the sufferings people smugglers had caused asylum seekers.
I am delighted to accept this testimony to Morrison's compassion for asylum seekers. But, even if this compassion is sincere, the implicit argument that asylum seekers merit sympathy because they are the passive victims of people smugglers is pernicious.
It is usually put in this form. Credulous asylum seekers are lured by avaricious people smugglers to travel on unsafe boats to Australian territory. Fellow-feeling with asylum seekers demands that this risk to life and health must therefore be stopped by preventing and penalising travel by boat.
This argument assumes that death at sea in an unsafe boat is the greatest peril that asylum seekers have to fear, that they are the passive and deluded victims of people smugglers, and that their lives will benefit if people smugglers are neutered. None of these assumptions is true.
Asylum seekers walk with death as their shadow. Persecution in your homeland and surrounding nations means living among people who will rejoice in your death, others who will not lift a finger to keep you or your family alive, and a society in which your humanity is valued less than animals.
If you pray with a group of asylum seekers, they will ask you to remember their dead relatives and friends and those who risk death along the way.
The story of asylum seekers has always been of fortunate and determined survivors and the unknown dead. Many Jews died trying to leave Germany. Some estimate that more than a third of the hundreds of thousands who fled from Vietnam after 1975 were killed by pirates or sank while at sea. Many Cambodians died in minefields or where shot by paramilitary when escaping into Thailand.
Villagers from El Salvador, harried by their armed forces and hunted out of their homes, died at the guns trained on them from both sides of the Rio Lempa. And yet they all continued to flee.
Asylum seekers have also always needed help to make their journey to safety. Even Joseph and Mary are often depicted with a young guide as they flee into Egypt. Many Jewish asylum seekers were given shelter and helped to cross borders by ordinary families and by religious communities.
Our people smugglers may be