Government admission on boat arrivals

You didn't have to be a genius to have figured this out already, but Australia's Foreign Affairs Minister, Bob Carr, has admitted that significant numbers of boat arrivals are not genuine asylum seekers but economic migrants:

we're getting many advise [sic] that it is economic pressure (and) economic aspirations (driving the arrivals)."

The latest boat, carrying 84 people, sailed directly from Vietnam, where there has been no conflict for 30 years.

Already this year, 759 Vietnamese boat people have come to Australia - the largest group to turn up since just after the Vietnam War - and more than four times the total number that has arrived in the three previous years.

One way to reform the current refugee system would be to resettle those claiming to be refugees in countries with a similar standard of living to their own (the costs of doing so could be borne by wealthier countries). This would remove the incentive toward economic migration.

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A corrupt refugee system

Well, how's this for confirmation of what most of us already knew.

Australia's Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, believes that most of those arriving by boat in Australia are economic migrants rather than refugees. He is therefore concerned that 90% are being granted refugee status:

Up to 90 per cent of people who arrive by boat are considered genuine refugees, but Senator Carr said his "impression" was that now, as arrivals spiked, most were economic migrants.

"They're people seeking an improvement in their economic circumstances, and therefore they've got to get into the regular migration stream," he said.

Senator Carr said immigrants who were not part of any ethnic or religious minority could not argue they were being persecuted in their home country.

"There have been boats where 100 per cent of them have been people who are fleeing countries where they're the majority ethnic and religious group," he said.

"I think it's unarguable that if someone is leaving a country and they are part of the majority religious and ethnic group, then they're not being persecuted in the way that the Refugee Convention describes."

So why are so many accepted as refugees? Part of the answer is that those on the refugee tribunals have been threatened with the sack if they reject too many claims. Also, refugee activists with a clear bias have been appointed to the tribunals. From 2010:

The two members of the Rudd Government’s Refugee Review Tribunal say they operate under a “culture of fear”, with their jobs under threat if they reject too many claims.

They believe two members have already lost their jobs for being too tough, and more could follow when the next round of appointments (and dumpings) are announced next month…

...the four-man panel which decides on RRT appointments includes a refugee activist with a conflict of interest.

John Gibson is also president of the Refugee Council of Australia and works as a lawyer for asylum seekers who are turned down by the RRT.

Here are some appointments from 2010 to the Refugee Review Tribunal:

There’s Charlie Powles, a Refugee and Immigration Law Centre solicitor, and Anthony Krohn, a Melbourne barrister who has worked for many asylum seekers and the Refugee Advice and Casework Service.

Add to them the director of the Brisbane Catholic Archdiocese’s Centre for Multicultural Pastoral Care; a solicitor for the refugee advocacy group Southern Communities Advocacy Legal Education Service; and a solicitor for Sydney’s Immigration Advice and Rights Centre.

Samantha Whybrow, who was recently a visa officer in Sri Lanka, was told in 2012 by a Regional Director not to worry if 90% of humanitarian applications were false "because the numbers are so small".

She believes that many visas were being granted on the basis of false information:

In my interviews with family members of people granted humanitarian visas (who were then applying for visas themselves) I asked why their family member had gone to Australia.
  
In a large number of cases I was provided with responses such as, “the gem business was not good”, “I don’t know”, “business was not good”, “our children are in Australia”, “Australia is giving visas for Sri Lankans”.

When I compared these statements with the statements the humanitarian visa recipient had made to officials in Australia I found extraordinary contradictions that lead me to strongly believe the (humanitarian) claim had been fabricated.

Let me repeat here what I think should happen with the refugee system. The current system, in which refugee applicants are resettled in Western countries, encourages economic migration. A better system would be for the wealthier nations in the world (and not just Western nations) to contribute to a central fund for refugees. This fund would be used to resettle refugees in those areas which are most similar to the refugees' country of origin in both ethnicity and living standard.

That would remove the incentive for economic migrants to claim refugee status and it would also avoid cultural dislocation for both the refugees and the members of the host society.

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Sheridan on border protection failure

Greg Sheridan has written a lengthy article (registration required) about the boat people arriving in ever larger numbers in Australia. There are two interesting facts that he points to. The first is that the boats have become an organised Muslim channel of immigration to Australia:

This boatpeople phenomenon is essentially a determined Muslim immigration...A former senior officer of the Immigration Department spoke to me this week, on condition of anonymity, on the way the illegal immigration trade to Australia has become regularised, from Iran in particular. When he first got involved in this issue, Iranians and others would go to Malaysia, then on to Indonesia, and it would be months before they could find a people-smuggler. Now, he says, it is more often like a travel agent service, with everything arranged inside Iran.

Sheridan is concerned that this wave of Muslim immigration will bring to Australia ongoing security problems. So far there have been 40,000 boatpeople arrivals under Labour and this number will increase through family reunion. If you have 80,000 most will be law-abiding, but there will be some who will get involved in terrorism. The larger the overall number, the more difficult it becomes for the security organisations to control the situation.

The other interesting information that Sheridan provides are the unemployment numbers for the boat people. Most of those arriving are low-skilled and with poor English language skills. The rate of employment, even after five years, is abysmal:

The Immigration Department's figures, released last year, revealed that five years after arrival the rate of employment - not unemployment but employment - of Afghans was 9 per cent, while 94 per cent of Afghan households received Centrelink payments. From Iraq, 12 per cent were employed while 93 per cent of families received Centrelink payments. Overall, households that came under the humanitarian program had 85 per cent receiving Centrelink payments after five years. The family reunion cohort had 38%, and skilled migration 28 per cent.

Those are sobering figures. Even the skilled migration programme has 28% of families receiving Centrelink payments. But you can see how costly to the public purse the arrival of boat people really is: roughly 90% are unemployed even after five years in Australia. At the moment there are 3000 arriving every month or 36,000 per year. Of those 30,600 will require ongoing unemployment benefits. In just over three years there will be 100,000 requiring unemployment benefits, plus other family and rent assistance payments, plus the costs of education, health care and so on.

I should point out that even if the economic costs weren't so high traditionalists would still be opposed to mass, ongoing, diverse immigration. That's because we believe that the different ethnic and national traditions are important to preserve, and so we don't want them to be undermined by open borders.

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