This whole debate about these children made me think of the many children of low income Australian parents. Don't these children effectively also exist in a kind of detention ? Confined to poverty with no foreseeable escape ?
If people want to get onto the "poor" children bandwagon than don't just look over the barbed wire fence, look over your shoulder as well, on this side of the wire. Many children in detention are being looked after way better than many of our homegrown poor.
I'm aware they're not in the fashionable compassion category as the detention children but treated even more compassionless by our authorities.

Never mind who may be in detention, overpopulation tends to be a euphemism for over-immigration and remains the elephant in the room. Every country in the world is already well populated, in most cases quite overpopulated.

Although "family planning" is an admirable goal, what such organisations rarely state is that it is not where a child is born that really matters, demographically and economically, but where that person is eventually living, not the moment of birth, but the decades between birth and death, during which time that person will be consuming the world's resources, along with 7 billion other people doing the same. Vis, Australia is pretty much full already.

Emigration and immigration, transferring the problem of overcrowding from one country to another, do no good at all; if anything, they simply perpetuate the illusion that birth control is unnecessary. Nor should concerns about population movement be labelled parochial, provincial, narrow-minded, as opposed to the more-fashionable concept of "thinking globally": just as "spreading the wealth" (the socialist ideal) results only in universal poverty, so "spreading the population" only exacerbates universal overpopulation.

Discussion of overpopulation, however, is the Great Taboo. Politicians will rarely touch the issue. To speak against overpopulation is an exercise in futility. How likely is it that the required massive change in human thinking will ever take place? Even in "developed" countries, to broach the topic of overpopulation is often to invite charges of racism and elitism. Read some of the posts above.

Given the continuing detention rates and an unlikelihood things will improve geopolitically in the medium term it might be more sensible to think in terms of the medical system of triage: let us worry and save those who can be saved.

The entire reason d’être of this article is irrelevant, like so many other species, humanity expands and consumes until its members starve and die. The basic problem of human life has still never been solved; the imbalance of population and resources.

As a result, the competition for survival is intense, and for most people life is just a long stretch of drudgery followed by an ignoble death.

It is ironic that birth control, the most important invention in all of human history, has been put into practice in such a desultory manner.

Why are we looking for intelligent life on other planets, when there is still so little of it on Earth?

Geoff,
Yes, just imagine how many sterilisations could be carried out & how many contraceptive pills could be bought for the billions of aid dollars being forked out each year.
Our silly authorities reward people to have more children that they can't afford to feed. pretty bloody stupid if you ask me.
You can't blame people for trying to get as much as they can but you can throw 99% of the blame at our bureaucrats but they get reward even more handsomely simply for stuffing up.
Isn't anyone getting tired of this nonsense ?
The proponents of refugee production must be given a wake-up call, send them to the refugee producing countries until they change their mind. Make them work in the centres.