Reflection On Asylum Seeker

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My personal experience I will be detailing is my participation in a demonstration during Refugee Week in 2015. My experience will be reflected on through drawing similarities and differences between it and two of the readings. These readings are Tazreiter’s journal article, ‘The unlucky in the ‘lucky country’: asylum seekers, irregular migrants and refugees and Australia’s politics of disappearance’, and Ziegler’s media article ‘Refugees Have a Right to an Opinion That Counts Politically’. Through the connection of my experience to Tazreiter’s article, it is argued that demonstrations supporting asylum seekers proves that the Australian population supports their resettling; which is contradictory to the Australian Government’s increasingly …show more content…
Under the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) and the enforcement of ‘third country processing’ in 2012, Asylum seekers without a visa who arrive by boat are denied asylum and sent back to Indonesia, or detained indefinitely on Manus and Nauru whist their claim for asylum is being processed (Tazreiter 2017, p. 247). In these offshore processing centres, asylum seekers are denied access to necessities and services such as healthcare and young refugees are subject to attacks by local children (Amnesty International 2016). According to Tazreiter, asylum seekers who arrive by boat are “demonised” by this policy, referred to by the Australian Government as ‘boat people’ (Tazreiter 2017, p. 247). Tazreiter’s view has been supported and shared by the Australian public actively partaking in asylum seeker demonstrations. In fact, many large demonstrations have occurred in Australia which involve many states. An example of these demonstrations are regular candle vigils in capital cities and regional towns (Rural Australians for Refugees, n.d.). The objective of these vigils is to show unified support for asylum seekers, pressure the Australian Government to halt offshore processing and to increase Australia’s resettlement of asylum seekers (Rural Australians for Refugees, n.d.) Although the demonstration I participated in was not nationwide and only involved students, its educational impact cannot be