Lethal cost of kindness to asylum seekers on the high seas
- HERALD SUN
- JULY 03, 2014
A boat carrying asylum seekers arrives in the port of Geraldton, Western Australia. Up-sized. Picture: Supplied
THE Greens this week proved they’ve learned nothing about asylum seekers and the lethal cost of “kindness†to them  particularly children.
Our Navy on the weekend intercepted a boat that left India with 153 Tamils on board.
India, a stable democracy with a free press and the rule of law, should not be a source of a single refugee. Any Tamils there, including those who left Sri Lanka, are safe and do not need to flee to Australia.
So this boatload of alleged “asylum seekers†actually seems part of a vast movement of people travelling from poor countries to rich ones in the West in search of wealth, and the Abbott Government is right to try to negotiate their instant return.
The Government is even more correct to be militant in stopping boats. Around the world, Western countries are finding their borders under siege from poor immigrants like never before  well, not since the cataclysmic migration of German tribes into the Roman Empire.
The US now has more than 25,000 Latinos illegally crossing over every month, twice the rate of last year. It already has around 11 million undocumented or illegal immigrants, mostly Latinos likely to form another underclass.
It is a similar story in Europe, which had 103,000 people illegally enter last year, many fleeing violence in Syria, Somalia and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East.
Italy last weekend intercepted another 5000 migrants sailing from North Africa, bringing the total so far this year to more than 60,000.
The rate of arrivals is double that in 2011, when a record 63,000 Africans arrived, many fleeing the violence of the Arab Spring. Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano estimates 400,000 to 600,000 more are waiting to cross over from increasingly lawless Libya.
Even flat-broke Greece has seen 3000 illegal immigrants from the Third World arrive each month. That’s twice the rate of a year ago, even though Greece built a wall to stop them coming through Turkey.
At the other end of Europe, Spanish police last Sunday fought off 500 African migrants trying to break through the iron fence Spain built around Melilla, its semi-autonomous region in northeast Morocco.
What makes this invasion of Europe even more alarming is that the vast majority of the immigrants are Muslim, when so many immigrant Muslim communities are already dangerously alienated.
What’s more, Europe and the US now find their kindness exploited with scary results.
In 2008 president George W. Bush signed a law unanimously passed by Congress decreeing that children from Central America crossing US borders could not be sent back.
They had to be held humanely until the courts released them to a “suitable family member†in the US or placed them in an Unaccompanied Refugee Minor program.
The result: an astonishing 50,000 unaccompanied children, most from Honduras, El Salvador or Nicaragua, have now crossed into the US since October.
Joining them have been thousands of single mothers with children, who are merely given a “notice to appear†in an immigration court before being dropped off at a bus station to go to wherever in the US they want. Few show up for their hearing.
Much the same has happened in Italy.
This year 5000 unaccompanied children as young as 11 have sailed from Africa. Italy, unable to send them back, just encourages more.
We’ve seen this in Australia, too. In October 2010 the Gillard government promised children who’d sailed here illegally would be moved out of detention and into community-based accommodation.
Within three years we had five times more children in government care, and scores had drowned trying to get here. Total arrivals soared to 3000 people a month.
These are some of the lessons so far of asylum seeker policy. But have the Greens and their media sympathisers learned?
Greens immigration spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young (pictured) is already using the 30 children on the last Tamil boat as hostages in a game of moral blackmail. “I am extremely concerned about the children who were on this boat,†she protested with her usual sanctimony.
“We shouldn’t be deporting these people, we should be assessing their claims here in Australia.†Meanwhile, the Daily Mail online publishes “heart-wrenching drawings†sent by children in detention centres, claiming they raise “further concerns about the treatment of the young detaineesâ€Â.
Let them free, is the message.
And if the US and Italy are any guide, we’ll soon see boats loaded with yet more children to smash our resolve.
Populations are on the move. Time for honesty from the Left: how many millions do we really want, and how will they change this country?
Originally published as High seas killing with kindness
Nothing Andrew Bolt writes can be believed.
His work is so riddled with deliberate falsehoods that it is a waste of time and energy trying to analyse them.
The first sentence is a malicious lie:
“So this boatload of alleged “asylum seekers” actually seems part of a vast movement of people travelling from poor countries to rich ones in the West in search of wealth, and the Abbott Government is right to try to negotiate their instant return.”
That is blatantly false. The vast proportion of the world’s 15.4 million refugees are not travelling; they are stuck in camps.
Bolt then writes:
“It is a similar story in Europe, which had 103,000 people illegally enter last year, many fleeing violence in Syria, Somalia and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East.”
If that statistic is true, that is the equivalent in population terms of three people entering Australia.
That is clearly not “a vast movement of people travelling from poor countries to rich ones in the West in search of wealth …”
Bolt is paid to fabricate material which will foment disent, racial prejudice and hate.
Citations available from court cases where he had been shown to be a serial liar as well as a racist.
He deserves not one minute of the attention of anyone committed to building a better community.