(From The Conversation 3 July 2013)
As prime minister Kevin Rudd prepares to visit Indonesiaand meet with his Indonesian counterpart Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, he should bear in mind that the asylum seeker problem plaguing the Australian government is a direct consequence of our “prohibition regime”.

Just as the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s generated crime, corruption and a decline in the authority of government, the current asylum seeker policies of both the Australian government and the federal opposition directly fuel the problem they claim to address.

Australian society is suffering major collateral damage, reminiscent of the American prohibition. The government is currently developing long-term problems for Australia’s future generations. The solutions, however, are not dissimilar, with the consequences identifiable and ultimately more manageable and benign.

Globally, people smuggling is a massive part of the “black economy”. The monetisation of cross-border people movement is now significantly institutionalised through links between organised crime, international money transfers and worried states criminalising cross-border people movement.

Foreign minister Bob Carr has been at pains to argue since the fall of Julia Gillard that the spike and monetisation of asylum seeking is accelerated by cashed-up, middle class Iranians. They are fleeing the economic disaster of Iran caused by international sanctions – Australian included – against the Iranian government’s nuclear development policy.

Carr believes the overwhelming majority of these asylum seekers, including Tamils from Sri Lanka, do not meet the spirit of the UN’s Refugee Convention as “economic refugees”. Their role in the refugee flow has therefore seriously corrupted the system.

On current figures, it is estimated that as much as A$400 million has flowed into the Indonesian and Malaysian economies from asylum seeker payments to local smugglers during Labor’s six years in office.

This cash also subsidises the low salaries of regional officials, police and army personnel, as well as providing employment for shipwrights and sailors. So turning off the flow without an alternative source of income may simply deepen the strategies used by the crime networks to avoid detection.

The UNHCR has argued recently that Australia needs to ask Indonesia what it wants to do to manage the asylum seekers crisis. Current policies and practices will produce many adverse outcomes. Primarily, it is furthering corruption in theIndonesian and Malaysian law enforcement system. Domestically, it will rapidly increase Australian investment in a prohibition regime, which flows in great part to private multinational security firms such as Serco.

There are a number of other social, economic and health concerns that result from trying to put a permanent stop to people smuggling. Collateral damage to asylum seekers through rising death tolls will increase, posing increased challenges to the law of the sea, and the safety of navy and border protection personnel.

The creation of an incarceration network also has an 80% likelihood of causing significant mental health damage to detainees. Such damage would include long term social and behavioural consequences. Australians can already witness the impoverishment of thousands of vulnerable detainees in the community, with social costs for their support, and a wastage of a large potential labour resource. More widely we are seeing a brutalisation of political discussion, and toughness replacing compassion as a moral polestar.

If Australia wants to remedy these concerns, policy responses should emphasise social cohesion. To achieve this, there are several steps that need to be taken. Australia first needs to ask Indonesia and Malaysia how they see the problem and how they would like to see it progress, so that Australia can be part of a solution to rather than part of the problem. Indonesia and Malaysia need to be on-side and see the outcome as a potential win-win.

Recognising the internal pressures, Australia should agree to requests from Indonesia to identify the 6000 or so UNHCR approved refugees waiting for resettlement and facilitate their movement to Australia (or to an agreed third country).

With that reduction in the refugee load, Australia should also work with Indonesia to implement regional development strategies to replace people smuggling networks that both benefit and corrupt local power elites. This may be in the“opium poppy” model which would provide alternative income opportunities for people smugglers, as has occurred with opium growers in northern Thailand.

A policy of “stopping the boats” means asylum seekers finding an alternative before embarking on the potentially deadly sea journey, and one that stands scrutiny for its robustness, humanity and intelligence. Australia should create a new category of “applying for refugee status” visa, available at points along the supply route from the point of first sanctuary, through Australian or other friendly governments and the UNHCR.

