The asylum seeker debate seems to have been taken over by the hysterical right screeching about thousands of terrorists flooding to our shores with the fixed intention of strapping on a suicide vest and blowing up our kindergartens; and the equally hysterical left demanding that the entire 15 million benighted inhabitants of UN refugee camps should be immediately flown to Australia and given a free plasma screen TV and a laptop.

In all the shrieking, some of the basic facts seem to have been lost, so, with not a great deal of research and nothing in the way of expertise, I would like to debunk a few of the more erroneous claims:

Boat people are jumping the queue
Refugee status is determined by the UN Refugee Agency, and you can only apply for refugee status if you are outside your country of origin. That means that if you are a Tamil living in Sri Lanka, a Tutsi living in Rwanda, or anyone living in Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Sudan, you cannot send a polite letter and a 75 page, form with duly notarised copies of all your identification papers, to an Australian consulate and apply for asylum in Australia.

If you attempt to apply for asylum from within your home country you are not a refugee, you are an Internally Displaced Person and the UN will only try to resettle you within your own country.

There are only two ways to apply for refugee status. The first is to leave your country of origin and apply at your nearest UN refugee camp. That might take a while, given that 68% of refugees stay in UN refugee camps for an average of 17 years; there’s also a good chance you’ll get very hungry and possibly quite ill as well, Colombo, Yemen, Pakistan and many camps in Africa are all reporting shortages of food and medical supplies.

The second option is to get to the country you would like to live in and apply directly to them. This is not an illegal option for the lucky few, this is a right conferred on all persons by the UN Refugees Convention, to which Australia is a signatory.

So called Queue Jumpers are not jumping anything, they are acting within their rights according to an international treaty that Australia has signed.

Boat People are Illegal Immigrants.
So called illegal immigrants are not actually here illegally. They are here without a valid visa, which is an entirely different thing. In addition to the UN Refugees Convention, which requires that signatory countries process asylum applications regardless of the visa status of the applicant, this is also enshrined in Australian law (S36 of the Migration Act). Ergo, if the Australian government refuses to process asylum applications by people who arrive here by boat, or if they attempt to stop people coming here to apply for asylum, it is the government that would be acting illegally, not the refugees.

Real refugees could come here if they waited
There are roughly 16 million refugees and asylum seekers around the world, and an additional 26 million internally displaced persons.

The UN processed the applications of 121,000 individuals (0.47% of the total) in 2008 and offered them to the world for resettlement. Around 67,000 (0.26%) departed to their new homelands.

8,536,500 have been living in refugee camps for longer than 10 years. 3,083,900 have been living in refugee camps for longer than 30 years

Realistically, the chances of being able to escape from a refugee camp and re-build a life for yourself or your family are infinitesimally small.

Boat people are not real refugees.
55% of the applications for refugee status from people who arrived by plane were rejected. Somewhere between 2 and 5% of refugee claims by people who arrived by boat were rejected.

Of the total applications world wide last year, 46% were rejected

So it would appear that the vast majority of people who arrive here, legally, by boat are far more likely to be genuine refugees that any other group of asylum seekers.

Lots of asylum seekers come to Australia because Kevin Rudd is weak on border protection.
A recent poll claims that just over half the population agrees with this, 21% disagree and the rest are undecided.

The data does suggest that the number of people arriving by boat decreased after John Howard implemented the Pacific Solution, and has increased over the last 18 months. It is also true that the proportionate decrease of boat arrivals during the Pacific Solution years is greater than the decrease in other types of asylum seekrs. However, the graph below demonstrates that asylum applications in Australia and the arrivals by boat have all followed global trends fairly closely.

Source: www.unhcr.org/statistics/STATISTICS/3ae6bc834.pdf

http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/search?page=search&docid=44eb1e012&query=asylum%20applications%202004

The people who apply for asylum and the methods they choose to arrive at their destination countries are complex. Increasing global unrest, the global economic crisis, reducing numbers and space in other countries and the dwindling UN resources for refugees have all impacted on refugee numbers over the last 18 months and it would be overly simplistic to attribute the very slight increase in boat arrivals to a relatively wishy-washy change in policy by the Australian government.

Lots of so called illegal immigrants arrive by boat.
Of the 4632 people in immigration detention last year, 1958 were over stayers or had their visas cancelled, only 37 were asylum seekers who arrived by boat.

Source: http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/MIG/detention/subs/sub129d.pdf

Accepting asylum seekers would be detrimental to Australia
Herein lies the essence of the problem. If it was easy to pull out a bunch of statistics and prove that the majority of asylum seekers would settle well into their new country and prove to be a boon to the economy and the culture, the whole asylum seeker debate would get much simpler. And it’s not possible to do because you can’t prove something that hasn’t happened yet.

All the arguments against their likely integration – that they are poor, traumatised, don’t speak the language, haven’t had the opportunity to be educated and may bring the remnant of the wars they are fleeing with them, are definitely of genuine concern. However, these arguments have been made before. After World War II, Vietnam, Cambodia and Rwanda, Australia experienced waves of immigration that felt like a threat to the incumbent population. With the benefit of hindsight we can see clearly that there were some difficulties integrating the new immigrants, but those difficulties were relatively minor and were completely offset by the economical and cultural boon the provided.

The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants estimates that there are around 62,000,000 refugees in the world and over 34,000,000 people displaced by war and famine, including internally displaced persons, who remain within their national borders.

Sadly, we can’t take them all, but we can certainly continue to take some, we have the space, the prospect of economic growth and the room for a labour force to build the infrastructure we are going to need anyway. We have more of those things than most countries do. It’s time to take the hysteria out of the debate and look more calmly at the facts.

Oh, and one more fact in closing - 100% of non-aboriginal people living in Australia are immigrants, or are the recent descendents of immigrants; the vast majority of whom were poor, criminal, ill-educated or refugees in some form.

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