An argument often made by politicians in Australia is that many “asylum-seekers” are not actually seeking asylum from persecution but rather from poverty, that they are economic migrants rather than genuine refugees.
Australia’s ‘stop the boats’ policy
Al Jizz keeps beating  the  drum for the bleeding hearts:
One Afghan man does not reject “economic migrant” theory but says asylum laws leave no option for genuine refugees. (Al Jizz)
Not what Al Jazeera expected from its prize boat person
Andrew Bolt
Al Jazeera berates Australia for its cruelty to boat people, and produces an example of just the kind of person – an Afghan – we’re letting down. But then their Exhibit A says something unhelpful:
An argument often made by politicians in Australia is that many “asylum-seekers” are not actually seeking asylum from persecution but rather from poverty, that they are economic migrants rather than genuine refugees.
Mehak – to my surprise – agrees. Most of those on the boat he took to Australia, he thinks, were planning to give false accounts of their lives in order to qualify for refugee status.
He doesn’t think any of them deserved it.
UPDATE
The Fairfax newspapers and the ABC for years helped maintain Labor’s fiction that boat people were fleeing here for their lives. Today a Fairfax writer concedes that millions of poor people would rather live in rich countries – a perfectly simple and obvious truth that for a Fairfax audience must be presented in polysyllables, complete with economic theory, to make it palatable:
The global income gap has become common knowledge among the world’s 7 billion people and that has fuelled the motivation for migration. Surveys have found that more than 40 per cent of adults in the poorest quarter of the world’s countries would like to move permanently to another country if they had the opportunity. Hundreds of millions of people see migration as their only hope of improving their economic standing.
Economists call this a “disequilibrium phase” – a huge mismatch between supply and demand.
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