How Australia Stopped the Boats

The vast majority of asylees are economic migrants, many of which use fraud to attempt to get status in their target countries (see BBC's investigation of asylum lawyers coaching asylees to claim they're gay and facing persecution back home).

According to international standard, asylees must stop and seek refuge in the first safe country. This first safe country is often next-door to where they came from, throwing cold water on their claims.

In the US, asylum seekers often cross through 10 safe countries before arriving in the US claiming they need asylum from a country thousands of miles and several countries in land border away.

The narrative of 'asylum' refuses to acknowledge these basic realities, to horrific effect.

But if you seek asylum in a islamic country you are likely to end up enslaved or used in war efforefforts as involuntary mercenary. The southern coast of the Mediterranean is not really save as an African (except tunesia). Many end up in civil wars like libya, (in the past)syria, sudan or yemen. You can not have asylum in a country with no real rule of law, where belonging to some ruler affiliated family clan is basically necessary for citizenship?

> European policymakers are so convinced of Australia’s offshore processing success that Britain’s government appointed an Australian official to help draft its Rwanda plan. It even copied Australia’s ‘Stop the boats’ slogan. Meanwhile, officials from Denmark’s immigration ministry traveled 13,000 kilometers in 2024 for a fact-finding trip to a processing site on Nauru, the small island nation off Australia’s northeast coast.

> There is just one problem with this narrative: offshore processing did not stop asylum seekers from trying to reach Australia. Instead, Australia’s success lay in turning boats back to their country of origin before they reached Australian shores.

> Many readers will disagree that it is ever right to discourage people from seeking asylum in safe, developed countries. Nevertheless, there are three reasons to take Australia’s example seriously. The first is that many European voters want to reduce the number of asylum seekers coming to their countries, and their elected officials are looking for ways to do that. If they misunderstand the example they are trying to follow, they will spend billions of euros on an approach that is both less effective and less humane than it should be.