Never mind the Olympics, a record number of international visitors flocked to Australia this year with a vastly different goal in mind.

Immigration Department statistics show 3736 boat people landed on our shores in 1999.

This was a 1700 per cent increase on the previous year, when only 210 people arrived by sea. And it was also the year when the focus of illegal immigration shifted from China to the Middle East, with more than 3000 boat people hailing from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey or Algeria.

Along with about 700 new arrivals from China, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, they will see the turn of the millennium from behind barbed wire - inside two crowded Western Australian detention centres and the Woomera base in South Australia.

The dramatic increase - far in excess of the last great surge of boat people between 1976 and 1981 when 2200 Vietnamese arrived in Australia - has been blamed on organised people-smuggling, primarily based in Jakarta.

After finding their way to the Indonesian capital, illegal immigrants pay the people-smugglers between $3000 and $7000 for passage to Australia on a fishing boat or inter-island ferry.

Most of the 86 boats detected this year landed at Ashmore Reef or Christmas Island - two specks of Australian territory relatively close to Indonesia. Customs and navy vessels then escorted the seaworthy ones to the mainland.

But one of the most dramatic arrivals occurred in April when 60 Chinese boat people waded ashore near Macksville on the New South Wales coast.

The Immigration Minister, Mr Philip Ruddock, has been hard-pressed to hold back the tide of illegal arrivals and forged tough new laws last month that make it much more difficult for boat people to gain permanent residency. Under the regulations, refugees are granted only temporary visas and must prove their refugee status again after three years before they can get a permanent visa.

Refugee advocacy groups, the Australian Democrats and Amnesty, the human rights group, have criticised the laws as unnecessarily tough on people escaping real persecution.

A spokesman for Mr Ruddock said yesterday that Immigration Department intelligence suggested there could still be "a couple of thousand" people in Indonesia waiting for a boat.

"Whether they all still want to come here, given the change of laws is yet to be seen," he said.

In the past decade, 6868 people arrived by boat and 77 children were born while their parents were in detention. Of these, 975 were granted permanent visas, 3035 are still awaiting an outcome to their applications and the rest were returned to their homeland. Immigrants from war-torn Middle Eastern nations have the best chance of remaining in Australia, with immigration figures showing that of the 917 Iraqis and 713 Afghani boat people processed over the past 10 years, not one has been sent back.

There have been many break-outs in Western Australia this year, including a short-lived dash by five Middle Eastern men at the weekend. They escaped through a wire fence at the RAAF's Curtin air base.

The last of them was recaptured yesterday walking towards Derby.