 I'm Salvatore Babona, and today's lecture is the Syrian refugee crisis, lessons and comparisons. For 15 years, the issue of irregular migration by sea has been a dominant theme in Australian politics, despite relatively small numbers of boat arrivals by European standards. Through aggressive interception and, frankly, extreme repression, Australia has quote-unquote stopped the boats from reaching Australia, though it has not stopped them from leaving Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Is Australia's model a successful example to be followed, or is it impractical for problems on a world scale like those being experienced in the Middle East today? And is the Australian solution morally acceptable, either for Europe or even for Australia? Australia consistently attracts irregular migrants by sea who come seeking asylum from conflicts in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. These sea arrivals to Australia reached a maximum of over 20,000 in 2013 and were a major factor in the 2013 election that resulted in the change in government from the Labour Party to the Liberal National Coalition. The Liberal National Coalition that came in under Tony Abbott in 2013 had a renewed pledge to stop the boats, but that's hardly new since every Australian government since 2001 has pledged to stop the boats with a succession of ever more draconian measures. John Howard, the Liberal Prime Minister in the early 2000s, came up with the Pacific solution. Asylum seekers were redirected to camps on Christmas Island, Manus Island, and Nauru, there was indefinite detention for unsuccessful refugee claimants, meaning that if people arrived seeking refugee status and their cases were turned down, they simply would stay in detention on a remote desert island until they eventually relented and agreed to go back to their home countries no matter what the risks involved. Obscure legal practices hidden from public scrutiny characterize the Pacific solution. The Australian government keeps a very closed hand, keeping camps closed to press scrutiny, closed even to court scrutiny, attempting as much as possible to keep the dirty laundry out of sight on these remote locations. Beginning in 2013, Australia's actions became even more extreme by international standards, with boats being simply turned back to Indonesia. There are press accounts and anecdotal accounts of asylum seekers being loaded onto rescue rafts pointed towards Indonesia and just let go, and their original boats being sunk by the Australian Navy. It's difficult to know what actually happened because of the extreme secrecy surrounding these interceptions. The government doesn't give any information on them, not even the number. It routinely refuses even to confirm or deny the existence of these operations. Meanwhile, of course, the press are completely excluded, with the exception of a small number of courageous investigative journalists who join the boats in Indonesia. It's risking their own lives to see what's happening when they arrive in Australia, or don't arrive in Australia, as the case may be. Australia accepts just 13,750 refugees a year through regular channels, that means through actual applications where a person has the opportunity to apply at an Australian embassy or consulate for a humanitarian visa to come to Australia. An additional 12,000 have been pledged for 2015-2016 to accommodate refugees from the Syrian Civil War. Obviously, these numbers are very small, not just in absolute terms, but also for a country of Australia's size of 24 million people. Australia is six times the size of a country like Lebanon, which has taken in some 1.5 million refugees. If the EU wants to follow the Australian example, and this has routinely appeared as a suggestion in the press and in opinion columns in the European Union, this would require cooperation from origin countries. Australian pushbacks are only possible because the Indonesian authorities allow it. If Indonesia similarly were to push people back towards Australia, there would be serious consequences. The origin countries in this case are mostly in the Central Mediterranean, Libya and Tunisia, especially Libya because of its ongoing civil war, and in the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey with the connection to Greece. There's a much smaller flow from Morocco and Algeria to Spain. It's much smaller because Morocco and Algeria are both very aggressive in law enforcement to prevent boats from leaving their countries, so people smuggling and boat departures are severely restricted in Morocco and Algeria by strong national governments that in order to remain on good terms with the European Union, cooperate with the European Union by preventing people smuggling out of their countries. So the two main routes are the Central and the Eastern Mediterranean routes. The main route for arrivals right now and in late 2015 and early 2016 has been the Greek or Eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey. As a result in March 2016, the European Union signed a series of agreements with Turkey to cooperate in ending irregular migration. The basic deal is that the European Union will resettle 72,000 Syrian refugees a year directly from Turkish refugee camps to asylum in Europe. In exchange, Turkey will take back an equivalent number of irregular migrants who have arrived by sea and been denied asylum in the European Union. This is supposed to be a one-for-one trade for every person that Turkey takes back from the European Union. The European Union will resettle one refugee from Turkey. The trick here is that people have to voluntarily agree to be returned to Turkey. Now this implies that in all likelihood the people going back to Turkey will be people who wanted of their own accord to go back anyway. In other words, this is not going to be an absolute reduction or return of asylum seekers. This is going to be the natural flow that inevitably in a population of a million asylum seekers a year