Devil’s Advocate 1 

First, let’s start with the actual phrase:  Illegal immigrants.  Immigrant is pretty innocuous, everybody who comes to another country is an immigrant.  Illegal is the relevant word here.  I know 2 young people, both hardworking with no children, the husband with degrees in chemistry and physics.  They own their home and have never been in any kind of trouble with the police.  Desirable additions to our community, you would have thought, but because of some points system, they are unable to come from England to Australia.  They should have been told to get a leaky boat, get to Ashmore Reef, and bingo!  They would have enough points to get into Australia.

Some committee in the United Nations Assembly decides that we must, on humanitarian grounds, intercept boatloads of these people at Ashmore Reef, escort them to Australia, house them and allow them access to all the benefits Australia has to offer, including free legal representation.  You have worked here for most of your life.  Do YOU have free legal representation?

We then house them in a secure (we hope!) facility, in which they are housed, clothed and fed, in far better conditions than those from which they have fled.  There are necessary delays while we attempt to ascertain that we haven’t imported terrorists,  spies, saboteurs, fugitives from genuine justice, etc., but this isn’t enough for these illegal immigrants, so they riot, causing damage to Australian property, not to mention to the occasional Australian policeman. 

Do we really want this kind of fanaticism in Australia?  I think not!  Anybody involved in this kind of behaviour should be returned immediately, with no possibility of appeal, to where they came from.

Better yet would be for our patrol boats to intercept the illegal boats at Ashmore reef, provision them, and then tow them back to their port of embarkation.  They should then unload all the people and immediately sink the boats to prevent the same thing happening again as soon as the patrol boat clears the horizon.

This would be far cheaper to the Australian taxpayer, and would make the infiltration of Australia by terrorists and other undesirables much harder.

Devil’s Advocate 2

How can Australians stand by and watch as suffering men, women and children are forced to flee from the oppression of dictators in Middle Eastern countries?  They are forced to sell all their possessions and leave family and friends in order to escape to another country, suffering unimaginable hardships, border crossings, danger and death.  Then they must place themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous entrepreneurs who trade in human misery by fleecing these poor unfortunates of their few resources to sell them passage on appalling, leaky, unsafe boats which are poorly provisioned and liable to sink en route, killing all aboard.  This HAS happened.

If they do somehow manage to survive these hardships they are picked up by Australian patrol boats, and escorted into Darwin.  From there, they are taken to barracks, placed behind bars wire fences, and treated like the worst criminals, when their only crime has been to escape intolerable conditions in their homelands.  There they are left to await their fate, crowded together with no regard taken of the possibility that traditional enemies, for instance Iraqis and Iranians may have to share the same barracks, an explosive situation.