I hope that Tanveer Ahmed is right when he says that one of the backdoors to immigration – the shonky private colleges - is collapsing. The Government should seize the fees paid by students and return the students, with their fees, to their countries of origin. The silly little courses these shonks provide could be studied anywhere or by correspondence; and the ‘qualifications’ gained are hardly ones desperately needed in Australia, particularly when the ‘graduates’ can’t speak enough English to make themselves understood.

The students themselves are being ripped off, but perhaps that’s the price they are prepared to pay to dodge normal immigration procedures.

“Most of us see ourselves as open and welcoming to migrants but the prospect of having porous borders stirs deep discomfort, like allowing strangers into our homes unchecked.”

I don’t feel “open and welcoming to migrants” because I believe there are too many people here now for a country which is two-thirds barren. Migrants were needed in the past, but not now. We should take only migrants we invite because of our own needs. Better still, fill those needs locally; it’s cheaper in the long run.

But, the rest of the Tanveer Ahmed’s sentence concerning ‘porous borders’, ‘deep discomfort’ and ‘allowing strangers into our homes unchecked’, is spot on.

The usual cranks are going to find it hard to call man of Bangladeshi origin a racist for his comment; that’s only for white men!

Again, I have to say that I hope Tanveer Ahmed’s reference to migration agents staying clear of protection visa cases is correct. Migration agents have got themselves a very bad name by dealing with illegals.

The door that the author talks about has to be firmly locked to keep all but genuine refugees processed by the UN out of Australia. It’s all very well to say that we can understand why people want to come here – given Rudd’s encouragement to do so - but that does not mean they should be allowed to.

Rudd and his policies are the real threat to Australia.

Don't let facts get in the way of populism.
The author consistently, if not wilfully confuses migrants with asylum seekers. Under Australian and international law the two terms are not interchangeable.
Overseas studets are not the new refugees. He claims..."the path of asylum is attractive to those without appropriate skills or financial resources to obtain migration" A person in that category does not come by boat and would not be accepted as a refugee even if they did get to Australia.
Many 'would be' migrants fly to Australia and claim refugee status, they do not get accepted. Some asylum seekers fly to Australia on real and forged documents and do get accepted, but they are very few in number.
Sri Lankan asylum seekers off Indonesian did not deploy emotional blackmail, they are desperate. Use of the term says something about the mindset of the author.
It is claimed that,..."asylum and refugee status represents the path of least resistance for those seeking migration..." It does not; spurious claims are rejected by the Department of Immigration, the Refugee Review Tribunal(in my experince on the Tribunal) and the courts, which hardly seems a path of least resisitance.
I respect right of the author to express an opinion but those opinions might be more acceptable if basaed on fact.
Otherwise as it stands the piece appears more as an emotive and craven appeal to the red neck denialists who would expect different treatment than they advocate, if they themselves were to experience what the current asylum seekers have been through.
Bruce Haigh

Australia is essentially a large desert with a small amount of arable land around the coast,it can't support mass immigration, unlike the US or Canada. We should allow only those people, whose skills are required, to immigrate, and accept only our share of genuine refugees.

Thanks for article Tanveer.

Like you say, it is naïve to believe that avenues to migration here are not being played. This is understandable – after all, who in a Third World country (inc students and economic asylum shoppers) would not like the benefits we take as a given here – free education, unemployment benefits, retirement/old age pension, etc?

However, in the long run the current accelerating migration plan hatched and implemented by Liberal/Labor is economically unsustainable.

In a way, it is irrelevant who govt is using to pad out numbers, because it is bound to fall over financially as shown by its own study.

Access Economics in “Migrants Fiscal Impact Model: 2008 Update” estimated the 2007-08 migration program would bring a net benefit of $536 million to Australia. However, this net benefit is insignificant in comparison with the real long-term costs (NOT factored into the model – modeling only 20yr, and not ‘life cycle’ of migrants) of:
1. Retirement / pension phase and associated costs are not included in calculations.
2. Impact on Budget from any children of the migrant group born after arrival in Australia is also not considered.
3. Public goods and infrastructure funded by Commonwealth budget.

http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/migrants-fiscal-impact-april-2008.pdf

So, aside from the environmental arguments and the almost off hand way skilled migrants and other migrant groups are ignored in favour of hundreds of thousands of fee paying students (govt gets a couple of years of GST events and taxes out of them before they get visa) accelerating immigration in its current form is flawed – it is underfunded and uncosted even.

There must be a tipping point at which extra costs/declining services cause a kind of ‘Global Warming’ on the very fabric of life here.

When, who knows?

The point is, govt needs to be upfront with costing and where it wants population/economy to go.

Just saying “I’m all for a big Australia” is childish.

Ludwig
The restrainer on curtailing numbers for the on-shore refugee program is in the 1951 UN Convention. The central part of it is that a refugee cannot be 'refouled', or returned to his home state. But 'refugee' means, not someone who has arrived, but a person who has been determined to have refugee status, ie someone who has already passed through the system for determination of refugee status. By signing the Convention, a signatory state undertakes not to return an asylum-seeker until after the process of determination of refugee status is completed. This routinely goes from the Immigration Department to the Refugee Review Tribunal, and can go to the Federal Court, Full Federal Court and High Court.

Whether the person arrived legally or illegally is irrelevant to the question whether he has the legal status of refugee.

This means it is not open to politicians to 'curtail' the onshore refugee program without first withdrawing from the UN Convention which has been incorporated into the Migration Act. In practical politics, this is not an option and is unlikely to happen any time soon.

However it would be more honest to do so, rather than to carry on this pretence to the world of adhering to the Convention's standards, and then doing everything behind the scenes in bad faith to evade and defeat them.

Withdrawing from the Convention would not prevent us from accepting as many refugees from wherever, on whatever terms we want.

Peter Hume,

That, without a doubt, is the best reasoned post I have seen on the "nay" side of the 1951 Refugee Convention I have seen here.

Still, here is an alternate viewpoint. The 1951 Refugee Convention leaves it to us to make a determination about whether we accept the Refugee's story on how safe it is to return home. Each country is free to make its own determination. I'd say regardless of whether we are signatories to the convention or not, the number we will send back is determined by the number of mistakes we can tolerate - ie the number of times we send someone back and they end up being dropped into a well.

I am not saying withdrawing from the convention would not slow down the number of people arriving. It will. I am just saying it isn't a magic bullet. Unless there is a wholesale change in public attitude we will accept them anyway, and that will become known in the way the articles author claims our stance is known now.

Until reading this article I didn't realise how much pull factors influenced things http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/the-real-reasons-for-asylum-seeker-arrivals-20091106-i0j3.html . I now view being a signatory to the convention as being little more than another pull factor - something that signals we are more willing than some to accept refugees. However there are a lot of pull factors, and I suspect some may be even as effective as withdrawing from the convention, and politically a lot easier to do.