Immigration thread. - The Bear and Badger

trippy

IanHamlett wrote:

I don't think the UK's foreign policy can be blamed for the people leaving Eritrea. The UK hasn't done the best job in encouraging their human rights record but it's done the usual amount of badgering and (I think) there's some investment coming to Eritrea if they tidy up a bit.

Apart from in the 1940s when they spent time encouraging the learning of Arabic in the west of the country and encouraging Tigraian nationalism in the highlands, in order to encourage sectarianism.

They also dismantled hundreds of manufacturing plants, the airport, some railroads and a large dock to destabilise the economy, as well as destroying tobacco, coffee and cotton plantations and gold mines.

As you can imagine, even if they hadn't meddled at all in the intervening seventy years there would have been a fair bit of tidying to do.

Sorry for jumping in on what might just be a poorly chosen phrase but 'tidy up a bit' made me wince.

trippy

It's hard to find a troubled country where the UK's foreign policy can't be blamed in some way.

IanHamlett

Well yeah, if you go back a century or two there's a good chance the UK drew it's borders.

trippy

Aye, sadly.

Facewon

IanHamlett

That seems fairly sensible but he doesn't offer up any solutions.

edit - Not that you have to provide alternative parenting techniques to say a man shouldn't beat his child.

IanHamlett

Diluted Dante wrote:

He was doing a bit about tourists.

Only just seen thus. I know. I was using that joke as the basis of another joke.

IanHamlett

SpaceGazelle wrote:

Poor you. Lack of empathy is a significant problem.

Jost looked back at this and think you've misunderstood me, I'll blame it on the hasty re-type.

I was not seriously affected and I was happy to have those inconveniences. It was 100% worthwhile because there were people that were safe and happy instead of (maybe) being dead. But it's not difficult to imagine people being put out more than me or it happening repeatedly, and how that could impact an otherwise neutral view of immigration.

The other thing is it was impacting me, living in the absolute arse-end of the city, on my absolute arse. As I am now, only the doctor's waiting list thing would impact me. If I didn't get sick in that 3 month window (highly likely now that my flat isn't condemned), I wouldn't feel it at all, I'd just be delighted at the new grocery and its weird packets of dried unpronounceables.

[Deleted User]

IanHamlett wrote:

People do shitty things, fuelled by shitty ideas, but I don't think people are shitty.

If people have a shitty idea and then do a shitty thing that does seem to make them a bit shitty. It might not be their fault they're shitty but they most definitely are shitty.

IanHamlett

I don't think there are no shitty people.

[Deleted User]

It's hard to figure out what you mean when you generalise so much.

IanHamlett

Let's just take a potentially inflammatory and easy-to-take-out-of-context imperfect analogy.

X "Black people are criminals"
Y "I don't think black people are criminals"
Z "Chris Brown committed a crime when he beat Rihanna"
Y "I don't think there are no black criminals"
Z "It's hard to figure out what you mean when you generalise so much"

GooberTheHat

We're all at least a little bit shitty. The fact that the device you purchased that you use to post on this forum is more than likely produced by people in exploitative labour, and we know it but turn a blind eye, makes us all a bit shitty.

IanHamlett

Workers are exploited. In exchange we get to buy things we need and want.

It's not good what goes on in some of those places but it's probably better to work in a shitty factory to give your kids a better life than it is to work as a subsistence farmer so your kids can be subsistence farmers.

Facewon

Orly

IanHamlett

Probably.

Facewon

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2015/08/22/close-nauru/14401656002275

Facewon

http://www.julianburnside.com.au/a-brief-account-of-australias-offshore-detention-regime/

Not that brief. Harrowing. Witness testimony is just gut wrenching.

https://theconversation.com/dutton-to-brief-national-security-committee-on-refugees-48591

And now the PR attempts begin.

Facewon

Ms Gillard’s sickening hypocrisy laid bare

It was with disbelief, and finally contempt, that I watched excerpts of the Al Jazeera interview with former Prime Minister Julia Gillard on the topic of her government’s treatment of waterborne asylum seekers, particularly women and children.

Gillard, now a global advocate for the education of girls and women, employed what has disturbingly become a normalised justification for Australian governments’ increasingly callous torment of women and girls in off-shore detention: we do it to stop people drowning at sea.

I have yet to get my head around the psychopathology of those who believe the torment of one group is justified in order to discourage another group from undertaking a particular action. I think such justifications are teetering precariously on just about every ethical and moral ground I can think of, beginning with the Kantian argument that it is reprehensible to use people as a means to an end, and that people are an end in themselves. To treat them in any other way is to dehumanise them, and ultimately, ourselves.

