Posted on 11/26/2001 5:20:44 PM PST by cmvc3
Whites risk jail to shelter asylum seekers
Matthew Brace in Sydney Sunday November 25, 2001 The Observer
Professional middle-class Australians are risking their homes, families and freedom to shelter asylum-seekers. An underground movement includes several hundred people in Sydney and Melbourne who are hiding escapees from refugee detention centres. If caught the refugees face prison or deportation and their protectors could be jailed for 10 years.
Another 10,000 Australians have publicly offered their services to escaped refugees and those on temporary visas, and pledged to join a civil disobedience network in a bid to force the government to change its hard-line stand on boat people.
Under the government's Pacific Solution policy - in place since August - no asylum-seekers have been allowed to land on Australian soil. Instead they are taken to the Pacific island of Nauru.
The Navy has placed warships across the stretch of Indian Ocean between north-west Australia and Indonesia to stop the many leaky fishing boats that set out each day loaded with people. Most are fleeing Afghanistan or persecution and torture in Iran, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard, and his Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, were vilified by sectors of the international community for their tough stance but their government was returned to office in a general election two weeks ago.
Until now those sheltering escaped refugees have mainly been people in relevant ethnic communities but this emerging resistance movement of dissenting voices is mainly white and conservative.
Writer and broadcaster Phillip Adams prompted thousands of calls from Middle Australia after an article in the Australian calling on people to challenge the Pacific Solution.
Kate (not her real name), a postgraduate student in her twenties, has two men - one Indian, one Iraqi - hiding in her house in a Sydney suburb.
Both men are among the 72 escapees from the city's Villawood Detention Centre this year. 'I spent a sleepless night panicking about whether I had made the right decision but there comes a time when you have to put your principles first,' Kate said.
Kate's decision was influenced by the experiences of her grandmother who knew two Jewish women who fled the clutches of the Nazis but lost their families in the concentration camps.
What? Turned you into a beacon for the world?
America BECAME great because of its immigration, IMHO.
It began to lose its greatness when it turneed its back on Pound's 'poor, tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free'
I used to feel that way, I did.
I used to be very, very pro-immigration. No more. We're all Buchannanites now.
Jessica
Pound's??????.
That should, of course, have read Lazarus'
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