The word has gotten out that the Rudd Administration has made it easier for refugees arriving by boat to be granted asylum in Australia, so now, not surprisingly, the numbers are on the rise. From the Jakarta Post:
A boatload of suspected Iraqi asylum seekers skirted border patrols and landed Wednesday on a remote Australian island, officials said, becoming the third group of people to reach the country’s territorial waters in a month.
The opposition Liberal Party says the increase in boat arrivals is a result of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s relaxation of the country’s refugee policy last July.
When I first saw this story, I though how on earth were Iraqis getting to Australia on boats, but we learn that they first fly to Indonesia.
Australia has long been a destination for people from poor, often war-ravaged countries hoping to start a new life. Most of the asylum seekers in recent years have come from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. They typically fly to Indonesia before continuing to Australia aboard cramped, barely seaworthy boats.
Indefinite detention on remote islands by the Howard government previously kept the numbers of asylum seekers low.
The number of boats had dwindled after the previous government imposed unlimited detention for illegal immigrants and made it difficult to get refugee visas. But since Rudd’s government relaxed some of those policies last July, 11 boats carrying more than 340 people have entered Australian waters, three of them in the last month.
[….]
Rudd’s government has limited detention to 12 months and gives accepted refugees permanent visas instead of the three-year visas provided by the previous Liberal government.
The article doesn’t mention if these are Muslim Iraqis or Christians.