Bodies ‘locked up’: intersections of disability and race in Australian immigration

Abstract

Between 2005 and 2006 it came to be known that over 200 people had been wrongfully detained in Australian immigration detention centres, of whom 13 were people with a disability. A review of the subsequent Commonwealth Ombudsman Reports into the wrongful detentions exposed an organizational culture in which othered voices were discredited and disregarded, an over‐willingness to detain a person and a lack of proper oversight of these powers. This paper explores these reports and argues that proper investigation needs to go beyond organizational culture and to look also at historical, social, political and cultural forces shaping Australia’s use of immigration detention. The authors propose that the intersection of disability and race leaves people vulnerable to human rights violations primarily because this is also the intersection of both racial and rational prejudices of the dominant hegemony.

Keywords:

• disability
• race
• immigration
• Australia

Notes

1. The Australian Immigration Department has undergone several name changes during the period of time that this paper addresses. For ease of reading the authors use the generic ‘Immigration Department’ or ‘Department of Immigration’ throughout the paper. It appears in direct quotes from reports as DIMA (Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs), DIMIA (Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs) and DIAC (Department of Immigration and Citizenship), its current name.

2. Sadly, there are several high profile cases of families being offered visas for all able bodied family members but with a disabled child being refused entry. One such case is that of the Kayani family, which culminated in Mr Kayani committing suicide through self‐immolation outside Parliament House in Canberra in protest at his forced separation from his daughter who had cerebral palsy (for more on this see Jakubowicz and Meekosha 2002). The second area where this policy has a major impact is in the area of refugee resettlement. The guiding principle is that resettling countries offer protection to those most vulnerable. However, Australia excludes prospective refugees with disabilities from consideration for resettlement, although it is likely that a disability would increase their vulnerability in a temporary country or refugee camp.