Economy
Go back to where you came from
SYDNEY — Leaning against a bed in the modest home that she shares here with six other family members, Maisara Masudi, 37, a refugee from Congo, tells her Australian guests what drove her to flee her homeland years ago. After militia members killed her father and brother, she said, they raped her sisters, ages 8 and 12, before her eyes. One sister contracted H.I.V.
With the cameras rolling, Raquel Moore wipes back tears and strokes Ms. Masudi on the shoulder. “You’re a lovely lady, and you didn’t deserve what you went through,” she says.
Moments later, however, away from her hosts, Ms. Moore stops to reflect into the camera.
“Yeah, well, I guess they’re nice,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean that every African or refugee is going to be as nice as this family.”
Immigration is, to say the least, a complicated issue in Australia.
A three-part reality television series that debuted this week on the SBS network in Australia is tackling this most heated of topics in a novel way — by sending six native-born Australians with differing views on immigration on punishing journeys that retrace the voyages of asylum seekers seeking safe haven in their country.
The series hopes to rise above the din of the sometimes sensationalist news coverage, said Peter Newman, commissioning editor at the SBS, to show the human side of what drives people to pay smugglers as much as $10,000 for passage to Australia aboard a rickety boat.
“When politicians and people say ‘Stop the boats,’ what do they mean? What’s behind those slogans?” Mr. Newman asked in an interview.
Producers trolled the Internet and neighborhoods that had been transformed by an influx of immigrants to find candidates for the series, titled “Go Back to Where You Came From.” Participants were stripped of cellphones and passports before embarking …
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