Migration is a conversation the country needs to have
“An” Australia.
My dad was just a child living his best wild, relatively untamed village life in the mountains of Italy’s Valtellina region. His concept of the broader world was limited to Milan, 130km to the southwest. A country on the other side of the world, that could only be reached after three long months at sea? That was not in his mental or emotional orbit.
Dad would tell me many things about that time in his life. Ever the optimist, he glossed over the trauma of leaving everyone and everything he knew to start a new life in the Australian bush in a little town called Quinninup, three hours south of Perth. But his letters tell a different story. Tell my Nonna I miss her, he pleads. Tell my teachers. His child’s scrawl in faded pencil on now wafer-thin paper, not just a precious family heirloom but a tender-hearted window into a little boy’s journey from war-torn Europe to a new country in search of something better.
Our family’s story is both unique and typical of hundreds of thousands of others. They gambled on hope. Risked everything.
Long before the digital age afforded anyone the ability to see what they were getting themselves into, families like my own took an enormous leap of faith.
My Nonno Carlo borrowed money from one of his brothers to pay his way here first, then worked and saved for a couple of years until he could afford to bring out my Nonna, dad and his little sister.
They didn’t see their father for years. Only letters. Walking through dad’s village a couple of years ago, the weight of the isolation they must have felt fell heavily on my heart. Leaving everyone and everything they know. No face time, no phone calls. The staggering courage of that choice and how my brother and I got to reap the fruit of it.
I’ve reflected deeply on our family’s story these past few weeks. It feels like, all of a sudden, Australians are grappling with immigration with a fierceness and level of anxiety not seen for some years. There is a simmering yet overt sense of disenfranchisement among many. A sense of a frustration at either being ignored or labelled a racist (or worse) for demanding a better conversation, answers to questions.
This is yet another area in which Australia’s leaders (a term I use oh so loosely in this season) are, either by design or default, unable to accept and interrogate the nuance of this conversation, approaching it only through an ideological lens.
Let me help them out.
Immigration is neither good, nor bad. Neither right nor wrong. It is about who, how much, when and where. And of course, the all-important one – why?
Immigration is different from mass immigration; from uncontrolled immigration; from unvetted immigration. I don’t know anyone who is anti-immigration. As the child of a migrant, I am very much pro. I do however know many Australians who are concerned about open doors and open borders, with little checks and balances, and a sort of dewy-eyed naivety that speaks to a flawed belief that everyone who seems to come here does so with pure intentions.
There are two critical parts of the conversation that have been ignored. For starters, many Australians don’t understand or are unwilling to accept that there are bad actors who are deliberately trying to erode and influence our way of life. This naivety is born of a lifetime of peace, never having experienced conflict, never knowing what it’s like to flee to safety.
A couple of weeks ago I caught up with a dear friend from my university days, also the child of a migrant, only their family fled Egypt in the ’60s. We mused over the sense of gratitude we were raised with.
“Our parents’ generation retained their cultural and societal ties from the old country but also largely set about integrating with Australian values and social norms – there was a strong desire to give back,” he said, before our conversation turned to the blinkers that many Australians have, still, in relation to immigration in this era.
“Our family escaped an ideology that most people don’t seem to understand is still a threat,” he added.
A threat indeed, as proven by confirmation the extremist Iranian regime was behind violent attacks against Australia’s Jewish community. Still, in the wake of this news I fear many are still asleep.
It is not wrong for Australians to raise concerns about how the federal government is managing immigration. After all, it is about to bring a cohort of so-called “ISIS brides” back to Australia, news that was broken rather than shared by the government.
Even the UK drew the line there, refusing to allow its own back into the country they abandoned to marry into one of the world’s most brutal, violent and extreme terror groups.
There are obvious questions for our government. What is the history of these women in relation to ISIS? How old are the children, what evidence of radicalisation is there?
These are responsible questions, not unreasonable ones.
Italian migrants brought the mafia into Australia after World War II. Later, in the 1980s, Vietnamese migrants imported gang violence and drug trade. Chinese migrants gave us the Triads. The crimes and corruption of these nefarious groups had devastating impacts on our communities. They are a lesson, of sorts around the importance of strong immigration policy.
It is a story as old as time and not limited to one ethnicity or group, so it seems insane to me that we can’t have an honest conversation about the clear and present challenges presenting in 2025.
Even with the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador and the truth of those revelations, I think the weight of these things is yet to land.
The question of who has the privilege of coming to Australia isn’t just about supply and demand of housing, healthcare and that sort of thing, although they are critical factors. None of it can be interrogated without honesty and leadership, which brings me to the second missing piece of the puzzle.
Immigration, like so many other issues, has been politically weaponised. It’s an easy way to shut something down – call someone a racist or a Nazi or a terrorist. This I believe is reflected in the simmering sense of resentment that at least, in part, prompted hundreds of thousands of Australians to take to the streets last weekend. It’s my experience in 30 years working in and around media and corporate affairs, that either in a large or a small scale, a response like that comes from a sense of disenfranchisement. Or put more simply, when people are given the mushroom treatment. You know, kept in the dark and fed manure.
The Prime Minister, in a sort of backhanded way, acknowledged that this week. Speaking about the “March for Australia” events that took place across the nation, he quite rightly and sensibly pointed out that not everyone who expresses a concern about immigration is an extremist. I would argue that most people who express concern about immigration don’t fall into that category.
Hard conversations are important, no, necessary, and this conversation is about as hard as it gets, electorally at least. But it doesn’t need to be. It just takes strong leadership and a commitment to transparency. Will we get that? Another great question.
Is the Liberal Party finished? Don’t bet the rent on it yet
I once asked my late father to tell me the first thing he thought when, as an eight-year-old boy, he was told he would be moving to Australia. “What’s an Australia?” he responded.