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What if the immigration officers that deported Australian citizen Vivian Solon were not incompetent? The dribs and drabs of information that are emerging suggest that their determination of her status may well have been reasonable. One can only make a decision based on the information one has at hand, not what may emerge in the future.
According to News Limited:
VIVIAN Alvarez returned to Australia on a Philippines passport stamped with a tourist visa six months before she was wrongfully deported, diplomatic cables reveal.
If that was the extent of the documentation that she had in her possession, and that visa had expired, and she was claiming to be Filipino, can we assume that the immigation officers were incompetent?
Oh, of course there are plenty of incompetent immigration officers, as there are other public servants, and uncountable numbers in the private sector. The libertarian argument on the respective incompetence of the public and private sectors is that the incompetence tends to be preserved more strongly in the former than the latter. But there are also competent people, and this chilling deportation could well have been conducted by competent officers working properly within their legislated duties.
The problem, most likely, is the legislation. Or, more correctly, the policy behind it. If you have restricted immigration, then you have to enforce the restrictions or not bother. This is the point I argued in
my 2001 Canberra Times op-ed.
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