Fariborz Karami had been held in Australia's offshore detention system for five years when he killed himself in his moldy tent on the Pacific island of Nauru on Friday. Less than a month earlier, a 52-year-old member of Myanmar's Rohingya ethnic group died after throwing himself from a vehicle near Australia's other offshore detention center in Papua New Guinea's Manus Island.
In all, 15 people have perished in the country's offshore detention system since the camps in Manus and Nauru were reopened in 2013, according to the Australian Border Deaths Database, a project of Melbourne's Monash University, with seven of that total suspected suicides.
Australia's treatment of people arriving by sea in search of asylum — "boat people," as they're known locally — has long been a stain on a nation that has become a beacon for free movement since the end of its racist White Australia policy in 1973, with the proportionately highest migrant stock of any large country after Saudi Arabia.
The way that a system originally intended as a temporary measure has gradually turned into a "dire humanitarian situation" that's contrary to "common decency" (in the words of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees) offers a warning to the U.S. as it heads down its own path of more restrictive immigration enforcement.
The core justifications that have been offered for Australia's detention of boat people since it started in 1992 are strikingly similar to those now being proffered in the U.S.: that the policy is essential both for the government to maintain control of its borders and to prevent migrants from risking their lives on dangerous crossings.
All too rarely is it asked why refugees are prepared to make such perilous and expensive journeys in an era when mass air transport can move people around for far less than the $3,000-and-upward cost of being smuggled across a border. At its most basic, it's often about supply and demand.
Australia, for instance, had until the past year held its annual migrant intake close to 13,750 since 1996. That's despite a one-third increase in Australia's population and a global group of at-risk people that has risen from 20 million to 68 million over the period.
The U.S. is little different: Its ceiling on refugee admissions, which averaged about 113,000 in the 1980s and 1990s, had fallen to 75,000 since 2000 before being cut to 50,000 and, this year, 45,000 by the Trump administration.