Update from Australia: Opposition leader says Rudd asylum plan a “fake”

07/22/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In our previous post earlier today we reported that Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has signed a plan with Papua New Guinea to take Australia’s boat people/illegal aliens off their hands. The next logical question is: ALL OF THEM?

Australian opposition leader, Tony Abbott, says that is where Rudd’s action becomes a political ploy to buy time until the next election. PNG can’t possibly take them all.

Abbott suggests reading the fine print in an article ominously entitled: Nations to get asylum call! My first thought was, uh-oh, since the US has already shown its willingness to take over one thousand mostly Muslim Africans who arrived on Malta (illegally) by boat, what is to stop the US State Department from ‘lending a hand’ to Rudd’s Labor party?

Here is the story in The West Australian:

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said the so-called PNG solution was a “fake”.

He said the Prime Minister’s assertion that everyone who came to Australia by boat would now be sent to PNG was not borne out by the two-page document signed by Mr Rudd and Mr O’Neill.

“This is not a solution to our problem,” Mr Abbott said. “This is not a policy to stop the boats. This is simply a pre-election fix. This is simply something that is held together with Blu-Tack and Sellotape to last until the election.

“Mr Rudd has been misleading to the point of dishonesty.”

Shadow immigration minister Scott Morrison said PNG’s Prime Minister had made it clear that the country would not take an unlimited number of asylum seekers, despite Labor claims to the contrary.

Now this makes some sense, of course PNG doesn’t want the diseased, the criminals or the terrorists!

Mr Morrison said those found not to be refugees would become Australia’s problem, as would asylum seekers with communicable diseases, terrorism charges or a criminal background.

“The devil is always in the detail with Mr Rudd, and Mr Rudd always proves to be the devil in that detail,” Mr Morrison said.

Immigration Minister Tony Burke said every cohort of asylum seekers, including unaccompanied minors, women and children, would be sent to PNG when Manus Island welfare standards were improved.

The article lists other countries which may get the call from Rudd, but no mention (so far!) of Obama getting a call!

Come to think of it, I wouldn’t put it past these pols to have a plan to send some to PNG and that’s where the US State Department would pick them up to resettle in your town.

****Update**** More on the growing controversy from the Voice of America. Nothing yet on the US giving a helping hand, but if you see it before I do, please let me know!

Update July 23: Jesuit Refugee Services blasts (no surprise) Rudd saying PNG too poor to handle all the needy refugees on the way.

Downunder: Rudd gets tough with new policy on boat people…

07/22/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Open borders Leftists protest Rudd policy on boat people

…Leftists and Refugee Advocates take to the streets in protest.

Below is what Kevin Rudd, Australia’s new prime minister, said regarding the illegal alien boat people crisis Australia has been seeing in recent years (frankly there is no way to ever stop illegal immigration if one doesn’t CLOSE THE BORDERS).

From my vantage point illegal immigration by mostly Muslim migrants is the primary issue plaguing Australia’s political class in recent years, and it went further out of control during Julia Gillard’s time at the wheel.

From the Guardian:

Under the new arrangement signed with Papua New Guinea today – the Regional Settlement Arrangement – unauthorised arrivals will be sent to Papua New Guinea for assessment and if found to be a refugee will be settled there.

Arriving in Australia by boat will no longer mean settlement in Australia. Australians have had enough of seeing people drowning in the waters to our north.

Our country has had enough of people smugglers exploiting asylum seekers and seeing them drown on the high seas.

We are sick of watching our servicemen and women risking their lives in rescues in dangerous conditions on the high seas.

So the Left is ticked-off and plans more protests this week, see The North West Star:

Youthful leftist activists protesting Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s hardline policy to force asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea will surround his Morningside electorate office on Monday morning.

Around 300 protesters – mostly from the Greens, the Socialist Alliance and the Refugee Action Collective – marched around Brisbane’s CBD on Sunday afternoon vowing bigger protests this week.

Singing out “Pack Up Kevin and Throw Away the Key” they objected angrily, but peacefully, to sending refugees arriving by boat to Papua New Guinea.

Just like in the US, Socialists/Commies are packing the country with needy migrants who will need services in hopes of bringing down the government. This is Cloward-Piven Aussie style!

For our Australia archive (to see how bad it is!) go here.

****Update**** Opposition leader calls Rudd’s plan a fake! (Click here)

Update July 30th: PNG Catholic Bishops say don’t send them here, we are too poor for refugees.

