[Deleted for abuse.]

[Deleted for abuse.]

To the refugee advocates and their supporters, anyone who is concerned about boat arrivals is just a bigot. On the other side, those in favour of a more "compassionate" policy are seen as having warm hearts, but soft heads (at best) and at worst, as hating their own society and wishing to destroy it.

According to the UNHCR last year, there are 16 million refugees worldwide and 26 million internally displaced people. There is obviously no way that Australia can take all of them. It makes far more sense and is far cheaper for us to take our 13,000 or even 20,000 a year from the camps rather than from boats. There would be no concerns about whether a refugee was genuine, security issues could be assessed offshore, there would be no quarantine issues, people wouldn't be risking their lives and their children's lives on leaky boats and having to be rescued, etc.

We also want to avoid a repeat of what happened in Europe. Numbers started small there too. People who will be starting from nothing in a strange country know that they are likely to need a support network, so they prefer to go to places where there is already a community of their fellow countrymen. The first asylum seekers from Ruritania are most likely to be genuine refugees and pretty desperate, but once a Ruritanian community exists in Australia, it acts as a magnet for more Ruritanians, especially the friends and relatives of the people who are already here (chain migration), and numbers snowball. These people are not necessarily refugees. See Christopher Caldwell's book "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe". The UNHCR has admitted that by the early 1990s, the majority of asylum seekers in developed countries were economic migrants.

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/Pubs/cib/1999-2000/2000cib13.htm

Cont'd

Cont'd

From Home Office statistics, from 1997 to 2004 (before tougher measures were adopted), there were nearly 500,000 asylum claims in the UK (not counting dependants), but only about 20% of asylum claims were found to be genuine, even after appeal. The overwhelming majority of failed asylum seekers were not deported. See

http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefingPaper/document/108

"The UK Home Office has acknowledged that up to two-thirds of those refused asylum simply 'vanish'. In 1999 the UK received 71 160 applications; in 1999 fewer than 8000 failed applicants were either deported or known to have left voluntarily.(35)"

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/Pubs/rp/2000-01/01rp05.htm

Home countries may also refuse to cooperate with deportation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/aug/18/failed-asylum-seeker-iran-detention

Divergence, taking increased numbers of people from refugee camps is a good idea; but there are a few problems that need to be fixed. It is not reasonable to ask countries with large numbers of poor people and huge numbers of refugees already to bear the burden of properly maintaing and servicing those camps.

So the wealthier countries would need to increase their contributions (and make sure that the camps benefitted from them).

It is also not reasonable to expect refugees to stay in camps where water supplies are polluted with sewerage, disease is rife, and they are exposed to rape and murder--sometimes by the same groups of people from whom they fled in the first place. So camps would have to be created that avoid these problems.

It is also not reasonable for people to be expected to stay in camps indefinitely, with no knowledge of when they are likely to receive an offer of a country of refuge. There would need to be a queuing system (which does not exist at present).

Such a solution looks rather like the Gillard proposal, and I think it makes sense. The camps would remove the need for risky journeys across the sea, and put the exploitative people smugglers out of business.

The camps would become asylum seeker magnets--and the rear mongers would still claim that cheats were getting through.