Thursday, May 28, 2009

Visa changes an invitation to illegal immigrants

From the ABC:

The Federal Opposition says a proposed overhaul of the bridging visa system would further soften Australia's border protection policies, sending the wrong message to people smugglers.

A Parliamentary inquiry says there need to be changes to how the system works, including offering applicants increased assistance to health care, legal services and accommodation.

The Greens say the changes do not go far enough, the Opposition's immigration spokeswoman Sharman Stone says the recommendations would allow people into the community before they have had their identity and security status checked.

"That is just another message right now that I think is very unhelpful as the people smugglers literally get bigger and bigger boats, and become more and more active in what is a very dangerous and inhumane trade," she said.

"The message says, 'Look, we're not even going to complete all of your identity checks before we pass you into Perth or Adelaide or some other community where you can work, where you'll be given unemployment benefits if you can't get a job, where we'll find you decent accommodation'."

Original article

New boat sparks island tensions

From The Australian:

New boat stokes island tensions

Paige Taylor and Nicola Berkovic | May 25, 2009

AUTHORITIES on Christmas Island were yesterday preparing to process a boatload of 73 suspected asylum seekers - the 20th arrival since September - fuelling tensions among local residents over food shortages exacerbated by the island's swelling population.

The boat was intercepted off Ashmore Island at 7am yesterday, as new figures were released showing the number of skilled overseas workers coming to Australia on temporary 457 visas had plunged to its lowest level in four years.

Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus did not give details of where the passengers and four crew were from. They are due on Christmas Island by the end of the week.

The flood of asylum seekers has swollen the island's population by almost 60 per cent forcing the Department of Immigration to employ a community liaison officer to ease ongoing tensions on the tiny territory.

Immigration officials were confronted for more than two hours at a community meeting last week by about 150 angry residents demanding to know how the Rudd Government intended to ease pressure on the resources of the small island, whose population of 1200 regularly endures supply shortages as a result of late shipments from Perth.

There are currently 464 detainees on Christmas Island and 226 immigration workers, contractors and service providers. The presence of the fly-in, fly-out workforce - many of whom have a daily allowance of about $80 for food on top of their wage - has led to recriminations over scarce and expensive fruit at the local store.

Fresh food flown in from Perth is many times more expensive than in mainland stores - one man claimed last week to have paid $21 for three capsicums.

Some residents have grown resentful that the 29 asylum seekers living in community detention on the island are able to buy fruit on store credit provided by the department.

The department moved quickly to squash rumours that asylum seekers were living on unlimited credit. It issued detailed information showing a family of four asylum seekers on Christmas Island would receive $766 in store credit each fortnight and $300 cash.

Full article

"Fate Keeps On Happening": Australia, Boat People, And The Repressed Immigration Issue

From VDARE.com:

“Fate Keeps On Happening”: Australia, Boat People, And The Repressed Immigration Issue

By R. J. Stove
May 27, 2009

Australia’s leftish Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has displayed a fairly formidable range of literary awareness, running the gamut from free market economist F. A. Hayek (whom he resents) to theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (whom he reveres). This daunting curriculum, though, appears never to have included Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

A pity. Because Rudd’s current political plight calls to mind the maxim of that novel’s intrepid but pragmatic heroine Lorelei Lee: "Fate Keeps On Happening".

The "fate" in question is the 2001 national election, which should have been a disaster for conservative John Howard, head of Australia’s government since 1996. Opinion polls for most of 2001 had Howard well behind.

Then two things happened to save Howard’s career. Most spectacularly, 9/11 helped frighten the electorate into having doubts about the advisability of changing horses in mid-stream. But even before that, in August 2001, there was the MV Tampa affair.

The MV Tampa was a Norwegian cargo ship carrying more than 430 (exact numbers are variously given) Third World asylum seekers, mostly Afghans. Howard—fearful of an anti-immigration backlash led by Pauline Hanson, then at the height of her fame—refused to permit the Tampa to enter Australian waters.

This decision, of course, inspired profuse moaning from the commentariat, international as well as local, about Howard’s "xenophobia”. Such moaning increased in its intensity when he proclaimed: "We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come."

On Election Day, the opposition didn’t have a prayer. Howard returned to office with an increased majority, the first of his country’s Prime Ministers to manage this feat since Harold Holt in 1966.

No adult Australian, least of all in Rudd’s Labor Party, has forgotten the humiliation of this defeat. It has burnt its way into Labor’s collective soul, in a way that other, still more severe Labor losses (such as Gough Whitlam’s landslide routs in 1975 and 1977) failed to do.

Consequently immigration hardly figured in the 2004 election campaign. Labor’s leader that year, Mark Latham, was spectacularly erratic in many respects. But on a few themes he possessed a certain native horse sense. He compelled his party to accept a policy of increased penalties for people-smugglers and for those who overstayed temporary visas. No way was Latham about to tolerate accusations by Howard of being soft on illegals.

Suitably impressed by the resultant bipartisan front against illegals getting special privileges, most people-smugglers ceased attempting to ply their noisome trade in Australia’s vicinity.

Until now.

In 2009, an exclamation by the late Heather O’Rourke in Poltergeist II is newly appropriate to describe the advance of boat people: "They’re baaack!"

On April 16, a fishing boat containing Afghan illegals caught fire, killing five people—not three, as originally reported—and injuring 40 more, many of whom were taken to Royal Perth Hospital. (For footage of the fire, see here.)

In the aftermath of this tragedy, the Rudd Government has been left looking much more rattled than at any time since it stormed to victory at the 2007 election. (At that election, it had deprived Howard not only of the Prime Ministry but of his own parliamentary seat in Sydney. Not coincidentally, Howard had not raised the immigration issue again.

The post-Howard "conservative" Liberal Party opposition, led by Malcolm Turnbull—a prize instance of the pseudo-Catholic pro-abort pol with whom Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and John Kerry have made Americans depressingly familiar—has the scent of blood in its nostrils, for the first time since 2007. Turnbull is accusing Rudd and his cabinet ministers of covering up information about the explosion and its aftermath.