As Rudd takes over in Australia, the looming issue is what to do with the boat people

07/07/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update July 8th: Immigration policy will be what the next election in Australia will hinge on, here at the Herald Sun:

Asylum seeker policy is set to be a major battleground of the election as both the Government and the Coalition promise tougher action.

Thousands of mostly Muslim boat people have been arriving on Australian shores and roiling the political landscape there for years.

This boat packed with Sri Lankans arrived in Australia in April, and many of those on board were promptly flown back to Sri Lanka. Photo: ABC

Note to readers: forget it if you think you can escape to Australia!*

Looks like they too have lost control of their borders!

This NYT article is from last Wednesday, in advance of a meeting that was planned in Indonesia on the boat people crisis. I don’t know how that turned out.

From the New York Times:

Mr. [Kevin] Rudd, who last week replaced the struggling Julia Gillard as prime minister amid record low poll numbers for their governing Labor Party, is facing a hotly contested election currently set for September. No issue looms as large over his chances of retaining power as slowing the record number of rickety boats attempting the perilous crossing between the two countries.

Thousands of asylum seekers fly into Indonesia every year, where they pay smugglers to ferry them in often unsafe, overcrowded vessels to Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean that is its nearest point to Indonesia. Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers, together with Sri Lankans who often sail directly to Christmas Island without transiting in Indonesia, make up the majority of such asylum claims. Accidents at sea have killed more than 600 people since late 2009, and finding a long-term solution has eluded successive Australian governments going back more than a decade to John Howard, the conservative former prime minister.

Experts say recent statements from senior Australian ministers and advisers to Mr. Rudd signal a push to get tough on asylum seekers ahead of the elections as a means of insulating the Labor Party against claims that it has lost control of the country’s borders.

By the way, in 2010 we had a report that the US State Department, in a perversion of international refugee law, was taking some of the Sri Lankans who arrived illegally in Australia to Oakland, CA for resettlement. The Malta doctrine!

Not refugees! Economic migrants! (this statement must be making the heathen rage):

Foreign Minister Bob Carr of Australia, speaking by telephone from Brunei late Tuesday, placed regional security concerns and asylum seekers at the top of the agenda for the summit meeting. He repeated his recent claim that nearly all those now seeking asylum in Australia by boat are economic migrants and thus not entitled to refugee status under the U.N. Refugee Convention, to which Australia is a signatory.

And, get this, once a citizen of Iran gets out of Iran, no country can deport them back to Iran! That sure is one way to spread Islamic colonizers throughout the world! (Don’t forget to read about Al Hijra—the Islamic doctrine of immigration!)

He singled out Iran, which is feeling the bite of U.N. sanctions aimed at getting it to abandon its nuclear program and does not accept the repatriation of its citizens, as a major source of such migrants. He said Australia would be discussing ways to dissuade citizens of that country in particular from attempting the crossing.

About the photo: Here is the story at Radio Australia. By the way, although not Muslims, western countries are concerned that the Sri Lankan migrants are connected to the Tamil Tigers faction which pioneered the use of the suicide belt to make its political point.

*For ambitious readers, we have 100 previous posts on Australia, click here.

Somalis say Australia not taking African refugees

06/19/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

To add to Australia’s already deep troubles over thousands of Muslim asylum seekers arriving in boats, now Somalis are saying they have to go illegally to Australia because they aren’t being considered for refugee status there due to their skin color.

If you are a regular reader here you know Australia is in turmoil over the asylum issue. But, one thing that Australia and Canada have in common that we don’t have in the US is that the conflicts and public debate over refugee/asylum issues are out in the open in the mainstream media. When is the last time you heard any public debate on how many refugees we should be taking and from where in the likes of the Washington Post or the New York Times, or even Fox News?

Come to think of it, that story in the LA Times about the US taking Syrians may be one of the most forthright articles I’ve seen in the US press which normally stays mum when there is opposition to resettlement.

Here are two mentions of the latest headache for the Australian government. Somalis say they are going illegally to Australia because Australia won’t let Africans in through the front door.

From Radio Australia:

Somali refugees waiting in Indonesia, say they’re being forced to take dangerous boat voyages because Australia is refusing to resettle Africans.

The refugees say they have been told by the United Nations refugee agency, in Jakarta, that there’s no point applying to be resettled in Australia.

They wonder whether they’re being rejected automatically from Australia’s humanitarian program because of their skin colour.

Then here is The Australian (you will have to sign-in for the whole story):

PEOPLE-SMUGGLERS in Kenya and Somalia are telling Somalis seeking asylum they can easily get them to Australia through Malaysia and Indonesia. Australian Somali Association president Abdullahi Farah said he had been expecting an influx of Somalis arriving by boat as the message of an Australian option grew.