However, Gillard, Rudd, Abbott and now Turnbull apparently have no difficulty with treating waterborne asylum seekers as a means to an end, and justifying their hideous treatment of them as a necessary deterrent in order to save the lives of others.

It has been said more than a million times: arriving in this country by boat, seeking asylum, is not a crime. Indeed, as we are signatories to the UN Refugee Convention, we actively invite people to arrive here by whatever means they manage to employ.

If we want to save people from drowning at sea, and if we care about the humanity of those we already have in detention, we would cease to use the detained as scapegoats, and as examples of what will happen if you legitimately arrive here by boat. We would instead withdraw from the Refugee Convention. People come to Australia because we invite them, through our participation in the Convention, and our agreement with its principles.

Of course, we aren’t about to take that step. So instead we will continue to ill-treat asylum seekers in off-shore detention. We will continue to justify this crime against humanity by claiming it’s done to save lives.

And Ms Gillard will continue to strut the world stage advocating for the education of women and children but not, regrettably, those she imprisoned in mandatory indefinite dentition in tropical hell holes where they are abused, raped and made mad.

Women for Gillard? Non, merci.

Highlight mine. Apologies for the extended triple post, but see the highlighted. Given Abbott has just recently given you lot a literal Thatcher lecture arguing the opposite.

Vela

IanHamlett wrote:

Morally it's quite easy to decide what to do with people when they get here. Treat them with respect and see what we can do. I'm just having genuine difficulty seeing a morally righteous way to deal with the boats and smugglers. It's like one of those questions with a bunch of people on a train track.

If boats and people smugglers are going to leave, stopping the boats from going to one place will just send them to another destination.

You basically need to stop the need for them to leave the regional hub in the first place.

ie in the Australian situation, most migrants are using Indonesia as a stepping stone. If you really want to stop people taking dangerous voyages in un-seaworthy vessels, then you need diplomacy, relations with Indonesia, and process the migrants on Indonesia itself, with each country in the region (Aus, NZ, Indonesia, Malaysia, PNG, Timor Leste, a swathe of pacific islands, and perhaps countries across the world) agreeing to take certain quotas with a minimised time limit for processing.

You will not stop people coming when they are leaving countries at war such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Sri Lanka (e.g. Tamils), Myanmar etc etc.

You can however stop them from sailing across dangerous waters.

Vela

Double post time.

Australia's illustrious previous Prime Minister said that "if you want to stop the boats, you have to break the people smugglers' business model".

To Abbott, that meant turning boats back around to where they set sail from.

I agree with Abbott on one point - people smugglers are opportunistic scum, profiteering from peoples' misery (just like Conservative politicians. Takes one to know one, after all).

But in reality, there is one simple way to break the business model of people smugglers and that is to do the transport work yourself. Simple, safe, humane, and in accordance with international law and treaties to which we are signatories.

IanHamlett

I agree. Tackle the reasons they want to leave in the first place, with aid and negotiations, maybe even military intervention. But that won't help the people leaving now. For them we should be picking them up from closer to home.

Vela

@Skerret @Facewon read this quick

https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/3s3o1g/i_lived_through_two_riots_on_christmas_island_as/

[Deleted User]

IanHamlett wrote:

I agree. Tackle the reasons they want to leave in the first place, with aid and negotiations, maybe even military intervention. But that won't help the people leaving now. For them we should be picking them up from closer to home.

I 100% agree with first bit.
The second bit. I agree in a physical sense, there is no reason to have people travelling 1000s of perilous miles. However we all need to share the burden (especially those of us dropping the bombs). So if we want refugees to stop in the closest safe place then we need to aid that safest place financially at the very least.
That is for the short term, in the end these people will need a safe place to rebuild a life, a refugee camp isn't a long term solution. If what is happening in their home nation can't be rectified and their society can't be rebuilt in a reasonable amount of time (open to interpretation) then refugees need to be distributed throughout stable nations with numbers based on how economically viable each nation is.

That is a minimum.

IanHamlett

I meant like what the UK gov is doing, but not in large enough numbers, by picking asylum seekers up straight from the refugee camps in the problem country. It seem like you think I meant let Greeks deal with it and throw them a fiver chip-in for Pringles and a bottle of Coke.

EU needs a unified response. At least we know that now.

Lord_Griff

They should annex one of the gamma member states of the EU, create a new asylum state and ship all of them there. It would be a utopian melting pot held together by the common thread of everyone looking for a peaceful and fruitful life in a new country they can call their own.

djchump

I hear there's some spare land the Palestinians aren't utilising...

Lord_Griff

I think you're onto something.

GooberTheHat

djchump wrote:

I hear there's some spare land the Palestinians aren't utilising...

What, Israel?

IanHamlett

It was nice of Saudi Arabia to offer to build 200 mosques in Germany instead of taking anyone in.

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