"They know full well what’s happened", Turnbull insists. "They’ve known for some time. They should tell the truth. That’s all we’re asking them to do." [Rudd Braces For More Boat People, By David McLennan, The Canberra Times, April 21, 2009]

Turnbull’s critique is purely technical, however. He has specifically repudiated the Howard era’s border protection policies, which alone, if re-established, might have some chance of restoring the situation to the 2001-2007 status quo. In essence, he is emulating John McCain’s shunning of the issue that hurt McCain so badly with the Republican base.

This is a problem, because while no-one in authority will confirm as yet whether the explosion occurred deliberately or accidentally, what remains indisputable is Prime Minister Rudd’s personal anger at people-smugglers.

Such anger makes a conspicuous contrast with his usual public persona (periodically likened to Harry Potter) of cherubic blandness. But he recently called people-smugglers "the vilest form of human life" and hoped that they would "rot in hell".

Whereas in 2001 it was Labor which found itself trapped in a "damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t" vise apropos illegals, now this unenviable victim status is firmly maintained by Turnbull’s Liberal-National coalition. Turnbull’s natural aggression means that he cannot be seen to agree with Rudd’s policies regarding the illegals, or anything else. This aggression has made him publicly hated without being even remotely respected, a fatal combination in politics, as Machiavelli long ago explained.

Meanwhile, opinion polls (carried out, admittedly, before April 16) had Rudd coasting along on a 74 per cent popularity rating. Those who preferred to see Turnbull take over from Rudd as Prime Minister constituted a grand total of 24 per cent.

The same polls found that the usual mid-term blues had simply failed to occur. Rudd’s own party has been not just unscathed but, rather, strengthened. Labor led the Liberal-National coalition by 58 per cent to 42 per cent. That was actually six points better than the result with which it won office two years ago. (A subsequent poll, reported on May 4, showed a slight decline in Rudd’s popularity. Still, 64 per cent of respondents continued to prefer Rudd over Turnbull.)

So on present trends, Rudd is unlikely to lose the next election, due no later than 2010. Besides, incumbency gives a much greater advantage to first-term Australian Prime Ministers than it does to first-term American Presidents.

To find an Australian national leader who lost office after a single term, à la Jimmy Carter or George H. W. Bush, we must go back to the hapless James Scullin, flung out of the Prime Ministry in 1931, during the Great Depression’s depths. (For newsreel footage of Scullin, see here.) Even Whitlam, chaotic administrator though he was, secured for himself a second term, in 1974.

If the boat people issue continues for long enough to do Rudd serious damage, Australia’s conservatives might have a chance at winning power. Or, who knows, they might even raise the issue of legal immigration, effectively kept out of politics by the usual bipartisan consensus since Hanson’s implosion.

But probably, like the GOP in the U.S., they will opt to play the political game in the approved way—and lose.

R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Original article

Although it may have criticised the Rudd Government for its soft stance on illegal immigration, it is highly unlikely that the Coalition would ever risk raising the ire of its corporate sponsors in the pro-open borders business community by coming out in favour of lower levels of legal immigration.

The only thing that could possibly force the Coalition to re-assess its blind committment to mass immigration would be the realisation that immigrants, especially those of the non-European variety, overwhelmingly vote for the ALP. As this article points out, John Howard lost his own seat at the last federal election largely due to Bennelong's large Asian immigrant population. The role of the ethnic vote in toppling Howard in Bennelong should have sent a wake-up call to the Coalition that demography is destiny in politics. As Australia's ethnic makeup changes due to immigration, and the non-European minority population soars, the Coalition may find its share of the vote, like the European share of the population, in irrevocable decline.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The cultural costs of immigration

In an article published back in 1994, U.S. conservative pundit Lawrence Auster warns of the threat mass Third World immigration poses to his country's culture and identity. It is a sobering read, and especially relevant to Australians given that we are facing the same threats in this country.


Massive immigration will destroy America
by Lawrence Auster
INSIGHT ON THE NEWS,
Oct 3, 1994

The current immigration debate, although a welcome change from the politically correct silence of earlier years, is still far too narrow in its focus, dwelling on largely technical matters such as methods of border control, the welfare and health costs of immigration, or the impact of immigration on the economy or on minority employment. As important as those issues are, they distract us from a much greater and more difficult question: What is the impact of immigration on the whole society--on America as a civilization?

To deal seriously with that question in today's climate is to provoke charges of nativism, racism and demagoguery. As immigration advocates are fond of pointing out, fears that immigration would undermine America's national culture were raised in the early 20th century--indeed they were raised against the grandparents of many of the people now opposing immigration. Since that threatened disaster did not occur, the advocates continue, similar warnings are utterly invalid now.

This ahistorical argument ignores the profound and decisive differences between immigration at the turn of the century and today. In the early 20th century, America had a vital and confident core culture and insisted that immigrants assimilate. The immigrants were predominantly European, sharing--despite ethnic differences--a common civilizational heritage with Americans. Most importantly, the great immigrant wave was drastically reduced after two or three decades, ushering in a long period of ethnic equilibrium and social peace. None of those factors obtains today.

The current legal and illegal immigration in excess of 1 million people per year, more than 90 percent of whom are non-European, combined with the higher birthrates of immigrant groups, is rapidly turning America into a multiracial country, with no racial majority, no common culture, and a population doubling to half a billion during the coming century. Despite the fact that many immigrants are good people who want to be part of this country, and despite the fact that immigration may provide some discrete and localized benefits, the overall result of this unprecedented demographic event is the erosion--and ultimately the submergence--of every defining aspect of American civilization.

