Both the US and Australia are settler societies which were founded on white supremacy and colonial expansionism. Hence, they are intrinsically concerned with maintaining dominance over Indigenous people and asserting state sovereignty against the incursion of people deemed “other”.

But apart from rhetoric, Australia and the US are also using colonial-era and colonial-like power relations to coerce poorer nations into serving their racist immigration policy.

Papua New Guinea has hosted hundreds of male refugees and asylum seekers who tried to make it to Australia on Manus Island, while children and families have been living in limbo in the island nation of Nauru.

But amid the spending spree on militarisation and domination of poorer nations and the continuing misery and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people stranded at borders and in detention centres, there is rarely any recognition of the fact that these refugees and “migrants” have been in fact escaping wars and murderous regimes propped by the US, Australia and EU states.

And that is because these countries have never stopped behaving like colonial powers on the international stage, long after colonialism was supposed to have formally ended.

via How colonialism shapes immigration policy in the US and Australia | USA | Al Jazeera