The Sri Lankan Civil War and Australia's Migration Policy Response: A Historical Case Study with Contemporary Implications

Judith Betts and Claire Higgins

Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies from Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: Sri Lanka's civil war lasted almost 26 years and cost tens of thousands of lives. Since the end of the war in 2009, several thousand asylum seekers from Sri Lanka have sought protection in Australia, but both Labor and Liberal/National Coalition governments have taken a restrictive approach to their arrival and have expressed support for the Sri Lankan government. This article explores Australia's response to the protection needs of Sri Lankans during an earlier era, at the outbreak of the war in 1983, when a Labor government processed Tamils ‘in-country’ under Australia's Special Humanitarian Program.

Keywords: refugee; Sri Lanka; immigration policy; asylum seeker; Australian history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2017-05-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies, May 2017, pages 272-285

Downloads: (external link)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/app5.181/full (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/app5.181/full [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/app5.181/full)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:een:appswp:201720

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies from Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sung Lee ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).