Foremost of these is our tradition of individual rights. The growing numbers of minorities with distinct ethnic and cultural identities has led to a huge increase in race conflict and race consciousness in America. Each minority group is seeking official recognition and proportional representation as a group--in election districts, in employment, in education, in every area of life--and any failure to reach this utopian "cultural equality" is seen as further proof of America's inherent racism and of the need for ever-expanding state power to uproot the racism. While the problems of American blacks provided the original pretext for group rights, other minorities have acquired their own piece of the multicultural pie. Thus our newly multiracial society is becoming a multinational society, with the perpetual instability, conflict, suspicion and loss of freedom that characterize so many balkanized and Third World countries. Although proimmigration conservatives passionately insist that this shouldn't happen (since they believe that America is defined solely by universal ideas), the point is that it is happening. The assimilation into a common citizenship that was possible for people of European background is not happening for vast numbers of non-Europeans.

Next to pandemic violent crime, nothing so delegitimizes the social order as the presence of millions of persons residing illegally in this country and drawing on public assistance--combined with the government's inability or refusal to do anything about it. The more illegal aliens there are in a given city, all of whom have a powerful interest in the law's not being enforced, the more local officials accede to and even publicly welcome their presence, as Mayor Giuliani has recently done in New York City. When Orange, Calif., was overwhelmed in the early 1990s by a large illegal alien population standing on street corners seeking work, and living crammed into houses in numbers far above zoning limits, local authorities gave up enforcing the law and began instead to accommodate the illegals, building a hiring hall for them, refusing to cooperate with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, even firing a zoning officer who tried to do her job.

The rule of law is being further eroded by the fanaticism and violence characteristic of Latin American politics. When a federal investigator in San Diego County uncovered massive welfare fraud by illegal aliens and the welfare department, he was threatened by Hispanics and attacked as a "racist" by a Hispanic supervisor. Citizens in California, Texas and Florida who have spoken out against illegal immigration have received death threats and had their automobile tires slashed as a warning. As one border-control activist in California said, "It's war out here."

The loss of the rule of law goes hand in hand with the loss of national sovereignty. There are parts of the country, such as New York City's Chinatown and Washington Heights, that are already controlled more by foreign-based criminal gangs than by U.S. authorities. Crime networks from many nations, including Nigeria, Russia, Japan and Jamaica, are operating almost at will in this country. Meanwhile, many immigrant and ethnic leaders--including elected officials--openly state that because of its historic "sins" the United States has no right to control its borders.

The close proximity of widely divergent cultures, many of them lacking Western concepts of rationality, makes it difficult for people in this country to reason together or cooperate as citizens. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, juries in major criminal trials in southern California have been deadlocked because multicultural jury members did not share basic assumptions about right and wrong. Meanwhile, under the concept of "cultural defense," some immigrants charged with murder and rape have been let off with light sentences on the basis that people from non-Western cultures should not be held to Western standards.

On a deeper level, America's mind-blowing heterogeneity has helped undermine any common conception of human nature. Replacing the classic and Judeo-Christian allegiance to a moral truth higher than the individual, the mindless celebration of diversity has become America's new religion.

Thus Richard Barbieri, the head of the Independent Schools Association of Massachusetts, writes: "The essence of multicultural change is to listen to the uniqueness of others and to change our uniqueness to accommodate theirs.... True diversity will involve being humble, first of all, humble before the knowledge and experience of others." In a multicultural manifesto for the virtually all-white city of Dubuque, Iowa (pathetically titled "We Want to Change"), Dubuque's leaders declared: "Diversity calls us into a world that focuses on the many-splendored beauty of others." In all these calls to multicultural transformation, white Americans are never told why they must embrace the "experience," the "knowledge," the "beauty" of others. The diversity of others is supposed to provide some new and wonderful value--but what is that value? Well, the fact that the "others" are not like "us." They exist, therefore we must yield to them. Multiculturalism turns out to be a kind of mysticism.

Yet even as whites worship at the shrine of otherness, Third World advocates openly boast of their hatred for Anglo society and of their intent to destroy it. The publication Border Watch reports that a Hispanic activist told a California woman, who had publicized the problem of illegal aliens receiving in-state college tuition, that "You are the one that needs to go home. This is a Latino home. You people need to go back to wherever you came from.... Get with it. People of color are going to take over sooner or later." Third World intellectuals provide a more sophisticated version of the same message. "The great power of Latin America is its culture," says Gabriel Garcia Marquez in an interview. "We don't spend a dime trying to penetrate culturally, yet we're changing the United States.... We're changing the language, the food, the music, the way of being. We're changing you into a Latin country." Novelist Bharati Mukherjee--a multicultural "moderate"--speaks of Third World immigrants as "we, the new pioneers, who are thinking of America as still a frontier country." Enlarging on her imperialistic reverie, Mukherjee told Bill Moyers, "I want to conquer, I mean, I want to love and possess this country."

What such "possession" means in actual terms can be seen all over America. Areas dominated by immigrants from Third World cultures with low levels of skills and civility have ceased to be part of what most Americans think of as civilization. Vast stretches of Los Angeles, New York and Miami, have become Latin American or Caribbean slums, with deteriorating infrastructure, cheap wares sold on the sidewalk, cars fixed on the street, men loitering about all day in public, and high levels of noise, dirt, disease, disorder and violence. In step with this process of Third Worldization, there is an exodus of whites (and middle-class nonwhites) from immigrant-intensive states and regions. Thus, even as we are admitting more than a million immigrants and refugees into the United States every year, we are turning hundreds of thousands--and soon to be millions--of embittered and traumatized whites into refugees in their own country.

In cities with large Third World populations, the traditions of Western high culture--classical music, ballet, theater and libraries--are dying out through lack of support or face political pressures to change their entire character. Theater critic Thomas Disch writing in the Atlantic Monthly has said that a leading factor in the decline of the Broadway theater is that, as a result of New York's exploding ethnic and racial diversity, there is no longer a common culture to support the theater. Adapting to the demographic changes, America's powerful arts-funding organizations have given top priority to Third World folk arts, while withdrawing support from high-arts institutions such as symphony orchestras.

