In my last post I should have said "vast majority of asylum seekers in developed countries" rather than "vast majority of asylum seekers worldwide".

Barfenzie,

It might help us to see where you are coming from if you answer Plerdsus' questions above. Personally I don't hate or fear foreigners at all, except for a few extreme Islamists. I just think that no country can take in unlimited numbers of people without trashing its environment, social cohesion, and the welfare of its disadvantaged people. The Howard government has indeed been using the asylum seekers to deflect attention from its mass migration policy. Both major parties take enormous amounts in "donations" from the property development industry.

It is the combination of too many people plus bad management that leads to those poisoned rivers and the like. In its 2002 Future Dilemmas report, the CSIRO recommended stabilising Australia's population at 20 million on environmental grounds, and one of the lead authors has said that even this will require much better management for sustainability.

If you are in favour of open borders for anyone claiming to be a refugee then you need to explain why you are right and the CSIRO is wrong. If you think numbers will always be small, then why not push for a cap on total numbers of claims?

Whilst this may not exactly match the topic under discussion, some forum users may be interested to read Mark O'Connor's review of open border advocate Phillipe Legrain's book "Immigrants: your country needs them" at http://candobetter.org/

It begins:

Some angst was caused in February 2007 when Philippe Legrain (with this book in tow) was featured at Perth Writers Week. The problem was not that a debate on migration was irrelevant to a literary festival but that there was no debate--and that the supposed expert (Legrain) seemed ignorant of Australian conditions.

I am struck by how little and how selectively Philippe Legrain has read in the area on which he claims to be an expert. Despite his Australian publicists' claim that he offers a lucid and enlightened account of "Australian policies, facts and statistics" the facts he states are frequently incorrect or slanted. His index is barren of references to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which perhaps explains his bizarre claims that Australia's population is 19 million, that its net migration is some 90,000 a year (see p. 9), that births are not keeping pace with deaths (p. 108, in fact they are twice deaths), that immigration was slashed from 1996 by the Howard government (see p. 53) and so on. In fact we have never had such a high-immigration government as Howard's. Only in the immediate post WWII period, when most of our migrants were war refugees, has immigration been so high.

If we lock up our borders against refugees we are breaking the law we willingly signed up to. What on earth is it about refugees who are victims of horrendous crimes and torture and persecution that brings out the evisceral hatred that I read here?

What is the difference between a Sri Lankan or Burmese migrant and a Sri Lankan or Burmese refugee except that one is for the government of their own country and the other is persecuted for reasons of religion, sex or whatever and has not committed any crime

More that 5 million people come to Australia every year and we never mention them. Only the few refugees.

Why is that?