It comes as a woman was found dead on an asylum-seeker boat carrying about 60 Africans and people from the Middle East after it was stopped by HMAS Warramunga east-northeast of Christmas Island on Saturday.

Meanwhile little Collie in Western Australia was not consulted before being informed that asylum seeking families would soon come to live there. But, they say they will be “welcoming” to the “seed” community nonetheless. (The seed reference comes from Welcoming America, here, where refugees are seeds and your community is the soil in which they grow!).

Collie Mail:

LOCAL community leaders have expressed disappointment at a lack of consultation surrounding the relocation of asylum seekers to Collie.

The Collie Mail last week reported that nine families seeking asylum would be relocated to Collie later this month.

Collie Shire president Wayne Sanford said council found out about the plan through the press.

“There was no briefing to councillors before the decision to consider Collie was made,” he said.

Cr Sanford said he was disappointed the Department of Immigration did not consult with the local government body from a planning perspective.

“Collie is a very inclusive and welcoming community and I am sure the community will welcome these people and make sure they are provided with a safe and positive environment and support where and when needed,” he said.

So, for all readers who imagine you can escape to Australia, forget it!

Australians lamenting the high cost of educating asylum seekers’ children

05/24/2013 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I have a pile of stories I want to post, just the run of the mill news about refugee problems around the world—you know the boring stuff. I look on those stories now as a refreshing vacation of sorts from the daily diet of refugee/immigrant terrorist stories of late. Here is one in my stack.

Children of the ever-growing tide of boat people arriving in Australia will cost the taxpayers $55 million over four years, here at the Herald Sun.

The Aussies say more kids are on board these boats, but from what I’ve seen most asylum seekers are young virile Muslim men.

But before I give you some of the story, something just occurred to me—at least in Australia they are having discussions on this topic. That’s just how it is in Canada too where it seems there is a daily dose of political back and forth IN THE MEDIA on the details of the problems and costs those country’s face with their ever-expanding refugee and asylum systems.

In the US we aren’t even having a public discussion on the topic!

When is the last time you saw an article in a major national publication outlining the cost of educating asylum-seeking children?

How many of you even have a rough idea of how many asylum seekers are granted asylum (like the Tsarnaevs) in the US each year?

I follow the press from Canada and Australia and can assure you these discussions are happening at least weekly if not more frequently. Here in the US the media must have decided such topics are verboten! Verboten! Verboten!

Back to the news from Australia:

EDUCATING asylum seeker children will cost more than $55 million over four years amid a record number of minors arriving on boats.

The Opposition has accused the government of cutting university funding while spending millions on meeting the educational needs of asylum seeker children with more than 3000 arriving so far this financial year.

How refreshing is this—they even have an opposition immigration leader!

Opposition Immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said the the costs of educating children had to be met but he blamed the bill on a blow out in boat arrivals.

“While Julia Gillard is actually cutting funding to schools and universities, she is providing an education revolution for asylum seekers arriving on illegal boats,” he said.

“Labor’s budget blowout on asylum seekers of more than $10 billion, includes the federal government paying for the full education costs of students who have arrived by boat.

“Given the record number of children coming on boats, it is not surprising that these costs are so high.”

[….]

Meanwhile, the government revealed the arrival of two new asylum boats carrying 150 people yesterday.

More than 2300 people have arrived so far this month.

Here are some statistics for US asylum seekers granted asylum in 2011.

Of all the individuals granted asylum in 2011, 54 percent (13,484) were granted asylum affirmatively, while 46 percent (11,504) were granted asylum defensively.

An additional 9,550 individuals outside of the United States were approved for asylum status as immediate family members of principal applicants. [The Tsarnaev boys would have been in that number, whatever it was back in about 2002—ed]

So that amounts to close to 35,000 in one year. Gee, wonder what that costs us to educate the kids? And, those are just the ones granted asylum, what about those who are still in the pipeline waiting for approval or who have never identified themselves or been caught yet.

By the way ‘granted asylum affirmatively’ means they got here and asked for asylum, and ‘defensively’ means they got here illegally, got caught and are in removal proceedings and asking for asylum.

Update for comparison: News from burning Stockholm reports that Sweden approved 44,000 asylum seekers in 2012! Most are from Muslim countries. Yikes, no wonder they are suffering! Imagine what those kids are costing the welfare nation.

In 2012 alone, Sweden accepted 44,000 asylum seekers, up by nearly 50 percent from a year earlier.