The origins of pro-immigration political correctness in Australia

From CanDoBetter.org:

The origins of pro-immigration political correctness in Australia

The following paper, published in the Winter 1997-98 issue of The Social Contract journal, was given by Mark O'Connor to the Fourth National Conference of the Federation of Ethnic Community Councils of Australia (FECCA) on December 7, 1996 in Adelaide. FECCA is a major promoter of immigration and multiculturalism in Australia.

Where Does the PC Line on Immigration Come From?

By Mark O'Connor

As a member of a group dedicated to reducing Australia's population growth, I worry that Australia over the past 15 years has had by far the world's highest per capita immigration rate. Luckily we seem to have turned a corner, and our net immigration (if you believe the lowest of the figures being put out by government sources) may now be only 50,000 a year, which is a little over one-third of our net natural increase (i.e. the excess of total births over total deaths - currently about 142,000 persons annually). [Sadly, O'Connor's optimistic observation that Australia seemed to have turned a corner has since been proven incorrect. Immigration has crept ever upwards since the late 1990s, and is now running at record high levels.] Clearly our first priority now should be to work on attitudes as to family size.

Yet immigration remains important. It sends a most negative message to the community. How can the ordinary citizen see having a small family as a contribution to the community's well-being when he or she must also watch (and pay taxes to help) the government increasing our population through immigration? Indeed the Department of Immigration has favorably cited a recommendation from the growth economist John Neville that if the birthrate falls or stays low then immigration should be increased to compensate for this.

Clearly we environmentalists must question the rather bizarre assumptions on which the immigration debate is conducted. How can it be "selfish" to resist immigration yet be enormously to our benefit to take in immigrants? How could former Prime Minister Keating simultaneously claim immigration benefits the economy yet want to charge New Zealand for dole payments to our NZ immigrants? How can it be "racist" to want to control immigration when most immigrants, especially until the last few years, have been of the same Caucasian race as the overwhelming majority of Australians? How is it that when we have rescued people whose own countries or cultures have failed them, we are so often and so complacently told by "ethnic leaders" that we are in their debt rather than they in ours?

Similar questions are asked in the United States. In October 1993 I was an invited guest at the annual conference of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. At its final session Professor Otis Graham from the History Faculty at Santa Barbara (CA) spoke brilliantly about the internal contradictions of the USA's current official (or politically correct or PC) line on immigration. Subsequently he was asked how such self-contradictory positions had become established as dogma. He answered, "I simply don't know - I wish someone would explain it to me."

Later in the discussion I offered a rather tentative explanation in the form of a very simplified "story" of how these positions may have been reached. I wasn't very sure how complete or accurate this story (or theory) was, either as a comment on American or even on Australian history; but several of those present, including Professor Graham, pressed me to write it down and publish it. So here it is, still tentative, but a little more fleshed out.

Perhaps our "politically correct" attitudes to immigration come from particular conditions produced in the decay of 1960s and 1970s radicalism. Sociologists like Alvin Gouldner and Katharine Betts have pointed out the paradox that entire groups of the tertiary-educated, who once saw themselves as anti-establishment radicals in fierce opposition to the values of their parents, have now moved up the social system and are running bureaucracies and governments. The old "anti-establishment," these scholars imply, now runs the establishment.

This is clearer in Australia where the more left-wing of the two major parties has won the last five elections. (In the U.S., the Bush and Reagan years prevented there being quite such a conspiratorial left-wing tone to the current bureaucratic power group.) Many such people were among those who "saw the light" in the Sixties and Seventies but then in the Eighties, when they were getting a little complacent, were offered money instead - "the money or the light?" - until they eventually chose the money. They were also (again, this is more clearly true in Australia than in the U.S.) the first generation in which easy access to tertiary education became open to a meritocracy of the talented.

"[This New Class] sees itself as a meritocracy; and one gains admission to this class not by inheritance or descent but by having the appropriate skills - and the correct opinions." Gouldner and Betts1 see this new ruling class as differing from a traditional aristocracy in that it does not depend on inherited wealth. Its capital is largely intellectual capital, represented by its tertiary degrees. It sees itself as a meritocracy; and one gains admission to this class not by inheritance or descent but by having the appropriate skills - and the correct opinions. Let us accept this term "New Class" on probation, for the moment, and see what we can do with it. (Luckily this is not a matter of speculating about some poorly known and distantly observed group; it is essentially my own class I am talking about, and includes many of my own friends and former class mates. Reading this, they may well complain that I have "turned conservative," though, oddly enough, I believe that it is they who have done so.)