The erosion of English as our common language (and our link with our historic and literary roots as a nation) is not merely due to ethnic elites forcing so-called bilingualism down immigrants' throats, as proimmigration conservatives argue. It is a direct outcome of the growing size and power of the non-English-speaking population, as could be seen last year when Hispanic-dominated Dade County, Fla., repealed an existing statute--passed by the former Anglo majority--that had made English the sole language of government. The lesson is clear: "Official English laws" by themselves are useless without restriction of immigration.

As a result of immigration, American national culture is being supplanted by Third World cultures. We are now experiencing the following phenomena in this country: a 25-foot-high statue of the Aztec god of human sacrifice is being erected in a public square in the Hispanic-majority city of San Jose, Calif.; Santeria, a cult that practices animal sacrifice, is now constitutionally protected under the First Amendment; huge festivals awash in pagan symbols celebrating "West Indian Day" and "Hispanic Day" regularly disrupt life in major cities; the passionate assertion of Latin American national symbols and myths are exalted by students and teachers in American public schools. At the same, time traditional American symbols and images are being discarded because they don't "represent" our new, non-Western population. Historical art works, such as a statue of a 19th-century pioneer family commissioned by the state of Oregon, and classic plays, such as Peter Pan, have been purged. The Alamo is reconceptualized as a Hispanic monument. The Pearl Harbor memorial is relativized so as not to offend Japanese-Americans.

The most significant change brought by multiculturalism is the total bowdlerization and rewriting of American history from an anti-Western, antiwhite perspective. Exposed to such "reeducation" through all their formative years, young white people coming out of the schools today have no sense of themselves as heirs of a historical nation and tradition--only ignorance and a pervading mood of estrangement. "We have come a long way from schooling that made Europeans into Americans," writer Jared Taylor has remarked. "We now make Americans into nothing at all." In the final stage of this process of dispossession, whites will follow the example of Kevin Costner in the film Dances With Wolves and spiritually abandon America for a non-Western culture.

There are many features in the unique complex of habits and institutions we think of as the American way of life: prosperity, well-functioning private and public institutions, a stable and democratic political system, liberty under law, respect for individual dignity, a high level of philanthropy and social cooperation, the sense of fair play, and the belief in reason and common sense. Multiculturalists may sneer at these values as mere masks of "white hegemony," but one thing is certain. These values have only flourished in white-majority societies, particularly in societies with an Anglo-Saxon cultural basis. As whites lose their numerical, political and cultural dominance, American civilization with all its constituent virtues will also come to an end. That process, already well advanced in our major cities, will only accelerate if America continues to receive a mass migration several orders of magnitude greater in scale and diversity than that which submerged the Roman empire.

Original article

Like in the United States, unfettered immigration into Australia threatens to bring about a massive increase in the size of our population, a radical change in our national culture and identity, and the gradual submergence of our current population by Third World peoples. Put bluntly, continued mass immigration threatens to destroy our nation as we know it.

Surely it is incumbent upon the Australian people to discuss whether or not they want their nation to be radically transformed through mass immigration. Immigration policy should not be decided solely by perfidious, short-sighted politicians, unelected bureaucrats, and self-interested business and ethnic minority lobbies. As Geoffrey Blainey wrote: "Immigration is everyone's business: it is one of the most important national issues. The idea that it is too dangerous to be debated is a mockery of democracy. It is too important not to debate."

Monday, May 25, 2009

Legrain strikes again

Remember Philippe Legrain? The author of the puerile Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them (read Peter Brimelow's scathing review here) is back in the Antipodes once again, preaching the usual open-borders dogma. This time, however, he is in New Zealand.

Michael Courtman of NZ Conservative writes:

Immigrants can't find jobs, so increase immigration

The Press reports that a visiting international economist Philippe Legrain has told New Zealand that it shouldn't cut immigration during the recession

At a Department of Internal Affairs-sponsored meeting in Christchurch, Mr Legrain spouted the usual Economist-style arguments about immigrants boosting creativity and being essential to economic growth, without providing any evidence of how such growth is supposed to boost the living standards of existing citizens.

Instead of trying to protect their jobs by calling for a slowdown in immigration, he said local workers should take it on the chin and direct the blame on "the bankers in the United States," (I wonder if that includes those who lent too much money to recent minority immigrants).

He also said that New Zealand needed more Asian immigration so it could take advantage of the expanding markets in East Asia, while overlooking the fact that the country already has thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of well-educated Chinese, Japanese and Korean speakers, should our export companies require their services.

To illustrate his total disregard for the concerns of local workers, he even admitted that thousands of recent skilled immigrants are struggling to find work as it is:

"During the two weeks he has been in New Zealand, Legrain said he had heard a lot of stories that highly-skilled migrants were unable to get jobs in New Zealand either because their qualifications were not recognised here or companies wanted people with New Zealand experience."

If recent immigrants are already being passed over by local employers, then maintaining high immigration levels during a recession will only make it even more difficult for them to find jobs.

What I think Mr Mr Legrain is really saying here is that because many immigrants are failing to find suitable employment, the country needs to bring in more immigrants to compensate for these lost "units of production," so as to maintain a high rate of economic growth that enriches our elites and avoid any empty berths in Auckland's yacht marinas.

Of course immigration-based economic growth doesn't increase per capita income unless it also lead to an increase productivity levels, and there's little evidence that productivity levels have increased much since National's neo-expansionist immigration drive began in 1990. This can be seen most starkly in the relationship between house prices and wages - since 1990 median house prices have almost tripled, while the average wage has only increased by about 40 percent.

Unfortunately while most people probably aren't particularly impressed by Mr Legrain, John Key apparently is. Recently he announced that National won't be aiming to cut immigration during the recession, and will be sticking with its expansionist target of 45,000 immigrants per year.

