@curiousdannii Who is "we"? Is your church going to care for them? Or are you advocating that some people's money be taken from them under threat of imprisonment in order to help other people? (since you asked the "why do people hold this" question – I have no issue with immigration, but is it right to force someone against their will to pay for someone else's right to immigrate?)

@Nathaniel There's no financial defense of our current practise - it's more expensive that onshore detention or processing: abc.net.au/news/2015-07-14/… refugeeaction.org.au/?page_id=3447

@Nathaniel And yes, it is right. You'll get no ground from me going anti-taxation ;)

@Nathaniel I would be interested to hear your arguments against taxation though

Typo above: where the security forces are outsourced to private companies

@lee how would you respond to this?

> In 2001, Sam Parnia and colleagues investigated out-of-body claims by placing figures on suspended boards facing the ceiling, not visible from the floor. Parnia wrote "anybody who claimed to have left their body and be near the ceiling during resuscitation attempts would be expected to identify those targets. If, however, such perceptions are psychological, then one would obviously not expect the targets to be identified."[119

> The philosopher Keith Augustine, who examined Parnia's study, has written that all target identification experiments have produced negative results.[118] Psychologist Chris French wrote regarding the study "unfortunately, and somewhat atypically, none of the survivors in this sample experienced an OBE."[62]

So, none of the people in the sample had an out-of-body experience, making this experiment inconclusive.

However, what would it mean if some people experienced out-of-body experience but could not identify the figures hung below the ceiling?

@curiousdannii Alright, let me change the scenario slightly. Would you feel any differently if, instead of taxing everyone equally, the government randomly selected 1577 homes throughout the country, evicted the owners without compensation, and settled one immigrant in each home?

Would that be "wrong"? Or only "more disruptive" and "less optimal"?

@Nathaniel Of course that would be wrong. There is also no parallel whatsoever with actual Australian policies.

Alright. Of course I recognize that by evicting 1577 homes the government is only "saving" some of the money it's spending on the "immigration problem," so there would still be taxes to pay for associated security measures, etc. But it sounds like you would agree that taxing the general populace equally, say a total of $300 million, is better than evicting 1577 people whose homes value a total of $300 million.

and not just "better" in a "optimal" sense, but "better" as in one is "right" and the other is "wrong"

@Nathaniel Where does tax even enter into the issue of offshore detention? But in any case, moving to onshore detention will be cheaper and morally better

@curiousdannii I'm addressing the general immigration issue, not so much what the best governmental implementation is. I find that disagreement over the implementation is usually not the root issue; it's just the most visible thing. So even if it is true that one solution is objectively better than another, it may be opposed because it is perceived as one step closer to a "pro-immigration" position that is opposed for a variety of reasons

One of which might be the taxation issue. Though again, I don't know your context – I'm just answering the question why some Christians might oppose immigration policies.

@Nathaniel I think phrasing the debate in terms of "immigration" is much more of a US thing (probably a UK/EU thing too.) A few minor parties are anti-immigration, and anti-"Islamification", but the main debate is over asylum seekers. Some people have claimed that extremists have attempted to come in as refugees, so that is a minor factor in the debate, but there isn't any clear evidence that is the case

It's an out of sight out of mind thing.

@curiousdannii We have a similar debate here over asylum seekers, and maybe it's just a US thing as you say, but it seems that the immigration opponents are usually the loudest anti-asylum crowd, and I don't think that's a mere coincidence.

@Nathaniel Oh yeah definitely, that would make sense. If you're against immigration in general then there's a high chance you'd be against one specific source of it.

We only have open borders with New Zealand (and a handful of tiny island nations) and we don't have the long land borders of the US

@Eagle Sadly very few Aussies are Christians or care about the Bible

@curiousdannii If a nation would treat The foreigner like that"love them as yourself"everything would be better.Just how it is.

And I don't agree that Islam is a big problem.

@Flimzy I guess Geert Wilders is a major Brexit supporter?

@LeeWoofenden Do you have any doctrine on when Jesus will return?

@LeakyNun I am generally skeptical of attempts to scientifically demonstrate the reality of the afterlife. My baseline is that there is no scientific evidence of God or the afterlife. And I suspect, despite efforts of Sam Parnia and a few others, there will never be a general scientific acceptance of any such experiments.

@Eagle Yes. I cover it in this article: Is the World Coming to an End? What about the Second Coming?

I literally laughed out loud at this one: imgur.com/gallery/GAopfyp

@Eagle Who is Geert Wilders?