In Australia in the 1980s, many members of this class entered the bureaucracy and went on to earn degrees in economics, often training in the most cynical of economic rationalist schools (like that of the Australian National University). Thus, underneath the cement of avowed radicalism which binds the new ruling class together (serving as their meal ticket and union card) is sometimes a guilty conscience about having betrayed so many of their utopian and Aquarian ideals - for this was a generation whose hopes went far beyond the dull obviousness of social justice. The triumphalism of their politics often reflected the lyrics from the musical Hair "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius" - an age of transcendent and psychedelic possibilities, of trusting the universe, and of release from constraints.

The result of this guilt can be a desperate attempt to find new grounds for difference and for moral superiority - no longer, this time, to justify revolution, but rather to maintain an establishment. Any ruling class that lasts more than a decade will feel the need to justify itself by having some ideal to which it appeals. It will invent some central legitimizing principle - usually a moral one. Thus a traditional aristocracy may place a moral value on the notion of "nobility" itself - a quality on which, by definition, it has something of a monopoly. By contrast it may see the classes it exploits as not merely "villains" but "villainous" and therefore needing to be ruled and guided. Our modern ruling class needs some similar principle to justify its free lunches and overseas travel.

They - or let me say "we" - used to be comrades in the struggle that built a better, more humane society. But what radical ideals are left when so many have been abandoned for pragmatic reasons and profit? Most utopian and Aquarian concepts of the 1970s have been quietly drowned. The psychedelic substances are only occasionally used by the successful baby boomers. Experience in running bureaucracies and governments has taught them not to be unduly idealistic about human nature. And so they have fallen back on a more basic or background ideal, one which, at least in Australia, was almost forgotten during the high point of 1970s radicalism. Yet when I went up to university in 1962 this had been the one ideal we all took for granted to treat everyone equally, regardless of race, color or creed (and some were beginning to add of gender).

Almost everyone in Australia believed in this ideal, at least in theory. So it is hardly surprising that the New Class still believe in it, at least in theory. The problem is that it is hard to claim moral superiority on grounds of such a common ideal.

The left-wing and tertiary-educated elite was now quite used to the fruits of power, yet already troubled by increasing evidence that it was just as corruptible as any previous establishment, and that it might soon lose favor with the electorate. In the resulting search for moral self-assurance and legitimacy, radical egalitarianism was the virtue it eventually focused on.

Why? It seems that the divide between left and right, liberal and conservative, is a persistent if fuzzy human tendency. It may be the characteristic mild schizophrenia of our species. And yet, most of the qualities that mark this divide between left and right "Both idealism and self-advancement combined to produce ... believers in democracy who brush aside the majority's views."are as morally neutral as those that differentiate, say, French culture from Greek culture. For example, tending to believe or disbelieve in the perfectability of human nature is not of itself a moral position; nor is the tendency to visualize oneself as a rebellious youth rather than as a controlling parent. The one quality by way of which the left can plausibly claim a specifically moral superiority is its concern with equality - its tendency to side with the underdog.

Before long some politicians and media people who were members or aspirants to this successful class were prepared to side with such underdogs as illegal immigrants, and even against the clear interests and beliefs of their own constituents and nation. Both idealism and self-advancement now combined to produce the mild paradoxes of an establishment that favors anti-establishment sentiments and styles in the arts (and often elsewhere), of believers in democracy who brush aside the majority's views, and of an elite whose claim to privileged status is based quite largely on anti-elitism.

Yet, even a decade ago it was getting harder and harder, at least in Australia, to find true racist rednecks against whom the no-longer-very-young, left-wing, educated classes could rebel - especially after those classes had been running the government and much of the media for years.

Their answer was a trick borrowed, I believe unconsciously, from the McCarthy-ites of the 1950s, and from their spiritual cousins, the Stalinists of the same era. It involves what Freudians call "projection." You project upon some real or invented victim-class your own secret guilts. If you were one of Stalin's henchmen, your secret guilt was an aspiration to privileged middle-class status in a very poor country. Down with the Kulaks! If you were someone like J. Edgar Hoover you could project upon others your own betrayals of public trust and public interest. Down with the communists!

You might then encourage the media to work up an intense obsessive concern about this evil, a concern which contains its own built-in, self-reinforcing loop. The pursuit of communist conspiracy (or in the USSR of a capitalist-revisionist conspiracy) became so omnipresent and all-encompassing that it readily discovered all the evidence it needed to sustain and even intensify its own belief.

