I think this plays very much into a lot of rhetoric that we've heard about an asylum queue and bogus refugees and queue jumpers. The fundamental principle is that an individual is a refugee once they have gone.... We cannot know an individual's refugee status until that status has been determined by an objective and independent process. The dangerous knock-on effect of language of a two-tier refugee or a bogus refugee....
Let me use the example of Thailand. Thailand has about 150,000 refugees from Myanmar in camps along the border, but an estimated one million individuals who have fled refugee-like situations within Thailand are not allowed into those camps. The Royal Thai government officially says these are not refugees; they're economic migrants. That is a rhetorical sleight of hand. The status of these individuals has never been determined.
Once we go down the path of saying there are rhetorically different kinds of refugees without them having gone through that process, we lose the moral authority to be able to work with partner countries like Thailand, which, given the cases that have been prevalent leading to this bill, is a very important country of first asylum in the region. We lose that position of moral authority when negotiating with partner countries abroad.