Don’t Follow Australia’s Grim Path on Migration
Whenever the supply of a highly desirable good is restricted, the black market will find a way of filling the gap.
Governments should acknowledge their own role in creating this problem.
Photographer: Angela Wylie/Getty Images
Fariborz Karami had been held in Australia’s offshore detention system for five years when he killed himself in his mouldy tent on the Pacific island of Nauru Friday. Less than a month earlier, a 52-year-old member of Burma’s Rohingya ethnic group died after throwing himself from a vehicle near Australia’s other offshore detention center in Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.
In all, 15 people have perished in the country’s offshore detention system since the camps in Manus and Nauru were re-opened in 2013, according to the Australian Border Deaths Database, a project of Melbourne’s Monash University, with seven of that total suspected suicides.