By the 1980s, if "racists" (i.e. anti-egalitarians) had not existed it would have been necessary for the meritocracy to invent them. (In Australia, where most ethnic leaders were Europeans and thus of the same Caucasian race as the population that had invited them in, they used the term "racist" just as freely, even though the differences at issue were not racial but cultural - unless one believes in sub-racial classifications.) For some members of the New Class the term "racist" became a way to disparage anyone who believed in "inappropriate" meritocracies and elites - i.e., ones other than those by which they themselves were sustained.

Their other great trick, also consciously imitated from the McCarthy era, was that when you need to enhance your own moral position you discover a conspiracy against some widely-revered public virtue - a virtue to which you can easily lay claim. Thus, by imagining (or exaggerating) a communist conspiracy the McCarthy-ites turned their own minimal and commonplace virtue - that of allegiance to the democratic rule of law and to the legitimacy of the American state - into grounds for a claim of moral superiority, even of heroism.

How could Betts' New Class, the new ruling bureaucratic class of the 1980s and 1990s, turn their own minimal and commonplace virtue of believing in the brotherhood of man (the siblinghood of humanity) into a special virtue that justified their rule? The high immigration policy, toward which some special interest groups were pushing them, inadvertently supplied an answer.

High immigration alienated and indeed damaged the interests of the non-tertiary-educated majority, yet it did so in ways that were deniable. A media blitz, started or helped by special interest groups, soon turned high immigration into a symbol for acceptance of human rights. Once this assumption was swallowed it became clear that those who opposed high immigration - the majority of ordinary citizens - were wallowing in moral error, denying human equality, and in dire need of "guidance" from an elite. ("How satisfactory!" purrs the Mikado in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.)

Initially high immigration had little cost to the New Class. It wasn't usually their jobs the immigrant workers were after, and poverty-related crime took place mainly in suburbs far from their own. For those who had hitched their bureaucratic careers to ethnic programs or multicultural policies, high immigration was pure profit. They could preach against "selfishness" and take the moral credit to themselves, sending the bill to the ordinary citizen. Like the Unjust Steward in the New Testament parable they had found a failsafe way to buy moral credit with someone's else's money (Luke 16 2-4).

The New Class tend to be internationalists (for a mix of idealistic and business reasons) who are strongly opposed to the evergreen appeal of nationalism. Worldwide, it would seem that nation-states based on ethnicity are being formed at a faster rate than at any time since just after World War I.

Ironically, the internationalists soon found themselves in alliance with those who want to Balkanize, multiculturize or racialize the nation-state. (Remember how often multiculturalism was associated with globalization in the discussions about NAFTA?) By a further, now familiar, paradox the cry of "racism" became a trademark of both the globalist New Class and of its allies, the racialists. Some members of the New Class discovered that high immigration, like some of the extreme forms of multiculturalism, could be a way to bring down the nation-state and undercut its loyal supporters. It was twice blessed it could enhance one's status as an international high flyer and simultaneously as a noble fighter for the underdog.

The New Class globalists found themselves in effective alliance with leaders of certain immigrant groups who were practicing globalists only so long as the rhetoric of globalism could help them increase their "market share" and hence their power within the country. Some of these leaders are chauvinists who play the politics of ethnic pride in a way to resemble the Nineteenth century colonials "We do have the right to enter your country, and on our own terms, because we need it and you don't really own it; and in any case we are doing you a favor by adding an admixture of our wonderfully rich culture to your sterile, narrow and un-diverse Anglo culture."

The new politically correct line on immigration - much like the plethora of new "culturally sensitive" terms with which the ordinary citizen could hardly keep up - was one more way for the New Class to assert its leadership over the insensitive masses, on whose behalf they had shouted in the streets barely twenty years earlier.

And the fact that there was popular resistance to high immigration was reassuring to the New Class. It enabled them to ward off any nagging doubts that they might have lost their radical edge and suffered the common fate of aging into conservatism. If the New Class could not stay forever young they could at least stay forever radical. Some indeed seemed to desire even more public resistance to their ideas. Mark Ulmann recently accused one group in Australia of being "desperate for a witch to burn."

In high immigration and multiculturalism the New Class had found its difference from the bulk of society, and what seemed to many of them a legitimizing moral principle. They could deliver expansive population growth with the steadily rising property values that meant billions of dollars to some of their friends in business. They could extend contempt to all those excluded classes that had failed to advance like them through the mandatory tertiary education into the new enlightenment.

