Rock and a Hard Place

I don't know how it is in other parts of the world, but in Australia we have a bit of a problem with illegal refugees (altho the term rattles my teeth a bit) attempting to enter Australia illegally via the ocean. They pay huge money to people smugglers who get them from their country and onto a stinking, decrepit boat and send them towards us. These boats are not sea worthy. Most need rescuing by the time they get close to our waters. There was an incident a fe years ago, claims people threw their children overboard to force the authorities to allow them to land. It was false and there is some awesome footage out there of an Australian Navy lady leaping from the Navy ship into the ocean to rescue women and children who had FALLEN off the boat when it started sinking. A common trick is for the smugglers to disable the boat when they see Navy approaching, forcing the Navy to rescue the refugees. The most common is sinking the boat, recently they have started blowing the boats up! Injuring many people in the process. Just yesterday yet another boat load were caught coming from Sri Lanka, little girl of oh I dunno, 10-12yrs old made an impassioned plea to be allowed to live here. *sigh* I just don't know. I am a refugee myself, we went through some pretty horrific things back in Communist Poland. BUT. We came here using the legal channels. We respected the laws of the country. Unfort these people have shown they already have utterly no respect for Australia and the laws we live by. Now they have made THREATS to blow themselves up (with their childen....) or go on a hunger strike (with their children) if we don't let them in. Um... that isn't exactly conductive to raising sympathy. No one like to be threatened, even if we DO understand these threats are made byu people desperate for their lives. But what do we do? Do we throw them back to their homelands where they will probably get killed? We can't let just ANYone in, who knows what their true motives are? How can we even know WHO they are? Unfort many are from Muslim countries and that makes everyone on edge about why they are really coming here, regardless of how moderate they claim to be. So what do we do? We can't just keep them in the Detention Centres, and no way can we just allow them to walk onto our shores and bugger the immigration laws. They make it harder by refusing to bring ID. Do we throw them on a plane back to Indonesia? We all know how well THEY treat people..... What's the solution? Is there even one?