A leaked report earlier this year shed light on where the Australian Government’s migration policy is headed and despite being dismissed at the time, subsequent actions should be sounding the alarm, Marianne Dickie writes.
The draft report was an assessment of the radicalisation of humanitarian entrants in the migration program. It focused on migrants who came to Australia as refugees, their relatives, and their partners who migrate to join them. It singled out Sunni Lebanese migrants who arrived in Australia between 1975 and 1990, as well as their extended families, and Australian-born descendants as a cohort that has ‘significantly influenced Australia’s extremism landscape’.
To be fair, the report was very clear that resettlement is the key to preventing radicalisation and it also notes that resettlement processes in place during the period mentioned were very poor, thereby drawing a causal link between the two. The report also commented on long-term data analysis, like that done by the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), which demonstrates that Australia has a good record of migrant integration.