Applicants would need to show verifiable proof of identity; an indication of what convention or protection category applied to them; their agreement if successful to accept placement in location and employment as decided by Australia for a period of two years; and agree to accept return to their point of origin or other agreed point if unsuccessful, maybe at Australian government cost or with subsidy.

If successful, this whole dynamic would essentially bypass the people smuggler network.

Clearly there could be many potential opportunities for rorting of this system. However, given the agreement to leave Australia voluntary is a condition of the visa, this is less so than currently. A “applying for refugee status” visa should be very difficult to forge and valid for six months from arrival. It would include a specific right to work in a specified location as permitted, operating something like work for the dole where no commercial employment opportunities existed.

The visa could be held until determination of refugee status, and could be extended if circumstances required. Any breach of the law resulting in a conviction would trigger the return element of the visa. The visa would be used in offshore processing (for example, by the UNHCR in Indonesia in agreement with the Indonesian government) and onshore in Australia. Any person arriving on a regular visa who thereafter seeks protection should also go onto this visa.

This normalisation of asylum seeking would provide a widely spread, cheaper and more accessible system. This should accommodate and benefit all legitimate refugees. People without an “applying for refugee status” visa seeking to enter Australia using any means would be slow-tracked, and would not have access to the conditions under that visa.

In order to close the loophole and obtain agreement for voluntary return if unsuccessful from current unprocessed detainees, the “applying for refugee status” visa would have to be offered to all asylum seekers currently in any form of detention in Australia or elsewhere. To help speed things up, they should be encouraged to recover their true identity documents from their source country or through some other form of certification.

If all these steps were followed, maybe then Australia could get somewhere in breaking the people smuggler business model. By default, Australia would also not end up with such a brutalising, costly and deadly system.

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If the notion of “breaking the people smugglers’ business model” sounds weird to you, particularly as whatever the government is doing, that is not the current effect, then please explore the ideas here. Originally published in The Conversation and slightly amended here for clarity and to incorporate feedback.

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With its revamped Pacific Solution, the Australian government has decided to make the choice to take a boat to Australia more horrendous in its implications, by increasing the likelihood of disasters at sea, and then punishing those who manage to survive the crossing.

But nothing has been done on two critical fronts – addressing the conditions that create refugees; and providing alternatives that break the incentive cycle promoted by the government and opposition, and facilitated by the people smugglers.

As the child of refugees who survived through the venal self-interest of people smugglers two generations ago, I am particularly aware of the contradictions involved.

The application of some cognitive theory and economic choice theory may help understand what is really going on; and why government and opposition are playing a doomed game they cannot win.

Cognitive dissonance and sunk cost

The concept of cognitive dissonance may be helpful in understanding the social psychology of asylum seekers who have entered the smuggler chain. This approach also throws light on the policy assumptions of government about the ways in which smuggler “business models” may be most effectively disrupted, thus interrupting the flow of asylum seekers to Australia.

Cognitive dissonance has been described as the “mental discomfort provoked by trying to believe two mutually contradictory propositions”. More strictly, it refers to the emotional investment people make in a particular belief, their tendency to try to line up belief and behaviour when the dissonance between them becomes salient. Somewhat counter-intuitively, beliefs will often adapt to justify behaviour, though interventions focused on the disjunction between behaviour and belief can “force” the process in the opposite direction.

In parallel to this cognitive state, there is what game and argumentation theory refers to as the “sunk-cost error”. This is the supposed irrationality of the observed tendency for people to stick with a behaviour even when it appears increasingly unlikely to produce the desired outcome or is very dangerous, and the original cost cannot be recovered no matter what their decision.

The psychological journey

Put this together in a simple narrative. A young man realises or is told by trusted others (family, senior community people) he is in mortal danger, so his family invests money in “buying” him an escape. Those who pick him up tell him he has no other option than to obey their instructions at every point.