That may not sound a lot to overseas readers, but for a small country of 4.2 million, it represents a higher figure than most other developed countries, particularly for one which has little labour intensive industry and derives most of its income from primary production and tourism.

Immigration cutback is pure spin

From WA Today:

Congratulations Immigration Minister Chris Evans for the best spin since Shane Warne was at his peak, but I suspect the Minister himself might be surprised at how easy it's been to befuddle most of Australia's media - they make Mike Gatting look like Don Bradman.

The "leaking'' of the "14% cut" in skilled migration on Sunday worked a treat, capturing all the headlines on Monday and getting a second run with the official announcement that night on the box and in Tuesday's fishwrappers. Oh, wasn't it lapped up, especially by the tabloids - just that little touch of xenophobic nationalism about it that so appeals.

And nearly all of it, as Chris Evans well knows, was misleading nonsense, just throwing the CFMEU a bone to protect a few construction and building tradies, being seen to be doing something about rising unemployment, while actually having no meaningful impact on this year's record migration surge.

Yes, Mr Evans did announce a reduction of 18,500 in the skilled permanent migrant category, "slashing'' the intake by nearly 14% to 115,000.

The Minister might not have mentioned that that still means a 12% increase on the previous year's skilled permanent migrant intake - and that it represents a bare 5% impact on total migration this year, that's running close to 350,000 people. Maybe make that 332,000 now - still a record high.

Full article

There are a couple of things we can deduce from this article.

The first is that Chris Evans is disingenuous.

The second is the vast majority of the journalists who reported the Rudd Government's "immigration cutback" are incredibly obtuse.

And the third is that unemployment levels will inevitably rise as a result of the massive flood of immigrants that the Rudd Government has decided to unleash upon the country.

You can see just how unbalanced federal immigration policy has become against the interests of the Australian people when the immigration doors are opened even wider during the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Book Review - "Overloading Australia"

From The Independent Australian:

OVERLOADING AUSTRALIA - How Governments and Media Dither and Deny on Population

Mark O’Connor and William J. Lines.
Envirobook. 2008. 241 pp. RRP $19.95
Reviewed by Geoff Mosley.

Mankind is suffering from an addiction to economic and population growth which at this stage it appears only nature can cure. The justification given by the sufferers is that both forms of growth are necessary for prosperity as a result of the ever growing consumption they deliver. The fact that endless growth is impossible because the earth’s resources are finite is conveniently ignored. Discussion of the subject of growth is taboo in government circles and is rarely discussed in the media.

Sooner or later, but perhaps only when nature’s retribution becomes more obvious, people will understand the error of their ways and seek an alternative to endless growth. In the meantime there will be a few who will document and examine the contradictions inherent in the present situation and an even fewer number who will provide an outline of a broad alternative way of life to growth.

Mark O’Connor and William Lines focus on the former task, providing a text which is both an encyclopaedia and a bible on the subject of Australia’s overpopulation. Their book provides all the statistics on facts, trends and costs that the reader will need to become informed on the topic and makes the central point that it is the relatively high net immigration levels that are responsible for well over half of Australia’s high population growth, standing at 1.6% per annum in 2008.

Where the book excels is in recording how governments, the media and environment groups have dithered, distorted and obfuscated. In the case of government the main explanation given is their short term outlook and compliance with business interests. The Commonwealth Government avoids developing an open policy by means of electoral and other consultative mechanisms, preferring instead a de facto policy. State governments take population growth as a given.

According to the authors, both the media and green groups have been muted by the playing of the ‘race card’ by business interests.

Why though have environmentalists been so easily put off their stride? The development of a longer term, big picture, view depends upon the effectiveness of the conservationists. According to O’Connor and Lines these groups have fallen victim to the short term concepts of human welfare of the ‘New Class’. So while the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has had a policy which calls for nil net immigration since 1978, for many years now it has been reluctant to show leadership in promoting it.

The book essentially concentrates on its stated aim - ‘to clear the intellectual deck of twaddle and rubbish’ - but does mention the immediate solutions of abandoning pro-natalism and limiting immigration (with greater preference given to refugees); preparing the ground, it is hoped, for more comprehensive solutions addressing every major facet of the way we live.

The book also performs a valuable service in pointing to the counterproductive nature of merely attempting to mitigate problems in a way which ignores population growth. In the case of water they recommend a protest movement involving non-compliance with water restrictions. Otherwise, reduced consumption levels will be seen as an open sesame to growth. A similar point is made with regard to those overseas aid efforts which help maintain unsustainable population levels.

Saving water will of course save you money but endless growth of population will cost you the earth. Getting people to pay for deadly overpopulation is one of the biggest confidence tricks ever perpetrated on the public.

There are a few errors. For instance the 1996 State of the Environment Report was Australia’s second, not its first, and the idea that the ACF may now provide leadership on the immigration issue appears to be wishful thinking given that the Foundation is currently in the process of removing the nil net migration objective from its policy statement. These are minor quibbles compared with the value of this book. Perhaps a future edition would help the reader more if it included a time line of all the past major events relevant to the book’s thesis.

Geoff Mosley is the Australian Director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy. He is a former Executive Director of the Australian Conservation Foundation and former member of the National population Council.

Original article


*UPDATE*

You can read another, more comprehensive review of Overloading Australia here. The review is by sociologist Dr. Katharine Betts, author of many articles and several books on the immigration issue.

Time to tell the truth about asylum seekers

From The Australian Conservative:

Time for the Rudd Government to tell the truth about the asylum seekers

Cory Bernardi | May 1 2009

Almost every day, of every week, of every month, I receive at least one email contrasting the payments made to Australian asylum seekers with the payments made to Australian pensioners. Perhaps you too have seen them as part of a viral information campaign. These emails suggest that illegal asylum seekers receive more government assistance than an Australian pensioner.

Indeed, I have raised this with the Minister for Immigration during Senate Estimates and have been advised that the email campaign is absolutely false. On that assurance, I too have rejected the legitimacy of the emails circulated, confident in the knowledge that they couldn’t possibly be true.

