A SKETCH...

The Immigration Sketch

Set A table, a chair, a stack of papers, two books.
Scene A new recruit to the Department of Immigration is given the tour by an old hand.

Official This will be your desk. Officially its nine to five Monday to Friday, but feel free to come and go as you please as long as you do your 12 hours a week.

Recruit 12 hours?

Official Yes, we work pretty hard at the Department of Immigration.

Recruit Well, where do I start?

Official This book is a full list of regulations. It outlines to you what our policy is on any given day of the week. You notice the policy on Mondays and Fridays is simply not to answer the phone, and Wednesday is early closing. We run a roster of our official position on absolutely everything and that changes from person to person. You’ll notice you’ve been colour-coded in red.

Recruit In red, I see.

Official And this book is a ready reckoner of places and situations in which we accept applications from people wishing to migrate to Australia. Basically we only let people in if they can afford to pay or if we have no choice.

Recruit In what situation do we have no choice?

Official Exactly. Now if people claim they can afford to pay you’ll need to see evidence of a bank account that has been active for more than three months, evidence of income, evidence of means of support for the first 10 years they will be in Australia, a bond of $10,000 a fee of $25,000 per applicant, and an affidavit promising they won’t bother Centrelink or Medicare… EVER, no matter how poor or close to death they get.

Recruit What about those who can’t afford to pay?

Official Oh that’s simple. You learn to love these – there is no limit on your imagination. Take for instance a Somali family living in a refugee camp in Uganda.

Recruit Okay.

Official Now how do I put them off migration to Australia?

Recruit Umm, make it too hard for them?

Official Exactly! We request appropriate birth, death, marriage and divorce certificates as well as DNA samples and pap smear results to ensure all people on the application are in fact related. The nearest DNA testing facility is in Kenya, so the idea of a good couple of days walking across the desert dodging bullets and guerrillas normally makes them realise how good they’ve got it in their little camp and changes their mind. If they persist we simply rely on the notoriously dodgy postal service losing the results. By the time they’ve gone through the process several times it’s taken five years and most of the applicants have died of disease, starvation, genocide, or natural attrition.

Recruit What if they’re still alive.

Official That’s easy. For instance we ask the refugees for police clearances. These are totally impossible to get for people in illegal asylum in a third country because, of course, they would be shot if the police knew they were there.

Recruit How do we put them off if they are not refugees and get to the final stage of processing.

Official It’s as simple as rejecting their claim on an obscure administrative point and sending them off to the confusing and expensive world of the appeals tribunal. Feel free to use your initiative and misunderstand anything that might be useful, as long as they descend into the appeals abyss, it doesn’t matter. But you’ll mainly be processing refugee claims. Basically there are only two things to remember in this particular area of the Department of Immigration. The first is we tell the whites they are not black enough to be convincing refugees. In truth white people don’t look like refugees and we certainly can’t put them in detention centres – there’d be an outcry. People are happy to go to the zoo and look at monkeys and apes, but they don’t want to see someone who looks like nice Mrs Thomas from number 47.

Recruit What’s the second thing?

Official We let the blacks believe that the White Australia Policy is still in place and unfortunately they aren’t allowed in. We tell the same thing to Vietnamese, Chinese and Indonesians and anyone from the subcontinent or Middle East. Got it?

Recruit I think so.

Official Where were you before you got the job here.

Recruit I was at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.

Official Oh I am sorry.

Recruit No, no. Don’t apologise.

Official Well I’m sure you’ll fit in fine. Just remember the golden rule

Recruit The golden rule?

Official Yes. Don’t let anyone in.