With all the celebrations about the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down just happening to coincide with the latest round of Australian government outrage about people smugglers, you’d think someone would join the dots.

Yet you’d search in vain for a headline saying (to plagiarise Kevin Rudd) “Smugglers who brought people out of Eastern Europe vilest form of people on the planet: should rot in hell”.

But a wonderful article by Andrew Casey, an official with the Australian Workers Union, published in The Age on 3 November, dares to take on the double standard. Casey was a child refugee from Eastern Europe. People smugglers got his family out.

It begins “Kevin Rudd is dead wrong attacking people smugglers. I have been in Australia for more than 50 years thanks to a smuggler. In 1956, my family crossed a dangerous border in the middle of a dark, cold and wet European winter night with the help of a smuggler. I was a little over three years old, my brother six months old.

“The decision to escape, to sell everything and pay a smuggler, was not easy. We came out because of the failure of a working-class socialist revolt against the anti-democratic Stalinist regime imposed on Hungary. (I acknowledge that historians still argue the nature of the 1956 revolution. But for my father and many others it was clearly a working-class socialist revolt, and not a right-wing attempt to restore fascism and capitalism, as others argue.)

“We have family friends in Sydney who chose not to use a smuggler when they escaped Stalinist Hungary. That fateful decision resulted in several losing members of their families (often very young children) as they crossed under fire from border guards who were following shoot-to-kill orders.”

Entitled “Grateful to the people smugglers” the article makes no bones about its author’s hostility to the government’s attacks. The conclusion sums up the writer’s position:

“For Kevin Rudd to throw around this simplistic name-calling about people smugglers makes me shudder. He has no right to judge either the smugglers or the people who use them. I am sure that now, as then, the people smugglers play an important role in the struggles of these poor, bedraggled people to escape oppression. I am also sure that some made lots of money out of the business. But others I know did it for more altruistic reasons. Good on all of them. I make no differentiation.”

So why can’t the government see this? We still live in a world where desperate people cannot migrate through legal channels, and will do anything they can for a chance at freedom. Why are today’s people smugglers (and today’s refugees) not applauded in the way those fleeing from Eastern Europe were, and still are?

What the Eastern European refugees had going for them was that they were fleeing regimes that Australia was hostile to, and they were white. So, no problem.

Now look at today’s refugees. For the Tamils there’s the awkward issue that Australia supports the government that oppresses them (and they’re not white). But Afghans fleeing the Taliban, or Iranians fleeing Ahmadinejad’s regime (while undoubtedly not white enough for racists) should at least qualify on the grounds of what they’re fleeing from. But still they are demonised and persecuted.

Unfortunately for them they fit the profile of world imperialism’s great justification – the “war on terror” and its attendant Islamophobia. Hence Australia’s biggest people smugglers, international airlines, are never mentioned in this context because most of the “illegals” (visa-overstayers) that they bring into the country are white non-Muslims.

The latest crackdown on “people smuggling” is both another way of trying to keep refugees out, and a justification for anti-refugee and anti-Muslim racism.