Now I am not so sure.

Two days ago, I read a report that the illegal immigrants who are detained on Christmas Island are receiving thousands of dollars in benefits from the Australian Government for breaking Australian law by breaching our border security.

One report has a family of four receiving $1066 per fortnight for food - more than many Australian resident families would receive from the Government when faced with extreme economic hardship.

Of course, the payment made to the illegal arrivals reportedly doesn’t include the free accommodation (yes that’s right - a house in the community, not a jail cell!), internet access and an unrestricted phone card so they can contact family and friends . One can only imagine the reports of the land of milk and honey during these taxpayer funded phone calls.

Frankly, at the risk of being condemned as heartless, I am appalled by this information. These people, who may or may not be legitimate refugees, have already shown themselves to be criminals by breaking the law to enter Australian territory.

Of course there will be the usual cries that the queue jumpers were so desperate to escape a life threatening situation they were forced to take the illegal and risky venture of coming to Australia in a leaky boat. I say that is absolute nonsense.

I cannot recall a single instance where an illegal boat person entering Australian territory had embarked, uninterrupted from their original country of residence. Recent reports are of Afghani or Iranian citizens who have travelled through Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia before paying a people smuggler tens of thousands of dollars for illegal passage to Australia. Hardly the conduct of someone fleeing for their life.

Indeed, recently a group of seventy Afghans were detained in a hotel in Indonesia because they were abandoned by the people smugglers whom they had paid for passage to Australia. One can just imagine their hardship, lounging around the pool, watching satellite TV, waiting for the chance at the good life in Australia.

Of course, the Rudd Government denies that their policies have encouraged the new wave of illegal arrivals into our territorial waters. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that since the immigration laws were softened there has been an influx of boats. Most recently, one of these voyages has met with the tragic loss of life and reinforced the perception that the Rudd Government is not being straight with the Australian people.

I say enough is enough. It is time for a reality check. We have more boats, filled with illegal immigrants, coming every week. Alarmingly, there are reports that when they arrive here, the passengers are offered greater financial support than some Australian citizens and still the Government is in denial.

The Australian people deserve to know the truth of what is causing this influx of illegal immigrants and exactly how their taxpayer dollars are being spent.

We need an independent inquiry to establish the facts surrounding illegal boat arrivals and the use of taxpayer funds that seem to act as an incentive for them to come here.

Cory Bernardi is a South Australian Liberal senator.


Original article

Saturday, May 2, 2009

The rise of the global suburb

For several decades now, Australia and Canada have been seemingly competing with other for the unenviable title of the country with the highest per capita immigration intake in the world. The huge, unrelenting immigration inflows into these countries essentially make them freaks among the world's nations.

The following article by Canadian academic Stephen Gallagher explores some of the immigration-related problems facing Canada, specifically the threat that sustained, mass Third World immigration poses to Canadian national identity and unity. As one reads the article, one could be forgiven for thinking that Gallagher was describing the situation here in Australia, especially when he talks of a country "with little underlying coherence in the sense of sustaining a primary national identity aside from being a desirable place to settle." As Gallagher explains, far from "enriching" the character of the host nation, the massive Third World immigrant deluge now swamping Australia and Canada threatens to eradicate the remnants of those countries' distinct identities and sense of nationhood.

From Immigration Watch Canada:

Canada and Mass Immigration: The Creation of a Global Suburb and its Impact on National Unity

Stephen Gallagher
McGill University

Recently, the National Post ran a contest to describe Canada “in six words or less.” The winner of this ‘motto contest’ was: ‘Canada – a home for the world’. Given the arrival of 10 million immigrants of diverse origins since the end of the Second World War, this motto is revealing of the new Canada. This is Canada perceived as a country with little underlying coherence in the sense of sustaining a primary national identity aside from being a desirable place to settle. This is Canada viewed as a home away from home for a range of peoples whose identities are rooted not in Canada but in countries and regions of origin. It foresees Canada’s evolution into a global suburb; a comfortable, secure and tolerant bedroom community.

The question I am asking here is how Canada came to have such permissive and non-controversial migration policies and practices. Of course, Canada is not alone in sustaining a mass immigration policy but it stands alone in the world as a country where mass immigration is so fully accepted as a policy norm. I also want to examine some implications of mass immigration for national unity and identity in Quebec and the Rest of Canada (ROC).

To begin with, Canada is not unique in having a contemporary policy of mass immigration although in comparison with other countries of immigration its flow rate is higher. On a per capita basis in 2007, Canada is estimated to have a net migration approximately four times that of the EU, double the US and a third greater than Australia. In addition, Canada’s annual flow of around 250,000 immigrants is very diverse in terms of origins and ethnicity unlike the US where the Latin American influx makes up more than half. With respect to Australia, immigrants from UK and New Zealand made up about 30% of the inflow. As a result, in other words, Canada is undergoing a social and demographic evolution that is much more rapid and profound than that in the other immigrant-welcoming countries. Toronto and Vancouver have majority populations that do not trace their primary roots to Canada prior to the Second World War. In 2006, 46% of the population of Toronto and 40% of Vancouver were born outside Canada and, according to Statistics Canada, it is very likely that in less than ten years from now, Toronto and Vancouver will both have majority ‘visible minority’ populations. Of course the US also sustains a large immigration influx, so fundamental demographic change is also occurring albeit at a slower rate. For example, according to a recent demographic study published by the Pew Centre, if present trends continue by 2050 the non-Hispanic white population will be a minority of the US population.

In Canada, the implications of social and demographic change have not been the subject of much political or public discussion and little effort has been expended considering what Canada will look like 20, 50 or 100 years in the future. Basically, a commitment to a high flow rate constitutes the sum total of Canada’s ‘population policy’. The situation is so unmanaged that studies of new census reports are greeted with careful media review and even amazement as if demographic change was some uncontrollable natural process as opposed to the result of an identifiable public policy.

