Andrew Bolt: Obvious immigration problem needs a solution
CITIZENSHIP Minister Alan Tudge admits we have a problem with immigrants not integrating — so now we need a solution, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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I’M GLAD Citizenship Minister Alan Tudge admits we’re dividing into tribes, with too many immigrants not integrating. But the Turnbull Government still hasn’t got the guts to fix what it’s helping to break. It still won’t admit our immigration intake — now double what it was at the start of the century — must be cut.
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True, Tudge is at least diagnosing the symptoms.
“There is emerging evidence that we are not integrating as well as what we have done in the past,” he said on Wednesday. This isn’t just because 25 per cent of migrants we brought in last year did not speak English, or barely.
“The challenge (of integrating them) is greater today because some diasporas are larger, the migrant intake more diverse and because technology can foster insularity,” Tudge said.
Let me translate. New migrants from some cultures now join huge new ethnic enclaves, where they need never speak English or assimilate. Arabic speakers, for instance, can settle in suburbs such as Lakemba in Sydney. Chinese immigrants can live among their own in Melbourne’s Box Hill. And there many can live tethered to their home culture, thanks to the internet, cheap air travel and satellite TV broadcast from overseas.
Migrants make up more than half the residents in 67 per cent of Melbourne and Sydney suburbs. So where are the Australians the newcomers are meant to assimilate with? And why assimilate, when their children are (falsely) taught in schools that Australia is so racist that it stole tens of thousands of children just because they were Aboriginal?
“We need to stop talking our country down, be it on Australia Day, in schools or in our public discourse,” Tudge rightly says.
“Rather, we need to talk about and think about our nation and community as a place that people will want to integrate into.”
But where are the solutions? Well, the government will try again to get tougher English language tests for immigrants and demand a “demonstrated commitment” to our values.
But why won’t it slash immigration? It’s the sheer scale of the intake now — 208,000 permanent immigrants and refugees each year, plus another 55,000 temporary ones (net) — that turns suburbs into ethnic colonies. Nor will the government drop multiculturalism, the mad policy where we fund people to maintain their own cultures.
So applaud Tudge for seeing the problems. Now demand real fixes.
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