My Facebook friends are outraged that Donald Trump is trying to reverse a decision by Barack Obama to accept a bunch of immigrants from prison islands run by Australians. My dumb question for today: if the Australians don’t want these folks as residents/citizens, why do we?
13 thoughts on “Why do we want the immigrants that Australia doesn’t want?”
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We dont. Only those who spend other people’s money want them. I suggest we put these refugees next to the homes of democrat lobbyists in DC
Because your liberal friends believe in open borders. They love paying taxes and they think it is great when we can expand our welfare and entitlement systems.
The hard line taken by Australia is that no one who arrives by boat will ever get to stay in Australia. Shipping them to the US preserves this. Whether this outcome is really a discouragement of future boat traffic is a separate question, though under the current regime it’s reasonable to think that future migrants cannot expect this outcome.
“Because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.”
Got that? All the people of the world don’t have an inner Australian. It’s the inner American we’re trying to rescue.
Many (though not a majority) of Australian people want the country to welcome these refugees; it is the Australian government that doesn’t want to allow them in, in order to discourage people from arriving illegally and then requesting refugee status (the government wants to keep the refugee-claiming process manageable and avoid queue-jumping; there are indeed very long queues in refugee camps in Malaysia etc). This goes with the governments claim that it “stopped the boats”, including using the navy to stop boats entering Australian waters and forcing them back to their port of origin.
Why is there this farce with Australia and with the boats in the Mediterranean that it’s a hard problem to stop these flows? Board and scuttle the boats and imprison the captains for five years. The whole problem ends inside two weeks.
@bobbybobbob You make it sound trivial to “board and scuttle the boats”. The Timor Sea and the Mediterranean Sea are big places. The Aussies and the Greeks/Italians/Maltese do patrols but they catch few of the boats at sea. The “captain” you suggest they detain is just another desperate migrant risking his life to get to the first world.
I’m not saying there should be an open door policy. Australia and Europe can’t handle all the migrants they’re getting.
I’m just saying your solution is hilariously naive.
You are misinformed of the situation. The boats are regularly intercepted. Contrary to what you may think, it’s actually hard to traverse the sea undetected in this age of radar. Even if that were not the case, you don’t need anywhere near 100% interception. The boats come and continue to come because consequences of trying are light. Start scuttling them and imprisoning those responsible and the flow stops almost immediately.
You are also mislead about these people being “desperate” migrants. Overwhelmingly they come from perfectly functional villages. They are wannabe welfare bums.
@bobbybobbob: You are also mislead about these people being “desperate” migrants. Overwhelmingly they come from perfectly functional villages. They are wannabe welfare bums.
Moreoever, nearly 100% of them are able-bodied males between the ages of 15 – 40.
“My dumb question for today: if the Australians don’t want these folks as residents/citizens, why do we?”
Log-rolling. From what I can tell, the US agreed to resettle the refugees as a favor to Australia, a close ally. Trump reneging on the agreement will weaken the relationship between the US and Australia (and weaken trust in future US commitments more generally). Of course Trump may not particularly care.
@bobbybobbob: seems like your quick google search did not provide you enough information to understand the complex problem of intercepting the boats. Rarely are the captains still on board when the boats are intercepted. Often they leave migrants at the helm and leave soon after entering international waters. In many cases ships sink or go way off course in storms because the migrants at the helm have no idea what they’re doing. Even in those cases when there is a crew/captain on board, they blend in so well with the migrants that they are very hard to catch. In Australia the trip is often made in rickety boats from Indonesia to Christmas Island (really close to Indonesia, look in a map), and it is very common that the migrants deliberately destroy the boat in order to be rescued. One well-known case they even dumped fuel and literally blew up the boat. So they have no way of being sent back. Imprisoning them and turning back the boats is illegal under international law, and if you look closely a country’s maritime border is really close to shore — there’s very little countries can do until the boats are already at the door. Australia has a deal with Indonesia where they send back the migrants to Indonesia through some life saving rafts (good business for local fisherman, who then sell these back). The great Tony Abbott had the wonderful idea of buying up all the boats in Indonesia, so migrants could not take the trip.
So the idea of taking action on the crew would do nothing to stop the boats. What the Russians did with Somali pirates was a shot in the back of the head and then dump the bodies at sea. One can always take this approach, but then there’s nothing off limits…
Since the Left has this dream about letting anyone into the country that wants to come in why don’t we compromise.
In the past immigrants coming into the country needed someone to sponser them, insuring that the sponser would take care of them if hard times occurred instead of the taxpayer being stuck with the bill. Let’s bring that back. Start a database of people wanting to sponser immigrants. When someone wants to enter the country, a sponser is assigned and will, for the next ten years, be both financially and legally responsible for the ‘dreamer.’ No welfare and no public assistance of any type would be allowed. If the ‘dreamer’ commits a crime, the sponsor would share the fines and/or jail time. This presents the best of both worlds. Many of us like the country the way it is and don’t feel the need to import a new underclass, but if the Left really wants this, they can put their money and there beliefs on the line. If these people are all the fine upstanding citizens they say they are, it won’t cost the sponsors or the taxpayers a cent and the country will be better off. If they’re not, at least the taxpayers aren’t stuck paying the bill and the sponsor can go to bed each night feeling good about their endless compassion.
I’m guessing, like the optional higher income tax that allows citizens of Massachusetts to show how much they care, there won’t be many takers.
It would probably be straightforward to blockade Libya and turn back the boats that are launched*. Harder to manage Greece because of all the inconvenient islands everywhere, but not impossible. Or you could implement less limp-wristed methods of discouragement without much real difficulty.
However, the underlying problem is obviously a lack of political will to stop african and muslim migration into Europe. There seems instead to be plenty of funding to encourage it.
* For those of you looking for future-oriented investments, transporting migrants has a spectacular ROI. I’m surprised there aren’t hedge funds investing in that concept. Maybe there are.