The asylum seeker debate has almost never been about the facts, it’s about fear. Most often it’s about baseless fears, cynically manipulated by politicians looking for traction and the mainstream media looking for linkbait and headlines.

Having said that, there have been a number of pieces published in a variety of places that attempt to debunk the disinformation gettting way too much attention in the rest of the media. This is yet another one of those, because the only way to fight hysterical shrieking of myths is with calm reiteration of facts.

Boat people are jumping the queue

An asylum seeker is someone who is seeking asylum but has not yet had their claim assessed; a refugee is someone who has been recognised under the 1951 Convention Relating To The Status Of Refugees as genuinely fleeing persecution and is unable to return to their home country. 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 refuse to resettle you anywhere other than 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. There are no queue jumpers simply because there is no queue.

Refugees Are Overrunning Our Country

Just. Simply. Not. True.

The number of asylum seekers that come to Australia is so small in comparison to the rest of the world that it’s hard to show it on a graph.

As a percentage of our total population, Asylum seekers are negligible. We are not being swamped, we’re being bamboozled by media and politicians.

Asylum Seekers are here illegally

So called illegal immigrants are not arriving in Australia illegally. They arrive 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 from 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. Thus the High Court has disallowed the Malaysia Solution.

Real refugees could come to Australia properly if they just waited

There are roughly 16 million refugees around the world and an additional 47 million forcibly 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%) were actually able to find a new home.

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 on boats because JULIAR is soft on border protection

The data does suggest that the number of people arriving by boat decreased after John Howard implemented the Pacific Solution and has increased again over the last two years. However, as a proportion of the total asylum seeker applications to Australia, boat arrivals are vanishingly small.

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 asylum seeker numbers 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.

Of the 4632 people in immigration detention in 2008, 1958 were over stayers or had their visas cancelled, only 37 were asylum seekers who arrived by boat.

Refugees live on hand outs from taxpayer money and get more than our pensioners

Refugees, that is people who have had their application processed and been accepted as humanitarian immigrants to Australia, have the same rights as any other citizen to apply for welfare. There are no special government payments. The only difference is that they are exempt from waiting periods for some benefits.

The Red Cross and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship provide some assistance to asylum seekers in mandatory detention or on community release, so they can meet basic needs. The financial component is less than any Centrelink benefits available to all Australian Citizens. Holding asylum seekers in mandatory detention costs the government between $200 and $400 million dollars per year more than it would if they were on community release, but none of this is in the form of cash payments to the asylum seekers themselves.

They do not get a free house, TV, swimming pool, alcohol or car. They never have.

Refugees will Destroy Our Way of Life

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. While no one can prove something that hasn’t happened yet, over 700,000 refugees have come to Australia since 1945 and our Way of Life has only improved in that time.

The meagre 5,500 boat arrivals last year (40% of our total 13,733 refugee intake) is very unlikely to change that.

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, have been made about every wave of immigration Australia has ever had. Since 1851 Chinese gold rush workers, German wine makers, Eastern European miners, Pacific Islanders in the sugar cane districts, post war Jews and Southern Europeans, Chinese dissidents, Vietnamese, Timorese, Serbs, Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Lebanese, Iraqi and Africans have all made their way to Australia seeking a better life. They found one. As we all did.

Oh, and one more fact in closing - 100% of non-aboriginal people living in Australia are immigrants, or the recent descendents of immigrants; the vast majority of whom were poor, criminal, ill-educated or seeking refuge from persecution. We’re still doing ok.

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