So “anchor babies” are now a thing in Australia.
For years, Australia has been praised or damned, depending on one’s political leanings, for its “tough” border policies. Certainly, the policies have been sufficient to end — twice — the more than daily arrivals of boats of illegal immigrants. But the truly determined country-shopper will almost always find a way.
Especially if they can get a few bedwetting politicians, professional activist nosey-nannas and an almost uniformly green-left, hand-wringing press on their side.
Oh, and squeezing out an anchor baby or two, if necessary.
“Anchor babies” were made notorious in the US, where birthright citizenship is exploited by illegal immigrants. So rife is the practice that “birth tourism”, where heavily pregnant women travel to the US as tourists and claim asylum as soon as they drop their bundle, is numbered in the tens of thousands.
Now, anchor babies have come to Australia.
The Biloela family will be freed from Christmas Island and eligible to live in the Perth community while their legal matter continues, after Immigration Minister Alex Hawke intervened in their long-running battle to free them from detention.
First things first: “Biloela family” is a typical journalistic sleight-of-hand. Their family name is Murugappan and they’re not from Biloela in Queensland, but Sri Lanka.
Both parents arrived in Australia illegally. Both were judged not to be refugees and ordered out of the country.
Enter the nosey-nannas and ambulance-chasers.
As we are grimly familiar, grifting country-shoppers never take “sod off home” for an answer — and they can always rely on local parasites to come swarming for a good feed of self-righteousness.
While the two Tamils tried to wear down the government by the standard routine of appeal after vexatious appeal, all of them dismissed, they married and eventually pumped out a couple of kids.
To make it perfectly clear: these two have between them lost ten court cases, all the way to the High Court. All at the taxpayer’s expense. Australian law is also very clear: Australian-born children of asylum-seekers who arrived by boat take on the visa status of their parents at the time.
There is nothing to stop them doing as the highest court in the land has told them to, and going home.
Mr Hawke said other people had returned to Sri Lanka since the civil war ended, noting it was “safe to do so.”
“The civil war has been over since 2009,” he said.
Australian authorities couldn’t have made it any clearer that these people have no right to be in this country and must leave. Still, they had two children, knowing that they, too, had no right to stay in Australia.
To a harsher eye, that might seem an awful lot like trying to game the system using their own children as pawns.
Mr Hawke said the Murugappan family would reside in suburban Perth through a “community detention placement” while their youngest daughter Tharnicaa, 4,receives medical treatment and their ongoing legal matter continues[…]
Mr Hawke said the outcome did not create a pathway to a visa for the family.
Sure — and pigs will fly. The media will churn out sob story after sob story, the grey-haired biddies of “asylum seeker activism” will squawk and flap their flabby arms, and ambulance-chasing “refugee” lawyers will launch vexatious case after vexatious case, until the government caves.
But he said at a future date he would consider whether to lift the statutory bar which prevented the family from applying for non-refugee visas, where their prior attempts had been rejected.
Aaaand… there it is.
“Today’s decision releases the family from detention and facilitates ongoing treatment while they pursue ongoing litigation before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Federal Court and High Court,” a statement from Mr Hawke said.
“The government’s position on border protection has not changed.
The Australian
“Anyone who arrives in Australia illegally by boat will not be resettled permanently. Anyone who is found not to be owed protection will be expected to leave Australia.”
Unless they have a photogenic anchor baby or two.
Or get to sneak into New Zealand for a “Writers’ Festival” — and never leave.
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