In an essay in Public Seminar, Professor Klaus Neumann and his colleague Associate Professor Anne McNevin have continued a discussion with Robert Manne, Frank Brennan and others about the challenges of irregular migration and “realistic” policy solutions.

Professor Neumann has held teaching and research positions at universities in Germany and Australia, and worked as an independent historian in Australia and New Zealand. He has written extensively about public memories in postwar Germany; colonial history and memory in Papua New Guinea; immigration, refugee and asylum seeker policies; civilian internment; volcanoes; and New Zealand forestry, among other topics. Klaus has edited or written ten books, including Not the Way It Really Was(1992), Shifting Memories (2000) and Refuge Australia (2004), winner of the 2004 Human Rights Award (Non-Fiction). His most recent books include Across the Seas (2015), about Australia’s historical response to refugees, which won the 2016 CHASS Australia Prize, and Historical Justice and Memory (2015), co-edited with Janna Thompson and published by University of Wisconsin Press.