We cannot treat refugees simply as objects of charity. We have to look into the political, economic and military interests in the creation of refugees. All the thousands of Vietnamese refugees are actually a product of the trade embargo against Vietnam and Cambodia. So from the specifics of Vietnam and Cambodia, or Indonesia and East Timor, we can come to the general point. That the uprooting of people, and the creation of refugees, is often not only a by-product of war and starvation, but a deliberate act of government policies.
Refugees are a commodity to be traded for political ends.
In the last two decades while nuclear rivalry has reduced the spectre of world war from the old arenas like Europe or the Europeanised settler colonies of North America and Australia, proxy wars or surrogate conflicts have been fought all over the world. So here I come to the myth of the welfare state. Western welfare states become welfare states because of their investment in war. Not war to be carried out by their own people but proxy wars to be carried out by somebody else killing somebody else. Every proxy war is an arena to promote new arms.