The Australian Immigration Department has recently announced that the government has spent $9 million to deal with an application backlog of more than 200,000 for Australian Citizenship.
Many refugees, out of which Biak Thwang Urai from Myanmar came to Australia in 2006 and lives in a modest home in Melbourne with his wife and six children. “The feeling as I arrived, I thought “this is the first sight of heaven.” We are very happy.” He told SBS News.
Mr. Urai fled Myanmar as he had been badly beaten by soldiers from the Burmese army after they had taken him on as a porter. He’d become sick and was unable to work.
“I worry that sometime the department will come and knock at the door and they’ll say ‘you need to go back to your country,” he said.
Mr. Urai applied for Australian Citizenship in 2015 to stop all the worries of going back but his papers were sent back. He has waited for five years in a refugee camp in Malaysia until he was finally granted asylum to come to Australia.
He applied again for the Australian Citizenship in 2017 and last year too where the department said that the requested birth and marriage certificate does not exist.
“We don’t have certificates because in my village there is no computers, everything no computer. My birth happened in the kitchen, not the hospital; it was very far away in the city.”
Therefore, obtaining replacement documents is difficult and costly, and a challenge faced by many refugees.
Western Melbourne Chin Community President Patrick Sang Hnin says he knows about the struggles of many people in his community.
“At least 1,000 people in his community have applied to become a citizen in the last two years and I don’t know of anyone who has been granted citizenship,” he said.
What is the cause of the Australian Citizenship delays?
In April 2017, then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull announced a citizenship crackdown, sparking a flurry of new applications. However, the applications were not processed because the Department of Immigration waited for new eligibility criteria, including hard English test to come into effect.
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