Dangerous Xenophobia

[Arwon]

I'm still getting over the fact that "Do these people look like refugees to you? They sure don't look like that to me" is a thing a person actually wrote.

 

[Arwon]

Also, from the Parliamentary library

Are asylum seekers ‘queue jumpers’?

There is a view that asylum seekers, particularly those who arrive in Australia by boat, are ‘jumping the queue’ and taking the place of a more deserving refugee awaiting resettlement in a refugee camp. The concept of an orderly queue does not accord with the reality of the asylum process. Paul Power, CEO of the Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA) notes that:

Implicit in this view is that Australia should not be bothered by people seeking protection under the Refugee Convention and that genuine refugees should go to other countries and wait patiently in the hope that Australia may choose to resettle them.

The reality is that only a small proportion of asylum seekers are registered with the UNHCR:
UNHCR offices registered some 119 100 applications out of the total of 923 400 claims in 2009, a 62 per cent increase compared to 2008 ... The Office’s share in the global number of applications registered in 2009 was 13 per cent compared to 8 per cent in 2008 and 12 per cent in 2007. This was due to the higher number of applications registered with UNHCR offices in Malaysia, Somalia and Kenya. Europe remained the primary destination for individual asylum‐seekers with 359 400 asylum claims registered. It was followed closely by Africa (336 400). These two regions accounted for 39 and 37 per cent respectively of all claims.[/i]

Once registered with the UNHCR, many refugees seek resettlement to a country such as Australia. Refugees do not have a right to be resettled, and states are not obliged under the 1951 Refugee Convention or any other instrument to accept refugees for resettlement. It is a voluntary scheme co‐ordinated by the UNHCR which, amongst other things facilitates burden‐sharing amongst signatory states. Resettlement therefore complements and is not a substitute for the provision of protection to people who apply for asylum under the Convention.

Unfortunately we treat refugee resettlement and asylum seekers as a zero-sum game. We should not be doing that.

Edit: Actually, you know what? I'm pretty sure I can disprove the "destroying one's documents because a people smuggler told you do" thing is actually a big advantage by comparing boat arrivals to other arrivals by country. Since to fly here you generally need some form of ID, you'd assume the document-destruction wasn't an issue like it is with maritime arrivals.

Looking at this, currently virtually all boat-arrival asylum seekers have come from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq or Iran (page 36) or are stateless. Refugee status grant rates are all pretty high.

Compare these rates to non-boat arrival acceptance by country (page 23) and you can see the highest grant rates are those same countries, plus Burma, Pakistan and Zimbabwe and a few others. Meanwhile acceptance rates from places like China, Indonesia and Fiji are far lower.

So to compare the countries' refugee status grant rates for 2010-11:

Iraq - Non-boat 93%, boat 90%
Iran - Non-boat 96%, boat 94%
Afghanistan - Non-boat 80%, boat 90%
Sri Lanka - Non-boat 79%, boat 83%

So given that the refugee status grant rates for non-boat arrivals are very high for the countries which also produce all the maritime arrivals, the conclusion really has to be that document destruction isn't creating a big advantage for maritime arrivals.

TL;DR: Most asylum-seekers who arrive in Australia by boat are given refugee status because they come from countries which made them refugees, and they had no alternative in this region but to take their chances with people smuggling operations.