Trump’s war on migrants has echoes of Australia’s past |
Protesters gather near the entrance to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, Minn. on Friday.OCTAVIO JONES/AFP/Getty Images
England had a problem.
It was the late 18th-century. A rising population and an industrializing economy had flooded towns and cities with striving, struggling newcomers. In the hurly burly of city life, some turned to crime to support themselves. The jails were overflowing.
The authorities were so desperate they took to housing prisoners in decommissioned ships moored in English seaports. But these rotting “hulks,” as they were known, filled up, too. The revolt in the American colonies made things worse. It meant that prisoners could no longer be shipped off to work in plantations there.
Then England hit on a solution. Why not send the surplus prisoners to serve their time in the most remote of His Majesty’s possessions: The eastern coast of the Australian continent, which had been claimed for the Crown by the famous explorer Captain James Cook.
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It was a deranged idea. No English ship had touched the shores of what would become Australia since Cook’s brief sojourn in 1770. No one really knew whether the place could sustain a penal colony or how its Indigenous people would respond to the invasion.
Yet what Australians call the First Fleet arrived on Jan. 26,........