His self-concept has been modified in a number of ways. He carries the responsibility for the positive outcome of his family’s investment which may be all they have. At every step, the smugglers “prove” they are trustworthy, thus reinforcing the self-concept of the individual as a survivor, an identity increasingly elaborated as that of an “asylum seeker” (though this may not be clarified until much later in the process).

He reaches the penultimate point in the voyage – Indonesia, probably – and his “objective” identity (in the form of papers) is removed or demonstrated to be no longer valid. His emotional investment in trusting the asylum seekers is huge, and every day his behaviour reinforces his new identity. He has no other trusted or credible sources of information. His heightened anxiety level will not allow him to modify his behaviour. In his mind, his survivor status now depends totally on the smuggler.

There are no accessible and testable competing sources of information that can reduce the anxiety through offering alternative pathways, other than those that would immediately “lose” the value of his family’s sunk investment.

The Australian government’s now even more corrupted Pacific Solution asks why he would not abandon the trip and apply to the UNHCR. Such a policy misses two features: the massive acquired anxiety resulting from months of managing cognitive dissonance; and the fact people will not acknowledge that their investment of money and time is a sunk cost.

Psychological interventions

So how can we help change asylum seeker behaviour?

First, we must accept that sunk cost is a factor which smugglers depend on for power over, and retention of, their clients. Recognition that the cost is lost will be a necessary but insufficient part of any intervention strategy.

Asylum seekers have a massive commitment to the belief that the sunk cost is not lost. The more the government messes with its policy, the clearer the balance skews towards the side adopted by the asylum seeker rather than that desired by the government.

A variety of interventions can address the cognitive dissonance problem. These include countering information from a credible source; providing a rational argument for behavioural change based on desired outcomes; and tapping the moral values of the asylum seekers. (Interestingly, The same dynamics could work on changing Australian attitudes towards asylum seekers).

The intervention is most useful where individuals are addressed in groups, when there is widely available accurate and positive information, and where they are induced to proselytise the desired changes to their peers.

This kind of approach can change behaviour remarkably quickly. False information that reinforces anxieties can have the opposite effect. However the effectiveness of the intervention (which is aimed at limiting the predisposition of asylum seekers to trust smugglers by getting onto unsafe boats) requires real changes so that the information provided is credible and accurate, sufficient to overcome the sunk cost factor.

What next?

There are three real changes that could be made that would help break the psychological cycle.

First, asylum seekers must be able to apply for refugee status while still in their home country, before they get tied up with people smugglers ( an impossible ask and a provocative inclusion, to demonstrate that the chain is already in place before the Refugee convention cuts in)..

Second, a major Australian processing centre should be set up in Indonesia (also a provocative suggestion, given the issues of sovereignty and Australian government capacity and motivation). If people fail this process, they will have little chance of any better outcome risking life and limb on the sea to arrive unlawfully in Australia. A small number will be tempted, but they will be paying premium rates and face almost guaranteed rejection and return.

Third, during waiting periods, intensive English programs, health checks and other identity building investment should be made available by government (not so provocative except to the shock jocks who would see such moves as offering a candy bar attracting more “illegals”). Every effort should be made to ensure asylum seeking arrivals are in the best mental and physical shape to re-adjust to Australia, rather than ensuring they are in the worst shape we can produce.

A rational response

A debate that grapples with each element of the asylum seeking process is crucial.

The Houston panel went part of the way, but left many fragments unresolved. The government and opposition have plans that will only intensify the catastrophe under way. The Greens have also avoided key questions.

Now is the time to systematically, rationally and with a “least worst outcome” mindset, move on these issues. Calm, humane, intelligent policy trumps panicked, inhumane, dumb reactions every time.

ABC Radio National Life Matters ( 29 November 2012) asked me to discuss the implications of my The Conversation provocation piece (republished here) (27 November 2012) on asylum seekers and why the Government and Opposition cannot “win” the games they are playing (with each other or with the world of refugees and global conflicts).   The link to the ABC is here.