But Australia’s Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, responded by saying Canberra’s “position is very clear, and that is we are not going to accept people who have sought to come to our country illegally by boat, they will not settle permanently in our country.”

Australia’s refugee policy has been a test in how a country balances the rights of the world’s dispossessed with its own right to determine who enters. And it was one year, 2001, that Australia set itself apart, and one incident, the “Tampa affair,” that brought its policy to the fore. It was an election year in Australia, and Prime Minister John Howard’s Liberal Party, which holds a conservative ideology, was trailing in the polls. But on the policy-launch day of his election campaign, Howard made his stance on immigration clear: “We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come.” His ideas on immigration shaded him a strong leader and is credited in part with his party’s election victory that November.

At the time, many migrants and refugees sailed and floated to Australia across the Indian Ocean to Christmas Island, an Australian territory 1,200 miles from the mainland, but only a three-day boat trip from Jakarta, Indonesia. Near the end of August 2001, 433 asylum-seekers, mostly Afghans, lost their way at sea on a wooden fishing boat called the Palapa and sent a distress signal. They were picked up two days later by MV Tampa, the Norwegian freight liner. What followed was a game of chicken. Typically, a captain will sail people rescued from the water to the nearest port that will have them. In this case, that would have been Christmas Island, the Australian territory where the refugees had wanted to go, and where they could be processed for asylum in Australia. But Howard refused them entry. A port 12 hours away in Merak, Indonesia, would take the ship, but the asylum-seekers were dehydrated and sick, and they included children and pregnant women. Some of those on board threatened suicide if returned, and the captain doubted whether his crew of 27 could make that far of a trip with the additional 433 passengers. So he sailed toward Christmas Island, and Howard dispatched the military.

As the deadlock became international news, Howard tried to pass a bill in Parliament that’d grant the government power to remove foreign ships from its waters, but he didn’t get the votes. International media, human-rights groups, and world leaders pressured Australia to do something, and after eight days, Howard worked out a deal in which the Australian Navy would take the refugees to Nauru, a Pacific island nation, where they’d be kept in camps while they waited for the government to process their asylum applications. These offshore camps would become central to Howard’s immigration policy, called the “Pacific Solution,” that Australia would pass in 2001.