UK columnist Katie Hopkins has reminded us that "getting Australian" means implementing vicious anti-immigration policies. Why can't we work to a time when the same phrase means offering hope? Jeff Sparrow writes.

"It's time to get Australian."

That's how the British far-right provocateur Katie Hopkins characterised her preferred response to asylum seekers and other migrants: using gunships to force migrants back to the shores and then burning their boats.

Hopkins, a former reality show contestant, regularly flirts with hatemongering as a kind of freelance shock jock, presumably on the basis that any attention is better than none.

But what is striking about her latest column in the Murdoch tabloid The Sun is her casual identification of Australia with unabashed cruelty and violence.

"Australians are like British people, but with balls of steel, can-do brains, tiny hearts and whacking great gunships," she writes.

"Their approach to migrant boats is the sort of approach we need in the Med.

"They threaten them with violence until they bugger off, throwing cans of Castlemaine in an Aussie version of sharia stoning."

Her extraordinary article - published shortly before 700 people were feared to have drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean - should serve as a wake up call for Australians.

In this country, what passes for debate about immigration policy tends to centre on details: the latest report on sexual violence in the camps or the most recent condemnation by the UN or whatever.

Understandably, even refugee activists get caught up in arguments about individual pieces of cruelty.

While Hopkins probably couldn't explain the specifics of Australia's detention centre regime, from her vantage, she's successfully intuited what we might call "the vibe of the thing" - the basic logic of a policy based upon deterrence.

"[Australians] threaten them with violence until they bugger off," she says.

Australian politicians - with a few notable exceptions - would not speak quite so crassly. But in essence Hopkins is right. That's what deterrence means. By definition, it's predicated on making seeking asylum a worse experience than whatever the refugees are fleeing.

That's why, we saw, at the recent Reclaim Australia rallies, a posse from the emergency response team on Nauru posing with Pauline Hanson. The men, supposedly selected because of their "cultural sensitivity", clearly saw themselves as the enemies of those they were detaining.

As abhorrent as these attitudes are, they're at least honest. Everybody knows - can anyone honestly deny it? - that bipartisan refugee policy in this country has produced a regime of terrible cruelty. In that sense, by using Australia as a shorthand reference for her preferred policy in a piece the Independent calls "so hateful that it might give Hitler pause", Hopkins has sounded the alarm about what we're allowing to take place.

For, make no mistake, matters will only get worse.

The hundreds of men, women and children feared dead in the Mediterranean appear to have drowned after the EU decided to defund search and rescue operations. Why? Last year, the British foreign office explained that rescue missions only encouraged immigrants to come. Indeed, all across Europe, politicians are trying to make the sea crossing more dangerous, explicitly so as to deter would-be migrants.

In other words, they're all "getting Australian".

Joseph Muscat, the prime minister of Malta, described rescuers searching for survivors among the bodies bobbing in the ocean.

"This could possibly be the biggest tragedy to have ever taken place in the Mediterranean," he said - and then added: "A time will come when Europe will be judged harshly for its inaction as it was judged when it had turned a blind eye to genocide."

But it doesn't have to be like this.

The deterrent model takes for granted the notion that people are a problem - that they are, as Hopkins so charmingly puts it, "cockroaches". On that, the liberal politicians agree with the conservatives: those who would come here threaten our way of life, which is why they must be, either regretfully or gleefully (depending on your temperament), dissuaded. The barriers thus erected make what would be otherwise the entirely safe process of travelling from one country to the next almost impossibly dangerous.

In the aftermath of an earlier mass drowning in 2013, the British writer Kenan Malik wrote:

"The only policy that could prevent more tragedies like that last week is the only policy that no European politician will countenance: the liberalization of border controls, and the dismantling of Fortress Europe. Too obsessed by illegal immigration, that is the one option not on the table. So the next time there is another tragedy as at Lampudesa - and there will be a next time, and a next time after that - and politicians across Europe express shock and grief and anger, remember this: they could have helped prevent it, and chose not to."

And so it has come to pass.

The growth of the anti-immigrant right - and the willingness of mainstream politicians to pander to it - has created an environment where the most obvious points about so-called "border security" can barely be raised. As Adam Davidson recently noted in the New York Times, "few of us are calling for the thing that basic economic analysis shows would benefit nearly all of us: radically open borders."

Yes, that's right - open borders. In the current context, an idea that was once a commonplace around the world (think of the Statue of Liberty and its plea to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" or the Australian national anthem promising "boundless plains to share") now seems almost unimaginable.

But as Davidson notes, "the economic benefits of immigration may be the most settled fact in economics. A recent University of Chicago poll of leading economists could not find a single one who rejected the proposition."

It might seem counterintuitive but immigrants don't cause unemployment. On the contrary, as Davidson says, they "don't just increase the supply of labour ... they simultaneously increase demand for it, using the wages they earn to rent apartments, eat food, get haircuts, buy cell phones. That means there are more jobs building apartments, selling food, giving haircuts and dispatching the trucks that move those phones. Immigrants increase the size of the overall population, which means they increase the size of the economy."

Equally obviously, immigration enriches rather than diminishes a culture. It's impossible (short of North Korean-style repression) to cut a society off from change and so the Australia of 2015 is inevitably very different from the Australia of 1915 (however much that evolution distresses reactionaries). But a culture that actively engages with the world, one that welcomes ideas and people from other nations, will be a thousand times more vibrant and dynamic than one that tries to shut them out.

So what would happen if, rather than spending billions of dollars excluding refugees, we simply made them welcome?

Immediately, the deaths would end. If refugees weren't forced to rely on leaky boats and people-smuggling rings, no one would risk drowning, any more than you or I do when we travel from Australia to Indonesia and vice versa. The camps could be closed, and resources diverted to helping people rather than brutalising them. The resulting economic boom that Davidson describes could fund all kinds of social services and other programs, even as the presence of Australia as an accessible place of refuge facilitated political reform in the region.

In today's social climate, such ideas might seem utopian. But what's the alternative? More repression and more deaths? Just how far are governments prepared to go to prevent ordinary people moving from place to place? How much are we willing to make them suffer?

To put it another way, Hopkins has reminded us that, at present, "getting Australian" means implementing vicious repression. Why can't we work to a time when the same phrase means offering hope?

Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland literary journal and the author of Killing: Misadventures in Violence. On Twitter, he is @Jeff_Sparrow.