Playing the devils advocate here (not necessarily my opinions, but you asked for rebuttals...)
The origin of that phrase actually has a really interesting story, it turns out when the vatican decided to cannonise a saint, they'd have someone argue against why they should do it. Hence, devils advocate. Just thought i'd chuck that out there.
I'll be the devils advocate to the devils advocate.
- Why should someone be rewarded just because they 'risked their life'? There is nothing about risking your life that makes you inherently deserve reward, you could risk your life jumping off a bridge and that isn't worthy of reward, only ridicule. I think you should focus on how they're risking their lives often to save their families imo, or that their lives are already at risk in their home countries.
I think this is a bit obvious. It is implied why they risked their lives obviously, they did it for their family and to get a better life. It's quite obvious as well they wouldn't risk their lives unelss they actually felt a very strong need to; unless all the asylum seekers are extreme sports fans. Imagine what would go through your mind, risking all this and going to a strange new place. So, in their minds at least and obviously 99.9% of the time in reality, they're in dire straits. It's not something you do while you're bored or for kicks.
- Fair point, the smuggling industry only exists however because of people being smuggled in the first place, so if you punish those people then there'd be less demand on the smuggling industry and they'd (theoretically) go out of business anyway. If we made it that every single person who comes illegally to Australia would get shot on the spot, then of course people would stop trying to come here BUT that's when you enter the issue of morality/ethics and you should focus on how inhumane it is to punish those being smuggled.
The problem is if you simultaneously punish the smugglers and don't open up alternative avenues for people to come to Australia, you're denying them a chance to come. The asylum seekers should be the focus here. If you cut off all the people smugglers, they simply remain in their country, in the horrible situation which they presumably want to escape from. In effect, you're trapping them.
If you look at this from an economics stand point, the only reason this market for dodgy and blackmarket people smugglers exists in the first place is because we don't allow enough legal methods for them to come here. It's sort of like alcohol prohibition in the USA, the mob had a blackmarket stronghold on alcohol untill prohibition was removed, now its fairly rare to see people buying illegal alcohol. Same with crown casino, whether or not you think it was a good idea is a different matter but after crown was open 24 hours illegal gambling apparently dropped quite a lot.
Of course in this situation we'll never be able to take enough in, there'll always be someone else to take in.
If the strategy of letting people actually know that Australia doesn't accept many asylum seekers works, i think its a decent once for reducing numbers.
The fact of the matter is if we try to help absolutely everyone, we spread ourselves too thin. We should focus on taking care of the number of people we already take in rather than dramatically introduce quota's.
-it will contribute to the culture of Australia, we are multicultural after all
I think we're already very multi-cultural compared to a lot of other places regardless of asylum seekers. Places like japan, the population is extremely homogenous. Something like 99% of the population is ethnic Japanese. They only took in like 40 asylum seekers last year i believe. In Australia by comparison we are extremely mixed.
- Only argument here is that people could say that "current" immigrants are not contributing to society and are only worsening it/staying on centrelink, but try throw in some Statistics or something to counter that because as far as I'm aware that's blatantly untrue.
Lets not forget 99% of people who come to Australia do so legally, they get their visas and come on a plane. You dont hear anyone complaining about that. Suddenly, since someone comes on a boat they're some big scary threat. 1% really is nothing.
Well, depends. Its actually very hard to become a citizen of another country, they actually have to want you. In Australia for example its hard unless you've got skills that are in shortage, if you do, you're probably more useful for Australia than the average Australian anyway.
If you're talking about asylum seekers, they come from usually horrible situations and war-torn places. We can't blame them for being unqualified. We have a moral duty to help out our fellow man though.
Imagine if you were in their situation, would you want to be helped? We can apply the philosophical idea of the "veil of ignorance" here. Basically, no one knows what their position will be in society, rich or poor, intelligent or not, disabled or able, asylum seeker or citizen, man or women. We don't know what we will end up as, we should use that as a basis for making decisions. Imagine if you were an asylum seeker, would you want things to happen like this?
In an economic sense, yes, they have less value compared to us selecting some highly qualified person from india or china but we still have a moral duty to help them, especially if they only make up 1% of our intake.
- They may just be humans like the rest of us, but if we let every person in a dire situation come into Australia then our own (and consequently their) quality of life would drastically decrease. Thus as much as we'd like to help everyone, we can't, and can only do so much as we can to provide both us and the immigrants a good quality of life.
This is actually a very good point. You can't have a messiah complex, the fact of the matter is, you just can't save everyone. All we really can aim for is it take in a decent, human number comparable to other countries and look after them the best we can. Help them out with mental health services and equip them with useful skills.
Even then, taking in asylum seekers is only treating the symptoms, not the cause. Constantly taking them in won't fix anything, the best long term strategy is to try correct the reasons that are making them desperate to leave in the first place, poverty, war, persecution, ect.
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