Xavier -

I'm a little concerned, that you say I distorted the facts.

If things in my post, were not correct - I am glad to have them corrected.

However, please note - all the facts in my post, were quoted from another poster, LunaEclipse, and you'll find that I am careful to say only what LE tells us. LE told us he/she had visited Nauru several times, had visited the camp, and knew how things were. I took LE at his word. So if what I wrote does not match up with the facts - it's because the person I was quoting, was themselves not reliable.

Also - from what you say, a lot of Nauru people are helping the asylum seekers. I am happy for the asylum seekers that this is happening. Unfortunately, our government does not seem to have a good record for treating asylum seekers well. There are plenty of people in Australia who would help asylum seekers settle here, and would be glad to have them in Australia - but unfortunately a small number of people have set themselves against asylum seekers here, and it is them that the government takes notice of. The government could easily ignore those people, but it chooses instead to follow them. not good for Australia, and puts on other countries, burdens that Australia - a rich country - should be accepting, itself.

Please keep us informed. It is hard here to know what is going on in Nauru. Even in the detention camps here, journalists are not allowed in, and it's hard for us the public to be sure, what is going on.

Mike

Brisco Rant,

The government takes little notice of what ordinary people think about other policies, such as Work Choices, so why do you imagine they care about what you or I think about asylum seekers? Has it occurred to you that the government might have been watching the blow-out of numbers of asylum claims in Europe over the past two decades? See the Migration Watch UK site for the UK Home Office statistics. In the UK there were 490,000 claims between 1997 and 2004. The actual number of people was considerably larger because asylum seekers are allowed to bring in immediate family members and in some cases parents and grandparents. Only 21% of the 1997-2002 arrivals were accepted as refugees, including after appeal, but only 13% were deported, because of the difficulty of deporting people who are already in the community, even if their claims are ill-founded.

Mandatory detention discourages ill-founded claims, because the people who make them will stay in detention, away from those juicy First World living standards. The Pacific solution isn't cheap and there are other problems with it, but Britain spent approximately 2 billion pounds on asylum seekers in the community in 2004 alone. It is not as though there were not plenty of British homeless and other disadvantaged people who could have benefited from that money, say the cancer patients who were effectively condemned to death because their surgery was delayed so much by the underfunded health system.

The response of the refugee advocates is to say that Australia will never get more than a few thousand claims a year, which won't cost that much and ought to bother no one, apart from a few white nationalists. If they were sincere, they could immediately defuse the opposition from folks who are worried about being swamped by calling for a cap on numbers of claims per year. If the cap is never reached, no one is disadvantaged, after all.

BriscoRant,

The comments which concerned me were the ones like 'Nauru detainees don’t get to go clothes-shopping. We are told they are “provided with clothing”" and "LE reveals detainees never get to do this, even if they know how to cook. Food is always chosen by others; always comes ready-cooked; always in a foreign style. Presumably there is nowhere provided, for detainees to cook for themselves if they want to."

These things you attribute to LE, however he never said them. It must be made clear that the processing centres are not the hell-holes that many wished they were. It is obviously convenient for some to attribute miserable conditions to the refugee camps; people would be more able to understand being physically uncomfortable than being disenfranchised. But it can really only be the illegality, immorality and irresponsibility which can be criticised.

Thanks,
Xavier.
P.S. On one occasion when LE attempted to enter Nauru without permission, it was a consideration to place him in the camp until he can prove his identity, declare him a menace to society (but provide no reason) and let him wait there whilst we take our time processing him. It was reckoned that aid would promptly stop, however.

Divergence, why don't you ask the persecutors around the world to put a cap on the number of people they persecute. Until you have some answers for people who will be killed if they stay in their country it is not possible to take you seriously.

Also, your facts are not correct. Note UNHCR reports of falling asylum claims around the world in recent years:

UNHCR: Asylum applications in the last five years drop by half
http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/news/opendoc.htm?tbl=NEWS&id=441929762
GENEVA, Mar 17 (UNHCR) – In the last five years, the number of asylum seekers arriving in all industrialized countries has fallen by half, according to preliminary annual figures released by the UN refugee agency on Friday. Asylum applications in 50 industrialized countries fell sharply for the fourth year in a row in 2005, reaching their lowest level in almost two decades.
"These figures show that talk in the industrialized countries of a growing asylum problem does not reflect the reality," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres. "Indeed, industrialized countries should be asking themselves whether by imposing ever tighter restrictions on asylum seekers they are not closing their doors to men, women and children fleeing persecution."

Sunfire,

You were the one who asserted that numbers would never be large, not me. If you believe what you said, why not agree to a cap? It shuts a large proportion of the opposition up immediately, and because numbers will never reach the cap, no one will be put into detention, except briefly for health and security checks. Put your money where your mouth is. Of course, you may have the problem of illegal immigrants crowding out genuine refugees, as has happened in Europe.

The numbers I quoted are correct, as you can check, since I gave my references. The statement about European asylum claims increasing from less than 100,000 a year before 1980 to nearly 700,000 in 1992 actually came from a UNHCR document. It is true that numbers have fallen off in the last few years. This is because there are push as well as pull factors (how bad it is in the home countries) and because the European countries have mostly gotten tougher. Britain still got about 40,000 claims last year, and the US and Canada approximately the same amount (see Migration Watch UK and the Center for Immigration Studies at www.cis.org). The push factors are likely to get worse as overpopulation and environmental deterioration, and resultant ethnic or religious cleansing, also get worse in many places, so this situation may not last.

The Howard government is taking a tough line here, because asylum seekers threaten his policy of high population growth. Any suggestion that immigration is out of control may well result in big votes for Far Right parties, as has happened in Europe, where they actually have a caucus in the European Parliament. A million people voted for One Nation in 2000, and the government doesn't want a repeat.

To quote UNHCR once again

With the numbers of asylum seekers at a record low, industrialized countries are now in a position to devote more attention to improving the quality of their asylum systems, from the point of view of protecting refugees, rather than cutting numbers," said Guterres. "Despite public perceptions, the majority of refugees in the world are still hosted by developing countries such as Tanzania, Iran and Pakistan."

How are you going to contribute to protecting refugees? All you are interested in is that you might be a little less comfortable if more people come here. Why don't you focus on the migration program, we take many more migrants than refugees. I am not interested in your fears about your own comfort and I am not trying to promote people coming by boat. I don't think you will find support from any side for encourging people on to boats so your cap idea is a furphy. But it is a reality that people will come on boats when they have no other options and we have to deal with the human beings involved fairly and humanely. You simply cannot seem to understand that these people who arrive are as human as you are.

I don't have time for this kind of debate that is so unproductive, so you will have to excuse me for not replying anymore. I am sure you will continue with your views regardless of what anyone says.