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AUSTRALIA

Mexican border reflections on Australian asylum seeker policy

  • 15 August 2014

I have been here in the USA for the last month. I am presently spending the week down on the Mexican border at the Kino Border Initiative, which is a Jesuit sponsored cross border project at Nogales. The Jesuit community members sleep on the Arizona side of the border and walk across the border to Sonora each day for work. 

At the comedor (soup kitchen), new deportees from the USA and those coming through Mexico trying to run the gauntlet back into the USA can come for two meals a day. Kino workers document human rights violations. Other NGOs such as the Samaritans and No Mas Muertes (no more deaths) come and provide practical assistance, including a telephone service so those on the run can check in with family and friends back home or across the border. 

The Samaritans include many Arizona residents well used to encountering migrants without visas making their way across the desert on foot. The Samaritans provide food and water, and even Vaseline for the feet of the weary. Their T shirts proclaim 'Humanitarian assistance is not a crime'. Many of them are heading to DC at the end of the month for civil disobedience outside the White House protesting US immigration policies. 

Each day at Kino, Mexican nuns provide spiritual consolation, inviting world weary people in flight to play the sorts of games we all played in primary school, doing contortions with our hands and designs with pieces of paper. 

On Sunday, Fr Sean Carroll SJ, the executive director of Kino, celebrates mass (pictured). Those on the run freely share their heart rending stories. The whole ethos of the place is to provide a humanitarian space for people in desperate circumstances. No matter what walls are built, no matter what draconian push back policies are adopted, there is no way the USA can seal this border. The Congress is deadlocked. Obama has been labelled the 'Deporter in Chief'. Still the people come.

We Australians confront none of the complexities of sharing a land border with a poor neighbour  many of whose family members are citizens of our country. Most Americans, I find, think that Australia has little to worry about when it comes to securing borders. There are three recent Australian developments which Americans generally seem to find morally repulsive and just stupid. They either cannot believe or understand that we routinely lock up children in immigration detention facilities; that
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