In brief
- The Greens have accused the government of pursuing an immigration crackdown akin to Donald Trump's agenda in the US.
- Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says the policy is a return to Australia's approach before changes in 2015.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has rejected suggestions that Australia is moving towards a United States-style immigration enforcement model following backlash over the government's migration reforms.
Burke announced the new policy settings on Thursday, with the most consequential changes targeting "visa-hoppers", overstayers, students and backpackers in a bid to bring down net overseas migration figures.
People who overstay their visas, a cohort of roughly 77,000 people, would face tougher enforcement measures under the government's plans, including the prospect of detention. To discourage overstaying, the government will add 250 beds and 100 compliance officers, restoring capacity Burke said existed before 2015.
Under the pre-2015 approach, Burke said overstayers were detained and generally organised their own flights home within a matter of weeks. "This is not the sort of operation that some people have seen on TV happening in other countries," he said in his address.
The announcement nonetheless drew comparisons to US President Donald Trump's hardline immigration crackdown, carried out by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency since he took office last year.
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The agency has taken an aggressive approach to enforcement, detention and deportation, triggering mass protests, legal challenges and fierce debate over the treatment of migrants.
In an interview with SBS News, Burke was asked about this characterisation.
Burke said he had been concerned that part of his speech would be "misrepresented"
He reiterated that the policy is simply a return to Australia's approach before 2015, when visa overstayers, such as students, were routinely contacted, encouraged to leave, and, if necessary, detained briefly before arranging their own departure.
He said the practice ended when detention centres became dominated by criminals, forcing resources to be redirected. Burke described the proposed expansion to 250 detention beds as a modest restoration of a system that had operated for years.
"Australia stopped doing it for the very simple reason that our detention centres filled up with criminals," he told SBS News.
"That's what happened, and there's no way — in a block that's got a whole lot of people who've done some horrific things and have come straight from prison — that I'm going to put an international student who's overstayed in the same place. I'm just not going to do that."
He said it meant that for the past 11 years, Australia had "stopped doing what is the normal thing to do", referring to the use of detention as a deterrent for people who remain in the country after their visas expire.
"It's a very modest program. It used to be 250 beds, it'll be 250 beds again. It's nothing other than something that used to happen all the time, and when it was happening, Australians never even noticed," he said.
Backlash from Greens and humanitarian groups
Greens senator David Shoebridge was among the critics of the policy settings, likening the detention move to the Trump administration's approach.
"If the minister doesn’t want these policies to be compared to ICE, he should not behave like ICE," Shoebridge said in a statement.
"This is where Labor has sunk to, reheating Tony Abbott's immigration attacks, with a 2026 Donald Trump twist."
The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre described Thursday as a "dark day for multicultural Australia", arguing the reforms would significantly expand Australia's immigration enforcement and detention system and warning it would have serious consequences for asylum seekers and refugees.
The group said the measures risked making Australia "smaller, meaner and more divided" and rejected the government's argument that the changes were a modest compliance reform.
However, two immigration experts who spoke to ABC News dismissed some of those criticisms.
Migration Institute of Australia chief executive Peter van Vliet said it was a "complete overstatement" to compare Labor's plan to ICE tactics, describing Australia's arrangement before 2015 as "fairly soft" and uncontroversial.
Former immigration department deputy secretary Abul Rizvi said the changes were sensible and argued that a return to pre-2015 policy was "a good thing".
"They were a very different operation to what we see in the United States," he said of the earlier compliance regime.
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