Assylum Seekers and Australian Bigotry - a response

After several days of wading through pages of readers' comments on the assylum seeker issue, 90% of which displays typical Australian xenophobia and bigotry, this nice article came along. I'm going to paste it here, but it comes from here:

Goodwill to all but those in boats

• by Paul Syvret
• From: The Courier-Mail
• December 21, 2010 12:00AM

AS the broken bodies of men, women and children continue to be dragged from the waters off Christmas Island, we really need to have a long, hard look at ourselves as a nation.

It is less than a week since the boat foundered and already those who perished are being exploited for tawdry political purposes.

With Opposition Leader Tony Abbott now basically blaming Government policy for the tragedy, and renewing his cynically populist "stop the boats" mantra, we risk dehumanising the victims of the disaster.

This debate transforms asylum-seekers from real people to a "problem" – political pawns and statistics, rather than human beings in desperate need.

Amid all the usual bigotry and xenophobia that has again swirled to the surface like toxic pond scum are the usual half-truths, outright lies and pejorative language ("invasion", anyone?) that sadly come with this debate.

It is downright depressing, for example, to read references to the "illegal undertaking" that these souls had embarked on (Courier-Mail Letters, December 18). Wrong. It is not illegal to set sail across international waters and arrive at a foreign country and then request asylum. That is a basic right under the United Nations refugee charter to which we are a signatory.

In fact it is no more an illegal act than if my safety was somehow threatened and I walked across your frontyard, knocked on your door and asked for help and shelter.

Honestly, reading some of the ill-informed opinion on various blogs in recent days, I can't help but think that if Joseph and a heavily pregnant Mary arrived unannounced some people would like to see them towed back out to sea – Christian principles be damned. Maybe instead of trying to stop the boats, we should rethink the whole approach and help the boats.

Maybe instead of trying to make life harder for people-smugglers (an awful term in itself which makes human beings sound like contraband of some sort), we should be doing their job for them in terms of helping transport some of the world's dispossessed. In the flight to lowest-common-denominator populism (that's Tony Abbott and cheapjack, cheerleader, conservative commentators), we're being told to view the boat arrivals and their human cargo as a problem to be resisted rather than both an opportunity and a duty to embrace. Right now we spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on high-tech naval, Customs and Air Force assets (enough to invade New Zealand on a slow day, particularly if you landed at Auckland on a Sunday afternoon) to protect our borders from a few rag-tag boats of refugees.

And if there was a queue for them to jump somewhere in the deserts of Afghanistan or the jungles of Sri Lanka then I'd like to know about it.

So why not do the following: Firstly, dramatically lift our humanitarian migration intake which, as it stands, is a tiny fraction of total migration and nothing like the refugee demands placed on countries in Europe, Asia and Africa with porous land borders to deal with.

We did this in the wake of the Vietnam War – which we helped wage – and the world didn't end. In fact Australia was much enriched by the new arrivals.

Divert the resources we squander on politically motivated border protection to funding UNHCR-sponsored processing of potential refugees at their most likely ports of origin in places such as Indonesia.

In other words, shorten the queues, up the intake quota and take some of the pressure out of the current demand.

What we're trying to do now is prevent the refugee process ("stop the boats"), rather than control it. All that policy will achieve is more Tampas, more SIEV Xs, more wooden vessels smashed asunder on the rocks.

Don't stop the boats. Replace the unseaworthy hulks with vessels of our own.

Don't target the people-smugglers. Offer a viable, timely, safe and carefully administered alternative.

Give the asylum seekers a proper and efficient queue to join and a guarantee, if not of refugee status then at least of safe passage and a fair and speedy hearing. Don't fight human desperation with force. Meet it with compassion.

Merry Christmas to all of you. And for those of you who believe – or at least claim to ascribe to – the principles Christ taught, ask yourselves the following: Would Christ have met the dispossessed and the desperate with gunboats and razor wire, or would he have extended a helping hand?