【With You Again】

Those "No Way: You will not make Australia home,With You Again" campaign ads from the country's government have made it to Facebook, and they're targeting...Australians.

Earlier in the week, the government proposed a lifetime ban on refugees who arrive by boat. Now, some Australians are being served the same anti-immigration campaign as people in other parts of the world are seeing. Including myself.

The anti-immigration ads have been around since 2014, aiming to deter would-be asylum seekers from making their way to Australia by boat.

They've been translated into 16 different languages, including Tamil, Arabic and Vietnamese. The format has even been copied by far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

I have a Vietnamese background, but as someone born and raised in Australia, I'm not really sure why I'mbeing served the ads.

What exactly do I need to do to prove that I'm a real Australian?

I speak with a coherent, Aussie accent. I sit on a toilet "correctly." I'm not that excited about Chinese New Year (and by the way in Vietnam it's Tết, you idiots.) I'm utterly terrible at mathematics.

Why do you still hate me?

It's likely that I'm being served the ads because my Facebook profile says I speak Vietnamese. Which I do, barely.

Now I'm getting constant reminders about how I will "never make Australia home" because of it.

It's not just me either. A friend reported they had seen the ad in Farsi. Another person I know who speaks multiple languages saw the ad in Tamil and Bengali. All are Australians.

The Vietnamese translation tells me that "Australia will not relax its border laws."

You'll get a more surreal message in Tamil: "Coming by boat? Australia doesn't exist!" Interesting approach.

So why would the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection plonk ads on Facebook, targeting Australians who happen to speak a language other than English?

Do they imagine me hopping on Skype and telling my distant relatives in Saigon -- in broken Vietnamese -- to p*ss off, if they're thinking of coming to Australia by boat? Probably so.

But there are other, more "othering" side effects to these ads, for Australians like me who have to see them.

Many Australians are privileged enough to not have detailed knowledge of the difficulties that asylum seekers face when fleeing war and persecution -- risking their lives to come to this country by sea.

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That's because the government has been good at concealing what happens to many of them once locked up in the country's offshore mandatory detention centres.

Australians from an array of ethnic backgrounds cop regular doses of casual racism at school, work, and life already. We don't need Facebook ads calling out our supposed difference.

In fact, maybe we could just consider dropping the whole campaign altogether. It's rubbish, after all.

Mashablehas reached out to Facebook and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection for comment.

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