[STATEMENT] Statement On Australia’s New Deportation Laws: Migrants Under Attack
7 September 2025
The International Migrants Alliance (IMA) Australia — part of the global alliance of grassroots migrant, refugee, and displaced peoples’ organizations—strongly condemns the Australian government’s passage of new migration and deportation laws. These laws mark a dangerous and repressive shift, targeting migrants and refugees with criminalization, mass removals, and indefinite and offshore detention.
We were appalled with the anti-migrants “March for Australia” rally on Sunday 31st August, where neo-Nazi elements were allowed by the government to speak freely attacking Indigenous Australians and migrants, and now the federal government is passing laws against migrants and displaced peoples.
As migrants ourselves (and let’s not forget that, without having to dig back more than a couple of generations, most Australians are migrants too)— and as workers, refugees, undocumented people, stateless persons—we brand these laws for what they are: an attack on the rights, dignity, and survival of our communities. Australia is deepening its anti-migrant policies as part of a global trend of rising authoritarianism, imperial violence, and racist state control.
Under these new laws:
Migrants and refugees can be deported without fair process, even to countries where their lives are at risk.
People who cannot or do not “cooperate” with deportation—including stateless people and those with nowhere to return to—face criminal charges and prison sentences.
The Australian government can now outsource deportations to countries like Nauru, turning them into dumping grounds for displaced people.
Immigration authorities are granted expanded powers to search, apply close surveillance, and isolate detainees, including seizing phones and personal belongings.
For migrant communities, this is not just a policy change. It is a message: we are not wanted, not heard and not safe.
These laws are not about “security” or “order”—they are about control. They silence resistance, punish migration, and allow a wealthy settler-colonial state to abandon its international obligations.
We are not the cause of crisis. We are survivors of war, economic collapse, land dispossession, and climate change—all of which are driven or aided by the same global systems of imperialism and corporate greed that Australia currently benefits from.
Australia’s new laws criminalise our movement and our presence. However, you know very well that the real threat is not migrants—it is a system that treats human beings as disposable, borders as weapons, and justice as optional.
This is not only a migrant issue—it is a human rights issue. The violence migrants face today in Australia echoes the long history of dispossession against First Nations peoples on this continent. Both struggles are rooted in the same system of colonization, capitalist exploitation and escalating white supremacy.
We stand in solidarity with Indigenous communities fighting for land, sovereignty, and self-determination because we believe that migrant justice and Indigenous liberation are inter-connected.
We call for an immediate repeal of the new deportation and migration laws.
We will not be silenced. Across the world, migrants are organizing against fascism, criminalization, and exploitation. We reject a world where borders kill and detention profits. We reject the idea that people are “illegal” just because they are seeking safety, dignity, or work. We believe many people in Australia share these views and beliefs.
Together, we will continue to build a world where everyone has the right to move, to stay, and to live free from fear.
Stop Deportations. End forced Detentions. Defend Migrant Rights. #
International Migrants Alliance (IMA) Australia
B.DiBiase@westernsydney.edu.au
majarayabuenaflor@gmail.com