From patronizing a people's culture it can be a short step (as the history of imperialism shows) to denying their aspirations and interests. It soon became politically correct for the New Class to deny that there was such a thing as an Australian or American cultural identity, other than a multicultural one. This made it easier to deny that the American or Australian people had any exclusive right to their own country, or even that there was such a thing as a cohesive Australian or American people. If the nation does not really exist, then why should not its elected and appointed servants sell out its interests in favor of a global one?

That's the story/theory. How well does it fit the facts - in Canada? in the United States? in Australia? in New Zealand?

Notes
1. ↑ Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, New York, Seaburg Press, 1979.

Katharine Betts, Ideology and Immigration: Australia 1976 to 1987, Melbourne University Press, 1988; "The Environmental Movement, New Class, and Immigration Reform," Papers of the 1993 BIR Conference: The Politics of Immigration, available from the Department of Immigration, PO Box 25, Woden ACT. I am indebted to Dr. Betts for a number of insights woven into my "story."

Source

The transmutation of America

From Australia.To News:

Transmutation of America into a tense multicultural bouquet: Can it happen to Australia?

By Frosty Wooldridge

An odd thing happened to the United States in the 21st century as it tripped into quicksand over its guilt-ridden past of discrimination toward minorities such as Native Americans, Asians, Blacks and Latinos.

What happened?

After all, the fact remains that European settlers trespassed, ravaged, and slaughtered 522 Indian tribes—their languages, cultures and ways of life. Anyone reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee or The Sand Creek Massacre cannot help but cry at the brutality committed against the aborigines of North America in the 1800s.

To see the Indian reservations today, one weeps at rampant alcoholism, domestic abuse and utter hopelessness of cultures unable to operate in the white man’s world—but totally cut away from their own traditions. It’s sad beyond belief.

Their situation may be much like present day Palestine and Israel. The Jews of Israel commandeered the Muslims’ lands around Gaza, but unlike the docile American Indians, the Muslims responded with rockets, bombs and modern weaponry. An uneasy tension and outright hatred percolates throughout the region.

Back in the USA, without a doubt, African-Americans still suffer from being ripped out of their countries in Africa while forced into slavery. They lost their languages, cultures and ways of life. Traders shredded family members at will and with malice. The white man tore them from their agrarian lives into the mechanized age.

In the case of impoverished Mexico, Latinos crossed into the USA willingly to work the fields while enduring racism on every level. Of course, they hated the ‘gringo’ equally, feeling that he stole their lands.

But in 1965, thanks to U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy, the United States commenced changing its ethnic makeup by importing millions upon millions of immigrants from all over the third world. Under the guise of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’, the citizens of the United States watch(ed) indolently as their own culture, language and way of life vanished(s) into the hands of a peaceful, methodical and invading armada of humanity. Within the past 20 years, over nine million Middle Eastern Muslims now make the United States their home. They expect to grow to 20 million in a few decades.

Unlike the American Indians that maintained small populations, Latinos, by 2042 will become the new majority within the United States—totally displacing the white man’s culture and language within a 60 year period. As an ethnic group, they do not tolerate blacks or whites, and it will be interesting to see how they abide with Muslims.

America immigrated itself out of its identity and into a multicultural and diversity predicament. As President Teddy Roosevelt said, “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, or preventing it from continuing as a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

All the while, everything in America changes beyond its own understanding—much like what happened to the American Indians. Upon his final capture, Warrior Chief Geronimo said, “I think we have lost our way of life forever.”

America spirals into the same dilemma on a gargantuan scale. In the past 40 years, the United States revoked its laws, its culture, its language and its Constitution in order to accommodate outcries from minorities, dispossessed and foreign religions.

In the 60s, Lyndon Baines Johnson offered billions to bring the poor into the Great Society. Tax dollars paid for college tuition for minorities. Every child passed to the next grade whether they accomplished the work or not. As a teacher, I saw ‘affirmative action grading’ allow children who wouldn’t do their work—passed to the next grade. Later, ‘affirmative action jobs’ and ‘quotas’ based on color rather than standards became the norm for workers and students.

But today, Black Americans suffer terrific unemployment, illiteracy and broken families. Millions of kids grow up with a single parent. Violence, ghettos, obesity and hopelessness prevail. In California, Latino gangs dominate Los Angeles neighborhoods as schools ‘house’ students before ‘graduating’ them to the streets, unable to read or write. Millions of unwed teens bring babies into the world with no hope of supporting them other than taxpayer welfare. In Detroit, Michigan, according to NBC anchor Brian Williams, high school dropout rates last year hit 76 percent.