Regardless of its unmanaged nature, unlike the situation in other developed countries, a review of opinion polls suggests that, in general, the Canadian public appears to support mass immigration.

Also unlike the situation in other developed countries, immigration has not been a significant election concern. In Canada’s most recent election (2005), the governing Liberal Party reiterated its commitment to raise Canada’s immigration intake, from around .7% of the nation population, to 1% of the population. This rate would see an immigration intake of over 300,000 which would be proportional to a French or UK annual intake of 600,000 or an American annual intake of approximately 3 million. An election promise such as this would be political suicide in these countries. The Conservative Party did not challenge the Liberal party on this issue and won a minority government focusing on unrelated issues.

Why is this? I would argue that with the exception of francophone Quebec, the importance, need for, and acceptance of immigration has become an article of faith and almost a litmus test of Canadianism. In other words, immigration acceptance is part of a new Canadian creed. This creed includes the protection and promotion of openness, tolerance and diversity which is operationalized programmatically in a policy of mass immigration, multiculturalism and the defence of human rights viewed broadly.

As a result, mass immigration is celebrated in ROC without much evidence of the fundamental intellectual engagement on these questions taking place in the rest of the developed world.

So the questions I want to address is given Canada’s objectively astonishing migration rates, why is it that immigration-related discussion is marked by a level of passivity which has no parallel in the developed world?

First, there is no political leadership on migration-related issues essentially because Canadian politicians have shown an unwillingness to talk about immigration costs and trade-offs. The foremost reason is straight electoral expediency. The Liberal party has in recent years strongly supported policies of mass immigration and holds the ridings in Canada’s largest cities where most new Canadian communities are centred. In order to form a majority government, the Conservative party needs these ridings and must compete for these votes by delivering benefits to these communities. In addition, the slightest slip up and the Liberal party will paint the Conservatives as intolerant, racist and extremist which will hurt the Conservatives in their own areas of support outside urban areas where there are relatively few immigrants. This is because, as I said before, Canada’s identity is now strongly associated with acceptable immigration-speak. Name calling attacks on the Conservative party and any who question immigration policy are clearly thought to be effective. Otherwise they would not be such a regular feature of the Canadian political landscape.

A second reason there has not been much opposition to mass immigration is that there has been relatively little questioning of Canada’s immigration policies in the media or academia. On certain issues such as security and Canada’s refugee system, there has been a degree of concern expressed, but in terms of connecting this to the core reality of mass immigration, there is hardly a mention. The fact is that the media in Canada broadly and consistently views immigration positively. Even the National Post, which is generally perceived to take a conservative approach to issues, responded to a Statistics Canada report that showed significant immigration-driven demographic change with an editorial entitled “Statistics Canada counts our blessings”.

As for academia, it is awash in government money but little attention is given to assessing the real social, economic and political impact of entry flows. Also, little effort is made to seek out ways to more effectively and efficiently manage the flow in order to optimize the benefits for all Canadians. Instead, academics are primarily focused on concerns related to integration, social justice and the battle against intolerance. From this perspective, nationalism with a focus on the national interest is generally viewed with suspicion and is often associated with xenophobia or racism. In fact, the current head of the Canadian Political Science Association, Keith Banting, argues that this struggle may have ‘reinvigorated’ the left which has been in somewhat of a funk given the success of neo-liberal economic policies. Overall, the preponderance of migration-related Canadian academic activity has come to assume an aggressive ‘progressive’ orientation.

Thirdly, the basic facts about the costs and trade-offs related to immigration in Canada are not commonly known, nor have governments made much effort to make such information available. In the absence of such data, debate more easily spirals from trade-offs to name calling which in turn discourages political and public discussion.

In the US and UK, there is a vast literature on the costs and benefits of immigration. When the US Senate passed Comprehensive Immigration reform in 2006, the Congressional Budget Office produced a cost estimate. In the UK, a special committee of the House of Lords has just completed an extensive public investigation of the costs and benefits of immigration.

Certainly in the past, many countries of the developed world held an elite consensus on the need to depoliticize immigration issues. Academics refer to this as an ‘antipopulist norm’. In such an environment, the dissemination of statistical and cost information was purposefully limited. But the logic of this consensus is premised on migration policy being a relatively peripheral concern which could be managed effectively, more or less, administratively. These conditions no longer hold in most of the developed world and in the Canadian context, the absence of cost data simply limits the transparency of the issue area and works to the advantage of those that resort to emotional appeals. According to James Freeman, evidence suggests that emotional appeals are generally to the advantage of those seeking to maintain a permissive migratory environment.

Fourth, there is the impact of professional advocates: lawyers, rights activists, interest groups, many of whom represent new Canadian communities or service organizations. They all work hard to keep the door open. Immigration is a big industry in Canada. The effectiveness of this lobby can be seen in the general incapacity of the government to effectively legislate, regulate and manage the immigration system. The build up of a backlog of nearly a million approved immigration applications is a symptom of this incapacity. I’m sure the immigration industry will be looking for some kind of one time massive expansion of the immigration intake to clear the backlog. But I would agree with Joe’s (James Bissett's) proposal that we should simply put in place a moratorium on new applications until the backlog is cleared.

Canada simply does not have a high profile immigration advocacy or research organization which questions the need for a mass immigration policy.

So what does all this mean for Canada’s national identity and how does it affect national unity? I would argue we are approaching a crossroads because the implications of Canada’s transition into a diasporatic country are so profound and manifest that the current studied disregard coupled with on-going fundamental demographic change is not sustainable. The implications of this transformation can be broken into the reality in Quebec and the ROC. In ROC , the rooted British and ‘northern’ connected identity has been largely buried and forgotten.

