Wednesday, October 03, 2007

'African refugees face integration issues: Andrews'

Kevin Andrews says that the government has cut Australia's intake of African refugees because they have difficulty integrating into Australian society.

"We have detected that there have been additional challenges in relation to some of the people that have come from Africa over the last few years," he told reporters in Melbourne.
"We know that there is a large number of people who are young.
"We know that they have on average low levels of education, lower levels of education than almost any other group of refugees that have come to Australia. We know that many of them, if not most of them, have spent up to a decade in refugee camps and they've spent much of their lives in very much a war-torn, conflicted situation.
"And on top of that they have the challenges of resettling in a culture which is vastly different from the one which they came from," he said.
(The full article from The Age is here.)
Anyway... I feel pretty uneasy about this. It sounds to me a lot like what people said about Vietnamese when I was growing up.

1 comment:

David said...

Makes me so mad.. What can we do against these attitudes?

Is there any point even writing to this government any more?