All boat people seeking asylum in Australia are first brought here to Christmas Island, just 220 miles south of Indonesia but nearly 1,000 miles from the Australian mainland, and most are now held at enormous cost within the center’s electrified, 13-foot-high razor-wire fences.
But even as boats arrive every few days, advocates for refugees and even the government’s own human rights commission are urging the government to close the place down and sort the asylum-seekers on the mainland. They compare Christmas Island to Guantánamo Bay or describe it as a reincarnation of the many notorious prison islands in Australia’s convict history.
“They put this center way out here on this remote island, and then they built it way, way, way out on the island in the jungle,” said Charlene Thompson, a social worker who counsels asylum-seekers here. She equated the new center to Port Arthur, a 19th-century penal colony in Tasmania, Australia’s southernmost island. “It’s a jail, a high-security jail, and it feels like the asylum-seekers are being treated as criminals.”
The influx of boat people, which has swung elections in the past, has rattled the government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd a year before another election. Recently, Mr. Rudd, accused by the opposition of being soft on illegal immigration, personally asked Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to intercept a wooden cargo ship from Malaysia with 260 Sri Lankans bound for Australia.
If the Sri Lankans, now held in Indonesia, had been brought here, their numbers would probably have pushed the center beyond its capacity of 1,200. That, in turn, could have forced the government to start processing the boat people on the mainland.
“I make absolutely no apology whatsoever for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia,” said Mr. Rudd, who had initially won praise from refugee advocates for reversing some of the harshest anti-immigration measures of his predecessor, John Howard, including charging asylum seekers for their stay in government facilities.
Mr. Rudd has continued to send boat people here for processing. He has also retained his predecessor’s “excision” policy, under which asylum seekers on islands like this one are barred from the mainland’s refugee review system. At first reluctant to use the new center, the symbol of his predecessor’s policies, Mr. Rudd housed the boat people in an older facility here.
But a surge of asylum seekers late last year forced the authorities to start using the new center. Nearly 2,000 boat people have been sent to Christmas Island this year. Currently, their numbers are believed to match the island’s local population of 1,100.
The boat people constitute only about 10 percent of all asylum seekers to Australia, according to immigration officials, with most simply arriving by plane. What is more, the boat people are far more likely to be recognized as political refugees after their applications are reviewed over a period of three to four months here.
Nevertheless, the arrival of illegal boats filled with Asians evokes a primordial fear here, one that has been instilled over past decades of anti-Asian immigration policies and is still stoked by conservative politicians.
“There is considerable anxiety about people coming by boat and from the north,” said Bernadette McGrath, the director of Survivors of Torture and Trauma Assistance and Rehabilitation Service, who spent six months investigating the government’s treatment of refugees here. “It’s very deep in our psyche.”
So regardless of how close a boat may have gotten to the mainland, the Australian authorities first steer it to Christmas Island, linked to the mainland only by a four-hour flight to Perth, 1,650 miles to the southeast, that operates four times a week. A supply ship docks here every five or six weeks. Newspapers are delivered 10 days late. The Internet remains costly and slow.
Named by a British navigator who spotted it on Christmas Day in 1643, the island remained uninhabited until about a century ago, when phosphate was discovered. The British brought indentured workers from Asia to Christmas Island, which became part of Australia half a century ago. Until the 1980s, the island was racially stratified, with white Australian managers overseeing Asian workers barred from whites-only neighborhoods.
Boat people who were interviewed said they were surprised to find themselves on an island they had never heard of.
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