Result: a horrific 32.2 million Americans subsist on food stamps! You must work to get your hands around that number! In America? How? Why?

Today, the same U.S. Congress that perpetrated our massive transmutation into a multicultural society, ponders the appointment of Latino Judge Sonia Sotomayor. By her own admission, she represents ‘affirmative action quotas’ into law school and appointments. She most likely will become an ‘affirmative action’ Supreme Court judge. Yet, when minorities scream at anyone making even the slightest racist statement, she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male that hasn’t lived that life.”

Americans will find themselves in new conditions as this new legal, multicultural experiment manifests in the coming years. However, it does not portend well for anyone no matter what their race. In a speech in Washington DC, former Colorado Governor Lamm said, “If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let’s destroy America. It is not that hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall, and that, “An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.”

“Here is how they destroyed their countries,” Lamm said. “First, turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual and bi-cultural country. History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar Seymour Lipset put it this way, “The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon, Holland, Great Britain—all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons and Corsicans.”

Finally, with America adding 70 million more immigrants within the next 26 years, I see ramifications that explode beyond our current predicament best summed up by Dr. Otis Graham, “Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide, but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all--ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet.”

Like a chemistry experiment where unknowing students pour a bouquet of chemicals into a beaker, no one knows what kind of an explosion will occur, but they ‘feel’ something regrettable happening.

At this moment, the British, Dutch and French that will become minorities in their own countries by mid century, may be asking themselves why they did the same things as America.

And the American people, unlike the American Indians, did it to themselves. America will never be the same; never get better. Payback, as they say, is a *itch!

Frosty Wooldridge, math/science teacher, has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com

Original article

"Can it happen to Australia?"

It already is.

The Indian student affair

I have so far refrained from commenting on the recent wave of attacks against Indian students in Australia and the subsequent fallout simply because the level of hysteria has been so high up until this point that it has been virtually impossible to examine the issue in a rational manner. Both Indians and the Australia media alike have used these attacks to once again stick the boot into "racist" Australia. The reality, though, is much different, as Neil Mitchell explains in the following article.

From The Herald Sun:

No, we are not racists

Neil Mitchell
June 11, 2009 12:00am

THERE'S no real point to worrying about being politically correct when that will aggravate a situation already dangerous and misunderstood.

It is fact that Australia's reputation for decency is now threatened by racial tension and the fear is that this could be a glimpse of the future.

The predicament is built around Indian students, the attacks on them, their response to those attacks and the ugliness the subsequent tension has provoked.

If there was any doubt about how seriously the problem is viewed, it was dispelled yesterday when the state's three most powerful people tried to quell the fears and end the stupidity.

The Prime Minister called for calm, but with a degree of passion not normally considered Rudd-like. He deplored racial attacks on any person - "Chinese, Indian, Callithumpian, Queenslanders".

He reminded the world that Australians are also bashed and die in India, which does not provoke parades of chanting ocker backpackers in the streets of Mumbai.

The remaining members of the power trio, the Premier and the Chief Commissioner of Police, met at a railway station and pledged a police campaign supposedly directed at street robberies, but really designed to reassure angry Indian students.

It was a stunt, albeit a worthy one, but let's put the spin aside and look to some basic truths.

It is true that there are gangs operating in this country. Some are racially based and racially motivated.

Some do attack particular ethnic groups.

It is also true that there have been attacks on Indian students described as "curry bashing", an awful term Indians themselves say is a motivation for the attacks.
But there have been far more attacks on Indian students motivated by brutality and theft.

In Sydney, there are dangerous racial undertones to the tension. On the streets at night it has been Middle Eastern versus Indian. That's ugly - and frightening.

The media in India has been hysterical about all this with little concern for the facts and less understanding of this country.

Australian political leaders have been quick to react and overreact, partly because they are concerned about Australia developing a reputation for racism and partly because the education of international students is big business.

And the final truth is that the Indian students have harmed their cause and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Student leaders have portrayed their members as docile, which in itself is a racist generalisation.

Some are gentle, some are not, and the aggressive protests have shown that.

Burning effigies of the Prime Minister makes for good TV, but it incites tensions and alienates decent people.

Worse, the protests seem based on the assumption that Australia's leaders and police somehow endorse this violence and could end it if they had the will.

That's rubbish, on both counts. It's unfair to blame the people and the leaders for the brutality of a few street thugs who are at times just as likely to attack fourth-generation Australians as they are visitors from the other side of the world.

