Hannah Arendt on refugees

The "asylum seeker" has become a contentious figure in contemporary Australia - to some, an embodiment of human need and a bearer of universal human rights; to others, a symbol of trespass and illegitimate demands. Inherent in the concept itself is an indeterminacy. Seekers of asylum are not yet assessed as falling under the category of "refugee". Notwithstanding their legal right to seek our protection, an aura of illegitimacy hovers over them. Though potentially satisfying criteria to be refugees, they are also potentially "economic migrants". Their unresolved status on arrival is a potent source of division.

It is worth being mindful here of some historical shifts in the relations between concepts of "refugee" and "asylum seeker". In 1943 the German-born philosopher Hannah Arendt published, in the Jewish journal Menohra, a heartfelt essay on the experience of being a refugee. In her times, she argued, the meaning of "refugee" had changed. Refugees used to be persons driven to seek refuge because of their acts or political opinions. Now, however, they had become "those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by Refugee Committees." Arendt argued that contemporary history had produced a conceptual shift, though nobody wanted to know. She and her fellow German Jewish exiles, she caustically observed, represented not only a new kind of refugee but a new kind of human beings: "the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends."

Arendt's essay focuses on the anomalies and the ironies of the situation of Jewish refugees in WWII Europe. Central to their predicament was a dilemma of assimilation. The new arrivals were regarded in their host countries not only as "prospective citizens" but also as present "enemy aliens". The refugees, not surprisingly, had their own ambivalence about their new status: "If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded."

The situation of boat people now attempting to reach Australia is in many ways very different from that confronting Arendt and her fellow refugees. The presence of groups of citizens - and potential citizens - who maintain continuity with identities acquired elsewhere has long been accepted in Australian immigration policies, and largely welcomed in Australian communities. We now talk in terms not of "assimilation" but rather of "integration" - in ways that are meant to acknowledge, and indeed celebrate, cultural differences. Yet the arrival of "uninvited" others is still a fraught issue - polarising political rhetoric and dividing our communities. For us now, it is not so much the figure of the "refugee" that is the focus of unease; it is that of the "asylum seeker" who reaches our territorial waters without prior authorisation.

What is it that is so unnerving for contemporary Australians in the idea of the "asylum seeker"? In some respects, the development was anticipated in a discussion of Arendt's essay by the Italian philosopher Gorgio Agamben in 1995. Agamben drew on Arendt's essay - and on her discussion of refugees in her first book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) - to argue that the condition of modern refugees has brought conceptual shifts in the understanding of citizenship and of statehood. At the heart of the issue are the shifts of attention demanded between consideration of individual refugee cases and the modern phenomenon of mass movements of people. Arendt herself had commented on this in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She suggested there that difficulties arose for eighteenth century ideas of the "inalienable rights of Man" once it appeared that new categories of persecution were "far too numerous to be handled by an unofficial practice designed for exceptional situations". The paradox, on Agamben's later analysis, is that, after solemn invocations of human rights in the aftermath of WWII, the figure that should have embodied those rights par excellence - the refugee - brought instead a radical conceptual crisis. Talk of "inalienable rights" appealed to the supposed existence of "a human being as such". The idea of "refugee" thus became a "border concept" - unattached to any specific identity. It evoked "a permanently resident mass of non-citizens."

Neither Arendt's analysis nor that of Agamben really fits the complexities of contemporary Australian concerns about asylum seeker policies. Yet some of their preoccupations do resonate in those divisive debates. The contemporary figure of the asylum seeker elicits varying responses along the faultlines of different ways of construing "rights" and "obligations". If we think of rights in terms of bounded sets of interests, associated with citizenship of a particular state, the asylum seeker represents intrusion and exploitation. If we think rather in terms of "universal" human rights and obligations, the figure of the asylum seeker will take on different lineaments - as the bearer of rights that accrue simply by being human; and as the focus of obligations that arise simply in response to the palpable needs of other human beings. These are not necessarily inconsistent ways of thinking; they can co-exist. Yet they answer to different historical layers of our understanding of ourselves and of our place in the world; and they can jar with one another. John Howards' mantra "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come" still resonates in the national consciousness. It can be heard differently by different sides in debate on asylum seeker policy - either as a statement of the obvious, or as a disturbing denial of human rights and international obligations. "We can't take everyone" can readily become a spurious justification for not taking anyone.

There are three things at play in current disagreements about boat arrivals, which do not always sit easily together: the indeterminacy of the concept "asylum seeker"; shifts between thinking of individual cases for asylum and the confrontation with mass movements of people; and the nexus between asylum seeking and paths to citizenship. Collectively, we are no longer afraid of immigrants. Nor, by and large, are we afraid of refugees - provided they come with prior approval, as invited recipients of our generosity. Yet boat arrivals still disturb and frighten us - and not just through an altruistic concern about the dangers of the journey. They remind us of older fears and resentments of raw difference - of the unassimilated, unintegrated "other" - which were common in earlier attitudes to immigration.

Transitions from "asylum seeker" to "refugee", and from that to "citizen", are one source of frustration with boat arrivals. "Non-refoulement" of asylum seekers recognised as refugees is a requirement of our Convention obligations; permanent resettlement is not. Against the background of the history of Australian attitudes to immigration, it is widely accepted that taking that further step is good policy: it avoids the presence of an unassimilated, unintegrated mass of people. Ironically, however, current policies designed to deter boat arrivals risk producing exactly that situation. The bewildering "no advantage principle" demands the prolonged presence in our midst of people without work rights or any assured path to permanent protection or citizenship.

The figure of the asylum seeker thus morphs in our times into that of the unassimilated "other" - here only by virtue of the grudgingly accepted bare fact of their humanity. In our eagerness to deter the indeterminate "asylum seeker", have we created our own new shift in the concept of "refugee", producing a new kind of faceless human being?