But Francophone Quebec has not forgotten its roots. In Quebec, collective memories, stories and symbols are deeply rooted and the French language constitutes a formidable nexus of identity. In addition, given sovereignty fears and general economic sluggishness, Quebec has not been a relatively attractive destination for immigrants. Therefore, compared to Toronto and Vancouver, Montreal with 20% foreign born population in 2006 has better preserved its rooted character. Overall, unlike in the ROC, the national re-branding exercise of the sixties and seventies with its new Canadian creed and Charter of Rights did not replace the admittedly evolving Quebecois identity.

In Quebec the majority of rooted francophone Quebecers have recently and clearly woken up to the implications of mass immigration on their lifestyle and identity. By setting up the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, the Charest Government inadvertently gave the Quebecois majority an unmediated forum to speak their concerns which, if not pretty, has led to a substantial lifting of public consciousness on migration-related issues. Now both the Parti Quebecois and Action Democratic (ADQ) appear to be considering following in the footsteps of numerous European populist parties that have gained control of their Parliaments on a platform of control of migration which has clearly been identified as the main factor in the decline of the use of French especially on the island of Montréal. This is not surprising because there are real similarities in the demographic situations of the Quebecois, Danes, Dutch, Flemish and others. No low-birth-rate/smaller-population nationality wants to ‘go gentle into that good night’.

The ADQ has recently advocated cutting immigration numbers and both the ADQ and the PQ have argued for the need to assess immigrants based on their capacity to integrate and for the use of ‘integration contracts’ for new arrivals. For its part, the Liberal government of Jean Charest has not been slow to insinuate that the policy proposals of the opposition parties are “driven by fear and intolerance”. At the same time, Charest has not avoided expressing the same sort of concerns and has also proposed a robust range of measures to address the perceived erosion of the French language in Quebec.

In the Canadian context, all this has real implications for national unity. Immigration has already relegated ‘British North America’ to the history books and more recently rendered national bilingualism and biculturalism unrealistic.

The danger for Canada’s national unity lies in the possibility that both conservative and socialist nationalists in Quebec will reach the conclusion that the French language and culture is more secure outside of Canada than in it.

Overall, at some point at current rates of immigration, Canada will cease to be anything approximating a nation and be best described as a global suburb. Canada is becoming a prosperous and secure home in a nondescript neighbourhood which makes no effort to assimilate new-comers because real identity is associated with the country and/or region of origin. Integration, on the other hand, is very much encouraged and the indicators of success relate to the incomes of new arrivals compared to earlier arrivals. Therefore, capacity in English or French, acceptance of rules and regulations and a commitment to consumption are the touch-stones of success. Perhaps by giving up all pretence to cultivating a separate and unique society, Canada is truly leading the way to the dissolution of the nations system on the road towards a global culture and citizenship. Success in this project might enhance the possibility of international peace and security.

But I have several concerns about this model of Canada, the first being that history is full of examples of societies in which even small cleavages have resulted in major problems. Given the stakes, one would think that, at the very least, prudence would be advised. Regardless, current policy sees a very diverse population equal to that of Manitoba’s arriving in Canada every four years.

Secondly, although Canada is certainly a leader in promoting cosmopolitan objectives, there appear to be few if any enthusiastic followers. Certainly tension, debate and reflection on the need for migration controls and a strengthening of integration policies which cross over into assimilationism are mainstream preoccupations in Australia, UK and US. For continental European countries and Japan, the draw bridges are up when it comes to mass immigration and diasporatic communities are being strongly directed towards full integration. This should give Canadian decision-makers pause and stimulate a thorough review of the issues related to immigration, integration and citizenship.

Finally, Canadian national unity may be endangered by unmanaged immigration. There is an emerging sense among Francophone Quebecers that the French Fact in America may not be compatible with high levels of immigration. At one level, there is a concern that new-Quebecers tend to assimilate into English cultures. This may not be objectively true but regardless, should a consensus arise among rooted Quebecers that participating in the new Canada (with its new creed and demographic reality) is endangering the French language in Quebec, then national unity will indeed be threatened.

In conclusion, I believe that Canada is going to have to come to grips with the implications of mass immigration. This should be done sooner rather than later. Issues related to citizenship, integration, composition, disposition, asylum and enforcement need to be addressed. Overall, Canada needs to understand what it has become to allow for the development of a much needed population policy. Furthermore, Canada must find a way to discuss the many implications of mass immigration in a fashion that transcends the superficiality of progressive advocacy and disconnects the objective and long-term needs of the country from the cut and thrust of partisan politics.

Original article

Melbourne feeling the strain of record immigration

From The Herald Sun:

Record population growth strains transport system

John Masanauskas
April 24, 2009 12:00am

MELBOURNE had record population growth last year, with the extra 74,600 people putting further strain on roads and public transport.

The city's addition in 2007-08, easily outstripped Sydney's growth of 55,000.

Leading the surge were suburbs such as Hoppers Crossing, Werribee, Cranbourne, Narre Warren and Melton.

The City of Wyndham, which includes Werribee, increased by 8900 -- the biggest growth of any municipality in the nation, according to an ABS report released yesterday.

Other high-growth council areas were Casey on the city's southeast fringe, Melton in the west and Whittlesea to the north.

*snip*

Overall, Melbourne's population grew by 2 per cent to 3.9 million -- the largest growth of any capital city, according to Regional Population Growth Australia 2007-08.

Monash University demographer Dr Bob Birrell said the city's startling growth reflected record high migration. "It shows that the (growth) gap between Melbourne and Sydney has opened up even further than was the case in the last few years," he said.

The rapid population surge in outer suburbs was consistent with State Government policy to open up new land, especially in the west and north.

"This extraordinary expansion will significantly add to transport problems with rail and road systems we're already experiencing," he said.

"The number of people in these areas is way above the number of jobs there, so people are travelling across the city for work."

Victoria's population increased by more than 92,000 to 5.31 million as of June last year.

Some regional areas, including the Rural City of Benalla and the shires of Yarriamback, Hindmarsh and Northern Grampians, recorded slight decreases.

Original article