But, despite the hardships and the imminent threat of camp closure, the number of returnees has recently decreased dramatically.
In doing so they not only risk the lives and safety of the returnees, but diminish Australia as a nation.
But some commentators are quick to employ a definition of what it means to be African that excludes returnees like me for being too fair-skinned, too British or too westernised.
Shamdasani said it was unclear whether the Australian government had been given any assurances that the returnees would not face ill treatment upon their return to Sri Lanka, nor was it clear how the Australian government planned to monitor their treatment.
More than 100 of the "returnees" were in the US and France, 14 in Africa and 12 in Latin America.
Returnees, on the other hand, who have access to loans from foreign banks, can enjoy single-digit interest rates, effectively dominating local markets.
Most of those arriving from Darfur are classified as returnees.
There is a symmetry to the journey that returnees are making, which speaks volumes about the state of Africa today.
This is not to dismiss the inequalities that still exist between Africa's increasingly visible international, urban elite – a category many returnees fall into – and the vast majority of Africans.
"Deradicalisation" programmes for returnees, which might turn some of them into reverse missionaries for the awful truth about IS, are still in their infancy.For all that, thinking of Islamist terrorism as a single, coherent adversary is misleading and dangerous.
This reflux is a worry for security services in France (home of the European Union's largest Muslim population) and across the continent, precisely because, newly expert and inflamed, the returnees can perpetrate commando-style attacks like that on Charlie Hebdo.
