Remember the Tampa

Enter the Tampa affair.

In late August, just eight weeks or so before the election, a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, attempted to enter Australian waters. It was carrying more than 400 refugees, mostly from Afghanistan. Prime Minister Howard’s government refused the ship’s request to enter Australian seas because the passengers had been picked up in Indonesian seas. His argument was that, by law, that made the refugees Indonesia’s responsibility.

But the Tampa’s captain ignored Howard’s warnings and entered Australian waters. Howard responded by sending Australian SAS forces to interdict, board, and capture the vessel. The refugees eventually ended up on the nearby island of Nauru, where their status was sorted out.

Howard’s argument was simple: “We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come.” His party quickly introduced legislation confirming that it was Australia’s right to “determine who will enter and reside in Australia.” And this turned out to be electoral gold: Ninety percent of Australians supported his actions. The Liberals surged. After a year of looking like his coalition was about to be tossed out of office, Howard didn’t just hold on to his majority—his coalition actually gained seats.

Australians are hardly xenophobic. Nearly 30 percent of the country’s population is foreign born. On both social issues and economics, they’re much closer to Western Europe than America. But Howard’s victory showed that even in a socially moderate, economically open, highly diverse country, taking a stand in favor of border control—of national sovereignty—can be politically popular. And in fact, that so many Australians are legal immigrants may have strengthened Howard’s political cause: The residents of the Tampa were deplored as “queue-jumpers.”

Which brings us to the “caravan” of more than 1,000 Central American migrants that is currently wending its way to the U.S. border through Mexico. “When they get to the U.S., they hope American authorities will grant them asylum or, for some, be absent when they attempt to cross the border illegally. More likely is that it will set up an enormous challenge to the Trump administration’s immigration policies and its ability to deal with an organized group of migrants numbering in the hundreds,” Buzzfeed reports.

These migrants aren’t an “invasion,” as some have charged. Rather, they are a political statement. In fact, the statement is right there in the name of the advocacy group that organized the exodus: Pueblos Sin Fronteras. That means “People Without Borders.” So, this isn’t a group of economic migrants desperate to escape their plight so much as a direct political challenge U.S. sovereignty, and the idea that a country can decide who gets in and who doesn’t. If and when they arrive at the border, this caravan may precipitate a confrontation that crystallizes the terms of the debate more clearly than any other incident in America’s recent experience with immigration: Who decides who comes to America? The migrants, or American citizens?

American conservatives seem uninterested in looking Down Under for political inspiration for these days. And the Democrats, for their part, have remained strangely quiet about the caravan—even pro-immigration stalwarts such as Luis Gutierrez have remained radio silent.

Perhaps they realize that when you reduce the conversation about illegal immigration to its fundamental question, the actual politics look very different than the liberal and media activist class supposes.

It’s easy to understand the left’s mistake because most of the time, fights about immigration center on second-order questions—DACA, “Dreamers,” amnesty, The Wall. But one suspects that, unlike the activists, the people who depend on voters for their jobs will remember the Tampa.