This is not a joke!
The Australian government, completely consumed these days by the arrival of boat people (mostly young Muslim men arriving illegally on Australian shores or being apprehended at sea while approaching Australia) is now asking retired people to take them into their homes as household (or farm) help and as “companions.”
Remember the young Rohingya ‘asylum seeker’ we heard about here the other day. The 26-year-old had been on the run for 11 years and had managed to “scrape together $12,000” to hire a people smuggler. Now, imagine him moving in with granny in order to help her run the vacuum and take out the trash! Companionship? Maybe she could pick up a few words of his particular Bangladeshi dialect.
Here is the story from The Australian:
ASYLUM seekers will be used as live-in companions for retirees and to “help out” on farms across WA under a new homestay scheme starting next month and backed by the Immigration Department.
Live-Every West Australian with a spare room is being urged to sign up for the Homestay Helping Hand program, with hosts paid $50 a week for each asylum seeker in exchange for providing board and food.
Asylum seekers, in return, are urged to “help out around the home or farm”, “pick up the shopping”, or “provide company for someone who’s lonely”.
The scheme will be run by the Australian Homestay Network, which finds accommodation for asylum seekers after they are processed on Christmas Island and released by the Immigration Department on bridging visas while their refugee claims are assessed.
Executive chairman David Bycroft said placements would start within a month and it was a “chance for Australians to put their hand up and be part of the solution instead of complaining about the problem”.
Give people a chance, says 70-year-old volunteer:
“Some of my friends think I’m quite naive and I guess I have a little bit of trepidation because some people are quite anti-refugees and think that anyone who is sympathetic is a bit naive. I don’t agree with that. We should give people a chance.
Readers, there is a certain logic to this. Rather than dumping all of the expense on the average Australian taxpayer, let the do-gooders open their homes and wallets. I’ve advocated a form of this concept in the past myself.
Every “refugee” family coming to the US should be sponsored by a private organization whose job it would be to use charitable (privately-raised) funds to take care of their needs for at least a year and help them assimilate into our culture. This would eliminate the federal contractor middlemen and brokers. We would very quickly learn how many of the do-gooder class are really charitable when it comes to their own personal funds being expended for the grand social experiment.
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