As Dutton conceded election defeat, my thoughts were with Ricardo
A couple of years ago, out of the blue, I received an email from a contact I hadn't heard from in years. And it was quite the gut punch.
But before we get to that, we have to go back almost a decade, when I spoke with 42-year-old Ricardo Bolvaran over a scratchy telephone line from Santiago, Chile.
'I'm lonely, I'm a little bit lost. I've thought about suicide a couple of times, to tell you the truth,' he told me, in his broad Australian accent.
That accent hid the fact that he was never an Australian citizen. He'd been in Australia since he was just a year old, migrating with his family to escape the brutal Pinochet regime and living here on a permanent residency visa.
When I spoke to him, Ricardo was a stranger in a foreign land. He had been deported to his birth country after falling foul of the Migration Act, in which visas are cancelled if their holders were sentenced to 12 months or more in prison. (This policy, it must be said, is a bipartisan one, and it remains in place under the Albanese government.)
He never sought citizenship – and why would he? All he ever knew was Australia.
His earliest memories were in Australia. He went to school in Australia. He fell in love with his partner, Rachel, in Australia. And he had his three boys in Australia.
Unfortunately, he also picked up some bad habits in Australia, racking up a petty crime rap sheet along the way. He was jailed in July 2015 after pleading guilty to a string of offences committed in 2012 and 2013 – including drug possession, possession of a knife in public, and receiving tainted property – and was deported the following month, straight out of the Brisbane Correctional Centre at Wacol.
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