The left, for the past ten years (with some exceptions), has faithfully tailed the benevolence and generosity line of liberals and ‘refugee’-NGOs. The humanitarian line – that these are vulnerable people seeking safety and protection, and being treated as lesser human beings – is undoubtedly true. But it also fatally politically limited. If our demand is to ‘bring them here’, we have to ask: what will happen to them when then they arrive in Australia?

With Donald Trump all but endorsing the recent fascist rally in Charlottesville, and liberals in the US and Australia suddenly coming around to the importance and legitimacy of antifascism, it’s worth taking a step back to look at what fascism is, where it comes from, and how to stop it.

We should discard arguments that suggest that Nazism was some sort of entirely ahistorical, anachronistic moment of madness or somehow a uniquely German production. In fact it was a consciously transnational, racially based movement with ideological roots in political antisemitism, pan-germanism and colonialism.

A few years ago I received a phone call from the current Energy and Resources minister, Josh Frydenberg. He called me in response to an email I had sent only hours earlier on behalf of Jews for Refugees (JFR), drawing his attention to the case of the MV Struma. The Struma was a ship carrying 781 Jewish refugees from Romania that, on 23 February 1942, was towed from the harbour in Istanbul to the Black Sea, leaving the ship adrift. The next day the Struma was torpedoed and sunk by a Russian submarine.

Baby Asha’s imminent deportation has been halted, but the struggle is far from over. What are the politics, potentials and pitfalls of Let Them Stay? How could we go from this moment – which is but one in a long history of opposition to the actions of Australia’s Immigration Department – to a broader dismantling of Australia’s racist border regime?