Refugees And Asylum Seekers

3 Pages 653 Words

MIGRANTS: Since the beginning of human society, people have moved from place to place, from region to region, from country to country. Some travelled by foot, others by motor vehicle or boat or plane. Every country in the world has experienced people coming and going at one time or another.

Today, about one hundred million people are making the choice to leave the country of their birth and live somewhere else. Perhaps they can get a better job in another country perhaps they have married a person from another country perhaps their health demands a different climate for their well-being. Their reasons are many and varied. It is said that one in every hundred people in the world today does not live in the country of their birth. Migration is nothing new.

Australia is a nation of migrants. Apart from Australia’s indigenous peoples, our ancestors all came to Australia from other countries by boat or plane. Australia has attracted migrants from the four corners of the globe at every stage of non-indigenous settlement since 1770. Despite such policies as the White Australia Policy’, Australia, like many other countries, has welcomed migrants, those who've come across the seas’ because this country needed a bigger population for its very survival as a nation.

While the benefits of migration are incalculable, every country has the right to regulate its intake of migrants. Like most countries, Australia sets criteria for all people wishing to migrate and live here.

REFUGEES: There is another group of people who come to our shores. These people are not migrants. They are refugees. Their situation is very different. They have fled their homeland because they had no choice. Sometimes war has been the catalyst for their moving. Sometimes they leave because of fear of being tortured or killed.

When refugees migrate’ their transport’ is often harsh and terrifying. Some clamber over barbed wire fences some swim shark infes...