CASTING OUT THE DISABLED AND ILL IMMIGRANT: THE LEGACIES OF AUSTRALIA'S IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION ACT ON 1901

Collectively, immigration policies function to perform national sovereignty by reinforcing the division between citizen and migrant, usually conflated with ‘native’ and ‘outsider.’ While the work of preserving sovereignty is an exclusionary act, in certain contexts it rests on particularly totalitarian governance practices. Such practices have their roots in longstanding racial and social hierarchies whose legacies continue to haunt the immigration policies of even liberal nation-states today. In Australia, for instance, immigration policies for several decades have excluded disabled and ill migrants by rendering them as biologically inferior and as economic burdens. I do not suggest here that Australia is a totalitarian state or that its approach to immigration fits neatly into a totalitarian framework. Rather, I posit that Australia’s approach to managing the entry of disabled and ill migrants into the nation-state contains the ingredients for totalitarian tendencies and should be subject to close examination.

 

Australian policies toward disabled and chronically ill migrants have resonances with pre-World War II Europe. As political theorist Hannah Arendt has argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973), the refusal to accept minorities reflected how emerging totalitarian regimes privileged nativism and national identity over human rights and legal protections. Excluding physically and mentally ill minority populations—many of whom had already been cast out as racialized others—was a key way European states cemented the idea that fulfilling physiological and biological ‘norms’ was a premise of one’s capacity to assimilate. This mode of exclusion was taken to its logical extreme during the Nazi regime’s establishment of German Eugenics science, which introduced ideas of racial and physiological purity in order to cultivate a genetically fit society. In this racialized utopia, the differently abled and the chronically ill were represented as inherently ‘degenerate’, less evolved beings, and an economic and cultural burden ‘to the greater German ‘Aryan’ race.” 

 

While it is important not to create a false equivalence between pre-World War II Europe and Australia, there are analogous ideas at play that render differently abled and ill migrants as apriori threats to the nation—both its present and its future. Australia’s immigration policies make it virtually impossible for immigrants with a disability or illness to receive visas. Section 60 of the currently active Migration Act of 1958 states that applicants must demonstrate they will not pose a significant cost to the community or prevent Australian citizens and permanent residents from accessing healthcare or community services regardless of whether or not they would use such services (Section c(ii), Section 60, Migration Act of 1958). Thus, baked into entry requirements is the assumption that disabled immigrants always already pose a threat to citizens’ health and wellbeing—that the entry of the ‘other’ takes something away from the able-bodied citizen. This cost threshold is calculated through the state’s “hypothetical person test.” This test consists of the individual applicant’s projected healthcare costs over the course of their life span, based on standard metrics predetermined for different disabilities and health conditions. According to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection website, the following diseases or conditions could result in significant costs and result in an application rejection, based on the number of projected medical tests, doctors’ visits, pharmaceutical drugs and other adaptive and rehabilitative technologies the patient would require: intellectual impairment; HIV infection; functional impairment; renal disease or failure; and cancer. People with other diseases such as Tuberculosis are rendered ineligible for a visa until they can prove they have received treatment. Those who do have HIV and who plan to work as a doctor, dentist, nurse, or paramedic are also considered potential risks to public health. 

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"Baked into entry requirements is the assumption that the entry of the ‘other’ takes something away from the able-bodied citizen."

 

In 2012, Australia introduced another element to its policy toward disabled immigrants. Immigration Minister Chris Bowen announced that under a new “net benefit” approach, the benefits that disabled migrants and their families brought to Australia would now be considered against the cost of their healthcare. An example of the fallout of this test is when Angelo Fonseka, a Sri Lankan man who was given a temporary work visa in Australia appealed to the Australian federal government to grant his 9-year old daughter, Eliza, who had Down Syndrome, a chance at legal entry into Australia. Angelo Fonseka was a Christian missionary working in Western Australia with the Shark Bay Christian Fellowship. His application for permanent residence for his family was rejected because of Eliza’s Down Syndrome, leaving his wife Shanoline and Eliza back in Sri Lanka (Holland 2015). Part of the government’s initial decision to deny her entry was based on the failure to meet the new “net benefit” policy. In this case, and in many other documented cases, disabled migrants are represented as potential leeches on Australia’s social welfare system. Here, containing invasive peoples means containing what will inevitably be parasitic behavior.