Both One Nation and the Coalition have been talking up their mass deportation target of around 75,000 – with zero details of how that would be implemented or what it would cost. Abul Rizvi looks beyond the hype.

While One Nation and the Coalition often refer to ‘overstayers’, the bulk of people in Australia without a visa are in fact unsuccessful asylum seekers.

It is thus useful to understand how the current record number of unsuccessful asylum seekers came about; who the unsuccessful asylum seekers are likely to be; and what would be involved in a program to deport these people.

The surge in the number of unsuccessful asylum seekers started around 10 years ago when former minister Peter Dutton and department secretary Mike Pezzullo were in charge . Two people who sought to develop an (undeserved) reputation for strong border control and immigration integrity.

The surge started with asylum applications from Malaysian nationals in 2015-16 and then extended to nationals from China. In 2017-18, around 67 per cent of the record 27,931 asylum applications were from Malaysian and Chinese nationals. A large part of that was a labour trafficking scam supplying cheap labour to the agricultural sector.

That slowed significantly during Covid-19, but the very large backlog of asylum applications and associated slow processing led to a resurgence of asylum applications after the virus. While primary asylum applications from China remain high, there has been an increase in asylum applications in recent years from:

• India, Nepal and Bangladesh, partly associated with an increase in student visas.
• Colombia, associated with a temporary surge in English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) students from that country.
• Pacific Island nations, associated with growth of the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility stream (PALM) visa.

A surge in asylum applications from Vietnamese and Filipino nationals during the 18 months after Covid appears to have subsided. A similar surge out of Indonesia also appears to now be subsiding.

There has also been an odd increase in asylum applications from UK and Irish nationals, possibly associated with the large number of working holiday makers from those two nations. That appears to be continuing.

The new Labor government tried to deal with the post-Covid-19 surge in asylum applications by investing more resources in faster processing at both the primary and review stages. That has helped marginally to reduce the asylum application rate, falling from 25,210 in 2022-23 to 21,656 in 2025-26. It has also reduced the backlog of primary-level asylum applications from over 39,000 in February 2020 to just over 20,000 in July 2026.

The asylum backlog at the Administrative Review Tribunal has also fallen from just under 42,000 in March 2024 to under 37,000 in July 2026.

While faster processing has helped, it is not a comprehensive solution without targeting the organisers (usually migration agents, both registered and unregistered) and a viable removals policy. The Labor government has been taking some actions against unscrupulous migration agents but has done relatively little on removals.

The number of asylum seekers still in Australia who have been refused at the primary stage now sits at over 110,000 (growing at about 1,000 per month). Those refused at both primary and review stages and not departed is over 74,000. The bulk of these are likely to be from Malaysia, China, India, Colombia, the Pacific Islands, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia.

But developing a cost-effective removals policy is not simple. Donald Trump is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on his mass deportation program, including building huge detention centres, and achieving only a marginal increase in the deportation rate (Trump’s self-deportation numbers are highly questionable). Along the way, the Trump administration has made huge mistakes of wrongful detention and deportation, which will lead to massive compensation cases.

A well-designed removals policy is essential, but copying Trump would be a costly disaster.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.