The Guardian view on America’s Pacific refugees: take them in | Editorial
These are the times we are living in: the super rich are able to prepare a bolthole in New Zealand to escape to should the world implode, while the poor and desperate who have sought asylum in neighbouring Australia are rejected first by the Australian government and now, it seems, by the US as well. We have Donald Trump to thank in part for revealing this paradox. The US president apparently slammed down the phone on the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and took to Twitter to decry his predecessor's "dumb deal!". The "deal" would have seen 1,250 refugees resettled on US soil after years languishing in detention on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus. The US president made it shamefully clear - if his actions this week had not already done so - that in the Trump era the door will be closed to the poor, the stateless and the unprivileged.
Mr Trump is, of course, not the first leader to implement hostile policies toward refugees and Mr Turnbull, a smart rightwing politician, must sense the hypocrisy in imploring the US to take in the refugees he has refused to accept into his own country - refugees who have been living in Australian-run detention centres which have been repeatedly criticised by the UN as illegal and cruel. But there are no such difficulties for those with money who wish to come to the antipodes, as we have seen this week with revelations that Peter Thiel, Trump adviser and co-founder of PayPal, has been given New Zealand citizenship, despite not meeting usual residency requirements. The prospect of Trump's America is not the reason for Mr Thiel's application for citizenship, which he received in 2011, but having an out-of-the-way refuge must be looking attractive at the moment. The New York Times called New Zealand Mr Thiel's "backup country" and wondered whether his citizenship was a way to hedge his bets in case of a global catastrophe. Others suggest the Silicon Valley billionaire might be shoring up an exit strategy should Mr Trump's plans go off the rails.
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