According to the International Labour Organisation, illicit labour trafficking is a global criminal business worth around $150 billion a year, with some 25 million people currently being forced to provide their labour to farms, sex shops, construction sites and other occupations under heavily exploited circumstances.
Limiting labour trafficking is a constant challenge for all immigration authorities – it is no different for Australia’s Department of Home Affairs and Australian Border Force. When I was in a former version of the Department of Home Affairs, dealing with new labour trafficking scams was an ongoing part of the job.
Limiting labour trafficking is a constant challenge for all immigration authorities.Credit:Getty Images
One common scam was out of Malaysia where organisers would lure poor labourers with the promise of a well-paying job in Australia if they would enter into a “debt bondage” arrangement whereby a large cut of their meagre wages would be paid to the organisers.
These highly vulnerable people were brought to Australia on a visitor visa known as the Electronic Travel Authority. The organisers would lodge asylum applications on their behalf. The asylum applications brought with them a bridging visa and work rights. Even though the labourers and the organisers knew the asylum claim would eventually be refused, the fact the labourers had work rights was enough to convince Australian employers, usually farmers but also sex shop operators, to give the trafficked people a job.
We knew the key to preventing these scams from growing rapidly was to quickly initiate investigations into the organisers. At the bottom of the criminal hierarchy of these organisers were often unregistered and sometimes registered migration agents and sometimes education agents. But none ever put their names to the asylum applications they organised.
In addition, we processed the unmeritorious asylum applications quickly and returned the trafficked people to Malaysia. Rapid processing and removal made the scam uneconomic as there was not enough time for the organisers to generate a return on investment. Employers were warned and often fined for employing undocumented labour.
Rarely did we allow these scams to reach more than a hundred or so asylum applications before the organisers were forced to move onto another target nation. When the same scam re-emerged in 2014-15, I thought former immigration minister Scott Morrison and his successor Peter Dutton would close it down quickly given their border protection rhetoric.