somebody will have reason to want to go back to their families in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iran and that small number of people will voluntarily go back at European Union expense. This does not sound like a rational basis for discouraging people from coming to Europe in the first place. Also, the fact that this plan is limited to 72,000 people per year seems to invalidate the whole process since Europe is receiving about 100,000 refugees per month from Turkey via boat arrivals. So the plan itself does not seem very realistic. Now there are some accusations that European Union coast guards have been pushing boats back into Turkish waters in the same way that Australia pushes boats back to Indonesia and Sri Lanka, but very little evidence of this. There's much more evidence that the European Union coast guards are providing assistance for refugees and helping them in. There doesn't seem to be much appetite among security forces in the European Union to be involved in this sort of pushback operations that the Australian Navy is doing in the Pacific. There is the possibility that the Turkish coast guard will become responsible for pulling back boats. We know much less about that. Turkey is a relatively authoritarian state that has a tight control on the media and on reporting in general. So we'll have to see whether or not Turkey takes action on its side to prevent people leaving. There seems to be little motivation for it to do so other than European Union aid. Now the European Union has pledged to spend for about four billion dollars, about three billion euros, to help Turkey feed, house, and school Syrian refugees already in Turkey. European Union has also pledged in the long run to allow visa-free travel in Europe to Turkish citizens. Both of these pledges are conditional on, quote-unquote, good Turkish behavior in executing these deals and upholding refugees' human rights. So it's very questionable, given the character of the regime in Turkey, whether or not this whether or not Turkey will actually receive the European aid it's been promised, and if Turkey doesn't get the aid, Turkey is very unlikely to cooperate in preventing both departures in the way that Algeria and Morocco have done. In addition, there is a nascent civil war or at least civil conflict restarting in Turkey between Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants in the east of Turkey. It seems very likely that in addition to Syrian refugees fleeing Turkey, we might see an additional wave of Kurdish refugees fleeing Turkey for Europe, and if in fact the European Union gives visa-free travel to Turkish citizens, these Kurdish minority citizens of Turkey might become yet another wave of refugees coming from Turkey to Europe. So watch this space on the EU-Turkish agreement. It is possible, but in my view, very unlikely that it will be successful in stemming the flow of refugees from Turkey to Europe. If the Turkish route is closed into Greece, one problem is that migration won't stop, migration will simply move to the much more dangerous central Mediterranean route from Libya and Tunisia into Lampedusa, Malta and Sicily. These maritime crossings in the central Mediterranean are much more dangerous because they involve much longer stretches of open ocean and the oceans are much rougher than the oceans or the seas separating the Greek islands from the Turkish mainland. So even if the negotiations with Turkey are successful, it seems unlikely that Europe will be able to stop these migration flows. They'll simply shift to another route, another and more dangerous route. With this route, there is no mechanism for Europe to prevent departures from Libya because Libya is a country at civil war with no functioning government. Pushbacks or returns to Libya would involve returning refugees to the country in the middle of a civil war which would seem completely unacceptable in anybody's moral dictionary. There's no governing authority in Libya with the authority to accept pushbacks. There's no one to negotiate with, only a series of local warlords governing individual cities along the Libyan coast. Besides the number of people involved, 100,000 people per month for Europe compared to an absolute high of 2,000 per month for Australia really seem to make these solutions unrealistic for Europe. So the key takeaways are that first, Australia's Pacific solution and Operation Sovereign Borders have been quote unquote successful on their own terms. If the goal is to prevent people from settling in Australia no matter what the cost, these operations have succeeded in doing that. Of course those terms are very narrow. The Pacific solution and Operation Sovereign Borders have not stopped people from risking sea crossings. They've not prevented thousands of people from languishing in detention centers. They have not prevented the cost to the Australian government, the massive cost of maintaining these offshore centers and this constant naval presence at sea. Second, the EU-Turkey Agreement plans for the voluntary repatriation of up to 72,000 migrants per year, but the voluntary nature suggests that the people going back will simply be people wanting simply put a free trip home, not people who are actual refugees fleeing danger. It seems very unlikely that refugees whose lives are threatened at home will voluntarily return with no incentive or reward. Finally, Europe will almost certainly be forced to accommodate refugees rather than push them back on the Australian model. Even if European governments in the European Union decided that the Australian model was morally acceptable, in the European context it probably is simply impractical. The rich countries of Europe will simply have to accept that they have to participate in this global social problem of resettling people seeking refuge from wars on their borders. Thank you for watching this lecture. You can find out more about me at SalvaturbaBonus.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs.