There's an interesting feature essay in today's "Today" newspaper, covering the issue of illegal immigration into Spain (unfortunately not available online). The essay comes down hard on the human traffickers who are behind the whole operation, seeming to take the view that if only both the public and the government came up in arms against these "Mafia", things would be much better. Maybe so - but my view is that whilst human traffickers certainly play a big role in the whole fiasco, they are by no means central to it, and taking them out of the equation will only solve the short-term problems. I remember a time when there was a great amount of excitement on my street (at least amongst the youth population), because people had discovered a "hole" into Europe via Ireland - you got entry into Ireland relatively easily, stayed in some cheap hotel overnight, then took a train (at least this was how it was explained) into Europe. Before that, my friend Sabally tells me, in their day (this was in the 80s), they traveled across the Sahara desert.... My point: there will always be ways to get in, which might be illegal, but which people will exploit nevertheless.
Trying to stop people from leaving by closing as many holes as possible will have as much effect as the worldwide war on drugs has (where there are users, there will be a drug supply), to use a much over-used analogy. What we want to do is make conditions at home so good people want to stay here instead: now that would be a permanent fix...
mutyes we have some similar issues as spain. Here in Australia there are many Asian countries (Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand) who have illigal human imigration attempts to Australia.
ReplyDeleteObviously Australia is a little harder to get into being a huge island... we have no international borders, our country is completely surrounded by ocean. However we still have hundreds of 'boat people' every year trying to illigally find their way into Australia.
Australia does have an open border policy, but permanent VISAs are still something many people strive for.
Our Navy spends a lot of time finding illigal boats in our waters trafficing people. The penalties for the trafficers is harsh, but unfortunatly the new life for the 'boat people' is not much better than back in their homeland. Because Australia is so vast, our government has set up Imigration Camps which in simple terms is a prison.
Illigal Imigrants, Refugees and boat people are placed in these camps until their VISAs, papers or deport orders can be sorted out. Some people have lived in these camps for a few years before being returned to their country - or given refugee status and set up in a home in Australia.
I don't agree with the way our government keeps these people in a prison - but illigal imigration is a big problem here in Australia, and something has to be done... just not sure if we're doing it right at the moment