Going Beyond A Queer Refugee Quota

By Daniel Rashid 

In the spirit of queer internationalism during Sydney WorldPride, a number of activists advocated for the adoption of a designated queer refugee intake separate from the regular refugee stream. 

This idea has a lot of good intentions behind it. A very large proportion of the world’s population are living in places where it is illegal to be queer. Persecution in these countries is common, and the more we can do to help people affected by this, the better. 

However, as a refugee activist, I feel compelled to point out issues with this. The primary issue is the fundamental premise on which it rests. We shouldn’t need a queer quota to bring in more queer refugees. What we need is for the current cap to be drastically expanded, allowing refugees both queer and non-queer to resettle. 

Neither would a quota for queer refugees do anything positive for those refugees that Australia deems illegal, and refuses resettlement. 

Queer Refugees

Queer refugees already have to go to great lengths to prove that they are who they say they are under the current system. A 2020 article in the University of New South Wales Law Journal by Will Berthelot, entitled “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity as a Basis for Refugee Claims in Australia”, details some of the more egregious judgements made by Australian tribunals.

In one instance, a tribunal decided that a queer refugee’s application for protection should be denied because “he was still pursuing what appeared to be a heterosexual lifestyle”. People who developed relationships with people of the same gender in migration detention have been rejected on the grounds they were only bisexual by convenience. 

One person was denied because his “knowledge of the LGBTI community in Sydney was at best superficial, and he was not aware of when Mardi Gras takes place”. Another was deemed not genuinely homosexual because, among other reasons, “he could name only two gay sites on Oxford Street”, and because “he did not know the name of the main Sydney gay newspaper”.

Gay Tests For Queer Refugees

If a quota for queer refugees is introduced, then these “gay tests” would get worse, not better. 

When it comes down to it, all refugees have good reasons to flee their homes and seek safety elsewhere. Who is more deserving of resettlement, a gay man who has fled a country where same-sex acts are illegal, or a democratic political activist fleeing a dictatorship?

A single mother whose entire village has been razed to the ground, or a lesbian who has been forced out of their hometown at the threat of violence? Nothing good can be achieved by trying to answer these questions: you cannot make a hierarchy of different kinds of suffering.

All refugees deserve resettlement, and in that sense, all are equal and entitled to the same rights as each other.

Daniel Rashid is a unionist and an organiser with the Refugee Action Coalition (RAC)