I heard this first on BBC world news while driving to work this morning. The U.S. and Australia have reached an agreement to exchange refugees, so that mostly Indonesian boat people stopped by Australia will be shipped to the U.S., and Cuban boat people will go to Australia. Here is the story from CNN.
Does anybody outside the John Howard/George Bush partnership think this sounds like a good idea?
To clarify, the story says that the first group from Australia to be considered are mostly Sri Lankan, but the report on the BBC mentioned that the majority of asylum seekers in Australia are Indonesian.
I think, if this deal holds up, Australians are going to be a little bit surprised. The fact that Cubans are trying to get to the US is only a matter of geographical and political coincidence, the US is close to Cuba and more or less willing to take them in. But for Cubans the objective is to get the hell ouf of there, if Australia is willing to take them in, trust me, Cubans will come.
To illustrate, in 1998-99 I think, there was some cultural exchange between Iran and Cuba and hundreds of Cubans started studying Islam for the chance to go live in Iran. That’s right, Cubans were willing to leave a communist dictatorship for a theocratic one. Obviously the objective was not to go to Iran, but to leave Cuba. Once both governments caught on to the scam the cultural exchange program was stopped.
I think the Cuban refugees will love it in Oz. they won’t have a lot of extended family around, true, but they also won’t have an established group that dislikes them, either.
It’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard for ages.
It would be nice to see both countries dealing with their own problems with at least a nod to basic human rights, even if it’s not popular with the electorate.
Bugger me, I’m becoming a leftie… :eek:
As opposed to where and what group?
I’m WAGging silenus may mean those people who will tell any Hispanic to “get back on the boat” (which in one memorable instance, was a iran-born immigrant to a third-generation cuban-american).
But those morons exist everywhere except, maybe, Anctartica.
I guess one of the nice things about not being able to understand spoken english that well is that I’ve probably missed most of those comments. Ignorance is bliss.
Oh, and actually there are very few of those… it’s only that morons everywhere follow the same rule of trying to look like there’s more of them by being extremely noisy. You know, sort of like a cat trying to look twice its size when hissing at a threat.