We’ll always welcome migrants who want to join Team Australia
But it’s more than possible to be pro-migrant without supporting an ever larger and ever more diverse immigration program. Indeed, given that migrants choose to come to their new home, there should be no expectation, in making migrants welcome, that they want their new countries to resemble their old ones.
It’s precisely because immigration can touch so many deep chords and can make such a difference to the way people live that it may need to be talked about, and subsequently better managed, especially when very high immigration is driving economic and social strain.
The chaos on the US southern border and the influx of perhaps 10 million people in four years was a key factor in the re-election of Donald Trump. Tens of thousands of boatpeople surging across the English Channel every year, amounting to a peaceful invasion, are behind the rise of the insurgent Reform UK party in Britain.
And in Australia on August 31, upwards of 50,000 people took to the streets, unsummoned by any significant authority figure, in a largely spontaneous cry of concern about the impact of sustained record migration.
As has happened elsewhere, too, many in government and the media used the presence of a handful of extremists in the crowd to discredit all of them as divisive, bigoted and even racist, in a bid to shut down debate.
Countries such as the US, Canada and Australia would not exist in their modern form but for settlement and subsequent immigration. Even Britain has been largely formed by successive waves of immigration by force – the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans – and more recently by post-war migration from the former British Empire, then the EU and now the wider world. Until recently, the countries of the Anglosphere generally have regarded themselves as exemplars of social contentment; not entirely without social tensions but with an Anglo-Celtic core culture and a Judeo-Christian ethos that can and should transcend racial, ethnic and cultural differences.
The argument for high immigration is generally that more migrants make a bigger economy and that individual migrants add to a country’s skills.
In practice, in all the Anglosphere countries, recent migrants are filling the entry-level jobs that locals are reluctant to do. As well, in all of them, immigration is substituting for the children that the native-born seem reluctant to have. It’s sometimes said, especially by the advocates of multiculturalism, that a large and diverse immigration intake improves countries by adding to their linguistic and culinary competence. Then there are the Marxists whose deep agenda is not humanitarianism or anti-racism but to harness “diversity” to erode unity and to dilute an identity they reject.
Immigration at record levels (as is or was until recently happening in all the Anglosphere countries) puts downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs and significant strain on physical and social infrastructure.
Understandably, it’s exacerbating voter anxieties about cost of living and especially younger voters’ anxieties about their chances of buying a home and starting a family. Under such circumstances it’s only reasonable to crack down hard on irregular migration and to significantly reduce legal migration.
As well, with some groups of recent immigrants over-represented in crime and welfare statistics or in Palestine protests, there are anxieties about the impact of continuing high immigration on social cohesion. There should be a stronger insistence that all migrants fully and wholeheartedly commit to their new home’s values – along the lines of the Australian citizenship pledge in which newcomers declare their “allegiance to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey”.
Even if it goes against the grain of some communities, we really do have to insist that freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the equality of the sexes and respect for democracy under the rule of law are a fundamental part of the Australian way of life.
Something the US historically has been good at is reconciling a strong national identity with mass migration. For all that countries have in common, each one is unique and has a right to keep its character and to run immigration with this in mind. Unless migrants are readily steeped in the history and traditions of their new home – unless there’s a strong civic patriotism in the absence of an ethnic one – national stories can be lost and existing citizens can start to fear becoming strangers in their own countries.
It would be wrong to run an ethnically or religiously discriminatory immigration policy, but it’s more than reasonable to take into account values or language, as shown by the number of countries (including Britain and Australia) with citizenship tests.
Countries such as Australia should not have a high immigration intake because lots of foreigners would like to live here, so come on tourist visas and claim asylum; or as students or short-term workers expecting more or less automatically to gain residency and citizenship.
In the end, as with every other aspect of government, immigration policy should serve the national interest. It should make a country stronger and better by bringing in people who will be an asset to the country and add to the lives of its existing citizens.
What’s needed is a better mechanism to ensure that, other than short-term tourists from countries that will readily take their citizens back, all newcomers are making a contribution to their new home from day one.
The best way to make this happen would be to welcome as migrants people who have been offered a job that no Australian could reasonably fill, at a wage that’s clearly above the present market rate, perhaps with a foreign workers’ tax to be paid by the employer to ensure that there’s no incentive to import cheap foreign labour.
In my country, there has always been a ready welcome for newcomers who work hard, obey the rules and join Team Australia. Newcomers who fill a job from day one are not only making an immediate contribution to their chosen country but are on a sure path to integrate and ultimately to assimilate seamlessly into their new homeland.
In the end, every migrant chooses to migrate. If they come for the wrong reasons, it’s not their fault; it’s the fault of governments that don’t make sufficiently clear what’s expected of them. If the rate of migration is causing economic or social tension, again, it’s hardly the fault of the migrants but of the governments that have allowed in the wrong numbers with the wrong skill sets.
No one can be blamed for wanting the better life that the Anglosphere countries can provide to almost anyone from anywhere else. The fault is with governments that use immigration rather than reform to boost their economies and that fail to reinforce with newcomers how lucky they are to have joined the best countries on Earth.
Tony Abbott was the 28th prime minister of Australia.
Just because immigration is a sensitive subject doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be discussed. In settler societies, there’s often a particular reticence because almost everyone is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants, and raising immigration issues can seem personal in a way few other debates are.