Visas for “heroes”: Good character, criminality and the settler-colony 

Guest post by Maria Giannacopoulos and Anthea Vogl. Dr Anthea Vogl is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research addresses refugee and immigration law, and racialised forms of regulation of non-citizens and the border. She is the author of Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination (Cambridge University Press, 2024).  Dr Maria Giannacopoulos is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Criminology Law and Justice at the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales.  Her research seeks to unravel law’s relationship to colonial power and its expanding carcerality.  She is special issue co-editor of volume 27 of Law Text Culture on the theme of ‘Imagining Decolonised Law’ 2024. 

In April 2024 security guard Muhammad Taha, originally from Pakistan, was deemed worthy of permanent residency in Australia following a mass killing event at a shopping centre in the affluent Sydney suburb of Bondi Junction. His permanent visa was granted following his bravery during the attack. But the offer of permanent status was not immediate. In the days that followed the attack, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese first offered an invitation to Frenchman Damien Guerot, nicknamed ‘bollard man’ after using a bollard to ward off the attacker, to “stay as long as he likes” in Australia. This prompted calls for equal treatment for other non-citizens who had also put their lives on the line to save others.   

Both men have now been granted permanent residency on the basis of their heroism. In relation to Taha, the Prime Minister eventually said that Taha is "certainly the sort of character we want to see continuing to contribute here in Australia".    

Of the six people killed in the Bondi attack, one was security guard Faraz Tahir, who had sought refuge in Australia after fleeing persecution in Pakistan. He was killed on the first day of his new job. At his funeral Albanese said that Australia grieves, remembers and honours the life that should have been lived by Tahir, a ‘hero’ and a person of ‘boundless generosity’. 

This tragedy laid bare just how ‘good’ and deserving certain non-citizens must be to demonstrate ‘good character’ for the purposes of permanent and secure migration status in Australia. The grants of permanent residency, while life-changing for survivors of the Bondi Junction attack, reinforce the unaccountable, selective and arbitrary exercises of settler colonial sovereign power that structure the regulation of migration law and status.  

Reflecting on the extraordinary standards that refugees and non-citizens are held to in the Global North, American-Iranian author Dina Nayeri has written that “[w]ith the rise of nativist sentiment in Europe and America”, there has been a ‘troubling change in the way people make the case for refugees”. She observes that “even those on the left talk about how immigrants make America great. They point to photographs of happy refugees turned good citizens, listing their contributions, as if that is the price of existing in the same country, on the same earth.” She asks: “Is the life of happy mediocrity a privilege reserved for those who never stray from home?”  

Omid Tofighian and Behrouz Boochani draw a direct connection between the racist ideologies upholding colonial border regimes and dehumanising stereotypes of refugees and displaced peoples. These contradictory tropes include the “desperate supplicant”; the “trickster”; the “tragic and miserable victim” but also the non-citizen as extraordinary, as bravely triumphing over adversity, or frequently, as contributing (socially and economically) over and above ‘normal’ citizens (p. 535).  

The actions of the Australian Prime Minister and Immigration Minister recall other extraordinary and blatant manifestations of the sovereign right to include (and exclude), though in circumstances where non-citizens are cast as victims rather than heroes. Following terrorist attacks on two Christchurch mosques in 2019 killing fifty people, the New Zealand government offered permanent residency to all survivors who were at the two mosques, as well as to immediate relatives of the survivors and those who were killed. After the attack and before the announcement, survivors’ ‘pleas for certainty’ about their insecure immigration statuses demonstrate that the status quo of temporariness and precarity they faced prior to the discretionary visa grants. Survivor-victims of the Grenfell Tower fire were also granted a pathway to permanent residency, even as the British Immigration Minister emphasised that “necessary security and criminality checks “would have to be met”.  

In Australia, the invocation of discretion to assert the worthiness of two heroes has played out against broader migration developments that place migrant/refugee subjects across a spectrum ranging from hero to criminal. The immigration system – and ‘god-like’ levels of discretion held by respective Immigration Ministers – are far from operating on the basis of boundless generosity, care or protection of the unknown other.  

In the wake of the Australian High Court decision of NZYQ, which limited the lawfulness of indefinite immigration detention, the Government set in train draconian legislation attempting to constrain the reach of the decision and preserve Government capacity to punish certain non-citizens. Specifically, the proposed legislation criminalises people deemed to be unlawful and who do not actively cooperate in their own deportation. Further reforms also introduce a range of surveillance and control mechanisms for those released from indefinite detention as a result of the ruling, including mandatory electronic monitoring and nightly curfews.  

The reforms that criminalise those who do not cooperate with their own deportation – with up to five years’ imprisonment – are currently before Parliament. They aim to coerce removal and are set to apply even in cases where non-citizens are not cooperating with deportation due to fears of persecution. Under the proposed legislation, a person must comply with Ministerial orders, by for example applying for a new passport or travel document from a country they’re seeking to escape.  

Settler colonial power to deem worthy or unworthy, or as of good or criminal character connects these simultaneous and ostensibly contradictory moments of migration management and control. Both the granting of hero visas and the proposed deportation/criminalisation legislation stem from and are enabled by the sovereign power and discretion underwriting the migration system of the settler colony. The deservingness and good character of the ‘hero’ migrant confirms the unworthiness of criminalised non-citizen and vice versa. 

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