REFUGEES TO EUROPE, REFUGEES TO AUSTRALIA: NUMBERS
Europe's boat people numbers make ours look minuscule
It's the summer boat season in Europe. Everyone's out on their boats, including tens of thousands of refugees from Africa making the trip across the Mediterranean. Not all of them make it.
So far this year about 42,000 people have tried to cross the Med to get to Italy. They're from Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria – anywhere in Africa and the Middle East beset by bloodletting. Men, women and children.
Illustration: Simon Letch
About this time last year the comparable number was 3362 arrivals in Italy. The humanitarian problems are escalating at an alarming rate and the EU and UN are thrashing about for solutions.
Sicily bears the brunt of the Italian influx, since the closure of the reception centre on Lampedusa, close to where 366 drowned last October. Greece too is under siege, with the government saying 15,000 undocumented migrants last year attempted to enter Europe.
Italian authorities estimate that there are 800,000 people sitting on the coast of Africa, waiting for a chance to cross.
The mayor of the Sicilian town of Catania was quoted in the press as saying that Europe faced ‘a looming, colossal humanitarian catastrophe’.
That should put our little old ‘illegal maritime arrivals’ problems into perspective, with 51,637 arriving by boat on our shores over five years between 2009 and 2013 (parliamentary research figures). The peak year for us was 2013 with 20,587 arrivals, about half what Italy has received in the past five months.
The Refugee Council of Australia's figures for 2006 to 2011 show Italy had 152,821 irregular maritime arrivals, Yemen a massive 342,192 and even tiny Malta with a population of 420,000 had 9372 arrivals in this period.
The ‘looming catastrophe’ is so serious that the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, is rethinking its approach. It is looking at ways to create safe refugee holding centres in North Africa and the Middle East. In other words, for the first time, the UN is thinking about offshore processing for refugees heading to Europe………..
You'd have to wonder why aren't the Europeans and the UN reaching out to a strongman with the answers, like Admiral Tow-Backs Morrison? He's dealt with a few thousand asylum seekers/refugees on his watch, so why couldn't he scale up to 800,000?
He could transfer his ‘solution’ to the European theatre of war: tow-backs, long periods of detention at a ‘processing centre’ in Somalia with attendant riots, physical and mental deterioration, doses of terrorising from local guards, refoulement, cancellation of legal assistance, then eventual resettlement for genuine refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo……….
Refoulement, or sending people back from where they came, is now one of Morrison's important policy prescriptions.
Last October the minister said: ‘Anyone who may have come from Sri Lanka should know that they will go back to Sri Lanka.’
In view of that, maybe it was not surprising that a Tamil man burnt himself to death in Melbourne. Leorsin Seemanpillai was waiting for the outcome of his claim for asylum.
Australia is particularly pally with the odious Rajapaksa regime in Sri Lanka and seems oblivious to evidence about the treatment of Tamils in that country.
But back to the global perspective. There are all sorts of way to measure our kindness to refugees. The one favoured by the government is to pick our intake under the official UNHCR humanitarian program and measure it on a national per capita basis. That puts Australia at No.3 in the world after the US and Canada.
However, if you look at what we call our onshore intake, people who have been found to have refugee status after arriving by plane or boat, our ranking drops to No.32 on 2012 global figures. We fall below Sudan, Afghanistan, Gambia, Chad and Burundi.
The UN data shows we took 8367 onshore asylum seekers as refugees in 2012, which is 0.61 percent of the global total recognised as refugees.
Since 1978, an average of less than two boat people a day have arrived in Australia.
What's to whinge about?
