Asylum Seekers.

Yeah isn't it only 5% ilegal immigrants come by boat?

This is also a really good site, specially the bit called 'the facts'
http://www.rethinkrefugees.com.au/?gclid=COuNnaKb86UCFQX3bwodzzU9ng

LOL! I'm glad not everyone want to live like that!
But at least you look after animals right? So the land isn't being totally wasted.

France takes something like 16% EDIT: I mean 16% of the world's immigrants...

I'm pretty sure we've had this conversation before.

This is true. Out of everywhere a refugee could go to seek asylum, we're the furthest away, and the waters between the original nation and Australia are long and perilous. You would have to be in pretty great need to risk it.
I'd say that's why we're not statistically the biggest intakers of asylum seekers.

Yeah we are so isolated! Canada gets a lot too though right, and they are pretty isolated aswell.

I will be opening an animal sanctuary, so yeah land isn't wasted... on humans anyway.

I really think we need to deal with the human rights issues in our own backyard before we start homing others.
There are SO many homeless people  in Australia as it is... so many people who need places to share or places to go to get away from abuse and neglect.
I'm all for giving everyone a fresh start, but I think we should help our own before others.

And the point has already been brought up before, we all live around the coast - Australia may be a big country, but a LARGE amount of it goes unused because people CANNOT live there.

Today's editorial in the Age was one of the most realistic and thoughtful pieces I've seen written in recent times... it's worth asking why our refugee quota has dropped from 17% of total immigration in the early 1990s to as little as 2% in recent times. These figures suggest that we care more about those who are able to bring money to this country and make us rich, than those who face persecution in their own.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/editorial/acting-on-principle-can-stop-boats-and-save-lives-20101216-18zjh.html

"Human tragedy lies at the heart of the so-called refugee problem that has convulsed Australian politics over the years. The issue is not sovereignty, border protection or national security; it is the plight of desperate, vulnerable people who fled their countries in fear of their lives. The foundering of a boat carrying asylum seekers on the rocky shore of Christmas Island is a horrifying reminder of this...
...
A minority of asylum seekers arrive by boat, but they are the focus of attention for no rational reason. Their number exceeds 6000 this year - more than double last year's tally - but 10 times as many arrive by air and overstay their visas. The discriminatory approach to boat arrivals is at odds with success rates of 70 to 97 per cent over the decade of refugees arriving by boat proving their claims. Of the vast majority of asylum seekers who arrive by air, only about 20 per cent gain refugee status. Why then has Australia invested so much, politically and financially (the offshore processing bill has soared past $1 billion), in the ''problem'' of boat arrivals?
...
If our main concerns are indeed to preserve lives and put people smugglers out of business, the simplest, cheapest and most effective solution is also the most principled one. Asylum seekers risk the sea journey because the so-called queue of registered refugees in Indonesia camps is hardly moving. They can wait years for resettlement.
...
Recent annual intakes from Indonesia have been smaller than the number of people on the single ill-fated boat that came to grief at Christmas Island. The best way to honour the memory of the people who died and to stop the loss of lives at sea is to open our hearts and our country to more refugees."

Thanks for posting that, Tarkine. It's really insightful.
Oh, the world we live in.

Canada gets bugger-all onshore refugee applicants, as does Australia, in relation to the number of refugees estimated to exist in Iran (900,000), Pakistan (1.5 million) and globally (15-20 million) - the UN recently found that around 80-90% of the world's refugees find themselves in developing countries (mostly in Asia and Africa), not in places like Australia and Canada. Not only are we geographically distant from the refugee source countries, we also spend billions of dollars on "border security", making it almost impossible for refugees to arrive here "legally".

Canada generally receives zero refugees arriving by boat, although I think there was one boat that recently made it there, all the way across the Pacific Ocean, with some Sri Lankans. Happy to find the current stats for Canada if anyone is interested. But Canada's refugee program is predominantly comprised of those resettled from offshore. Our own offshore refugee program is now almost non-existent, because successive governments (both Labor and Liberal) refuse to increase the quota, instead subtracting places from the offshore program according to the number of refugees who apply onshore.

The point being made in today's Age editorial, posted above, is that there would be less incentive for people to jump on a boat to Australia if we were resettling the refugees sitting around in Indonesia and Malaysia (who are mostly from places like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Burma) more quickly. On current timeframes, they would be waiting 30-40 years to be resettled.

It is also questionable why the refugee and humanitarian quota (currently 13,750) has hardly budged in the past 15 years, while the total migration program has exploded to well over 400,000 people arriving in Australia every year (net immigration is a bit lower, once you subtract the Australians who emigrate overseas, but still hovers between 200,000 - 300,000). If anyone is worried about population and infrastructure, please don't blame refugees for these problems, they make up a tiny percentage of migrants to Australia. Moreover, they are not voluntary migrants - by definition, refugees are forced to leave their country of origin owing to a "well-founded fear of being persecuted".