Washington: Canberra's get-out-of-jail card on the future of the hundreds of Australia-bound refugees on Nauru and Manus Island may have a very short shelf-life, with the head of a prominent US anti-immigration think tank warning: "This is the kind of thing the Trump administration will nix on Day 1."
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At the weekend, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull revealed a "one-off" deal with Washington, under which, for 1800 detainees in the Australian operated detention facilities, resettlement in the US would be an alternative to returning to their home countries or remaining in Nauru indefinitely.
Washington has not confirmed the deal publicly. But, after a brutal US election campaign, in which "illegal" immigration was the most bitterly contested policy, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the influential Centre for Immigration Studies, predicted a "firestorm" of opposition from anti-immigration activists.
"It's so difficult to justify," he told Fairfax Media. "I don't expect any Republicans will defend it. I can't see a lot of Democrats defending it either. My sense is that when the word gets out on this, it'll be dead on arrival."
On Sunday, Turnbull acknowledged the likelihood of a negative reaction from the incoming Trump administration.
However, there were conflicting signals from Canberra on whether the deal with the Obama administration could be formalised and executed before Donald Trump's January 20 inauguration.
Turnbull described it as a process "that will take time" but Liberal MP Andrew Laming told Sky News, "I think things will be moving" before the inauguration.
"They've got 68 days to pull it off," Krikorian said. Describing the Nauru and Manus island operations as "the Australian navy warehousing refugees", he claimed to be a big fan of Australia's "hawkishness" on immigration policy.
Acknowledging an upside for Australia in the deal, he then said: "I'm not sure why this is a good idea for the US - it's absurd. I'm not sure why we'd be taking them off your hands."
Alluding to Australia's separate refugee resettlement deal with Cambodia as though it was a more appropriate third-country destination for the refugees, Krikorian said: "I presume you paid Cambodia a lot of money?"
If it made sense for the Obama administration to agree to take 1800 refugees from Australia, then it might as well agree to accept "a million Afghans and Pakistanis from Germany. But why should we be taking these people that Australia doesn't judge to be legitimate asylees?"
Even parsing the deal in the context of speculation that the deal amounted to a people swap - Washington was taking a refugee group that were a challenge for Canberra at the same time as Australia had agreed to ease the immigrant pressure on the US by accepting US-bound refugees from camps in Costa Rica - failed to bend into a sensible argument, he claimed.
"If that's the case, why doesn't the US simply take the South Americans? What's the difference? What's the improvement in switching one group of people for another? It just doesn't make sense as a deal."
