Work the answer to asylum seekers' woes Pakistani asylum seeker Syed Ejaz Hussein Zaidi, who wants to work, at his share house in Dandenong. MOST days I hear from someone called Hayley Bester, who I assume is a bright young Labor staffer working in the office of Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare. Hayley's job is to email press releases from Mr Clare's office telling us the exciting things her dynamic minister is up to. Most of the emails she sends out, however - lately it seems daily - are entitled "Border Protection Command assists vessel." For, as we all know, Border Protection Command has been assisting a lot of vessels lately. Since August last year, when the hard-as-nails "no-advantage test" was introduced, another 20,000 people - roughly - have fetched up on our shores looking for assistance. Whether or not anything can be done to stop this flow of the uninvited seeking protection is a subject for another day. Perhaps a solution will be found when Tony time begins in September. We will see. What interests me, however, and the people at organisations such as the Red Cross, Salvation Army and the Australian Migrant English Service, is what is going happen to the people who are already here. Since the Government began releasing them into the community earlier this year, about 2000 asylum seekers have been settled in Melbourne on bridging visas, mostly in Dandenong, Springvale, Werribee, and St Albans, according to AMES. It also estimates that another 700 or so will be released into the community each month until Christmas. Until recently, almost all of those released have been young men. Last week the Government began also releasing women and children on bridging visas. The conditions these people are living in are wretched. Single men get $221 a week - 90 per cent of the dole - more than half of which, in many cases, goes on rent. One imagines getting around on public transport eats up a good deal of the rest. You can imagine the pressure this is putting on our charities. On Friday, the Herald Sun reported that hundreds of asylum seekers were without winter clothes and sleeping on floors without mattresses, while more than 100 asylum seeker families did not have fridges. But worse than this physical deprivation - and please don't bother writing to me to tell me how $120 for food must seem like luxury where these people come from - is the psychological damage being done to these people by preventing them from working. On Friday, John Walsh, boss of the humanitarian charity the Bridge of Hope Foundation, jumped to short-priced favouritism for the gong for understatement of the year when he said that, in treating asylum seekers the way we do, "we're sowing the seeds of a problem that might far outweigh short-term political impetus." We are, he said, "seeing an impoverished underclass of fringe-dwellers being created by this policy and, as a result, we could see rising crime and mental health issues." I'd go further than that and say that if the number of young men stuck for years in this limbo keeps rising at the rate it is, we are certain to see a rise in criminality not only from the asylum seekers themselves - for, as the old saying goes, the devil makes work for idle hands - but also against asylum seekers from a resentful local population. Never mind that working itself is a crime for people on bridging visas. This will be especially true if they continue to congregate in places such as Dandenong, Springvale, Werribee and St Albans, which have high unemployment. Indeed, if things keep going the way they are, it's easy to imagine we could end up in a similar situation to Sweden and France. High unemployment among migrants and their children has helped to fuel the rioting that has consumed parts of those countries in recent years. The key to getting these people settled here and fitting in is getting them into work as quickly as possible. After three, four or five years living on the dole, how many of them will be fit for work? Not many, I'll wager, if the local population's experience of welfare is anything to go by. Everybody knows these asylum seekers aren't going anywhere. They're here and they're staying here. Furthermore, as my daily emails from young Hayley show, there are going to be a lot more of them among us soon. We need to quickly get them working.