Some of the students have had a rough time, and that is deplorable. But it is the fault of a few criminals, not the society, and not the culture.

Neil Mitchell broadcasts from 8.30am weekdays on 3AW.

Original article

The automatic assumption was that the attackers in these cases were European Australians. But it turns that a number of the attackers were actually of non-European origin, a crucial fact reported neither here in Australia nor overseas. Why is that? Because it doesn't fit the orthodoxy that only people of European ancestry are capable of racism.

As columnist Andrew Bolt points out, political correctness has prevented the public from being properly informed about which groups are actually committing these violent crimes.

Bolt writes:

IF we weren't so scared of seeming racist, we wouldn't now seem so, er, racist that even India is giving us lectures.

Amazing, that. India, which perfected the caste system and is plagued by Hindu-Muslim bloodfests, is telling us we're too prejudiced?

But we have only our own stupidity and grovelling self-hatred to blame. After all, which nation has spent so much apologetic cash and sweat to persuade the world we are vomiting with racism, and which has been, on the other hand, too militantly anti-racist to point out who is actually bashing many of these Indian students?

...

...what police and many journalists refuse to confirm or even discuss is what victims and their spokesmen repeatedly say - that many of their attackers are Africans, Islanders and, less often, Asians who are newcomers themselves, beneficiaries of our eagerness to seem kind and tolerant.

...

That's how the false perception is allowed to grow that these attacks on Indians are just another example of our institutional racism, when the reverse may well be true -- that we're so over-eager to seem not racist that we take in immigrants we perhaps should not, and refuse to admit when they go wrong.

Unfortunately, Australian society is engaged in mass self-deception when it comes to the downsides of immigration-induced diversity. Australian authorities and the Australian media would much rather excoriate the white Australian majority for their alleged "racism" rather than examine those fractious groups actually responsible for much of the ethnically-based crime now plaguing our major cities.

Watering down the citizenship test

The following article was first published in early 2008, prior to the Rudd Government's watering down of the citizenship test.

From The Independent Australian, Issue No. 14 (Summer 2007/08):

Ethnic Leaders Attack Citizenship Test

A new chorus of opposition to the citizenship test introduced by the former Howard Government late in 2007 has predictably arisen from ethnic leaders now that Labor is in power in Canberra, writes Alan Fitzgerald.

The push is on for the new government to dismantle the Citizenship Test. Much is made of the fact that 20 percent of those who sit the random choice test fail, which actually suggests that the test is working. Labor's Immigration Minister Chris Evans has said that in view of the failure rate he would review the test with the intention of making substantial changes to it.

Surely, if the Minister's aim is to ensure a 100 percent pass rate then it would not be a test at all.

Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria chairman Sam Afra said his organisation always believed the new test was discriminatory (what a surprise!) and would stop many lawful migrants from becoming Australian citizens.

"The news that 20 percent of applicants are failing the test confirms our fears", he said.

However, these critics often do not mention that a person who fails the test can continue to sit for it as many times as they want to, until they pass.

The questions, chosen at random from a resource book, are hardly difficult. If you aspire to be a citizen of this country, out ought to know the date Australia came into existence as a nation, the name of the city where the Commonwealth Parliament is located, or the colours of the Australian flag. To pass the test you are required to correctly answer 12 of the 20 questions that are drawn at random from a pool of 200 questions. As they say, "it's not rocket science" [But it was evidently still all too hard for some of the "skilled", "hard-working", "intelligent" immigrants arriving on our shores - R.E.]. Migrants under the age of 18 to 60 years of age and older do not have to sit for the test, and there exemptions for persons with physical or mental incapacities. Illiterate migrants may take the test in an alternative format.

The questions are selected at random to prevent those sitting the test from learning the answers by rote. One enterprising company is charging migrants $20 to sit 15 mock exams over 90 days online in preparation for the real test. A migrant is eligible to take the test after four years residence in Australia [In most other immigrant-receiving countries, it is at least five - R.E.]. Failing the test does not affect their residency rights but means they cannot take the oath of citizenship until they pass the test.

Further, Australia is not alone is asking potential citizens to demonstrate they know something about the nation that is offering them the benefits and privilege of citizenship. The USA, Canada and the UK all require persons to sit a test.

Critics of the test appear to be quite happy to misrepresent it. Joseph Wakim, a former multicultural affairs commissioner and founder of the Australian Arabic Council, claimed that if the test had been around when his family arrived in Australia, his mother being illiterate would have failed the test, and therefore "I would have not here to tell this story". This is rubbish [And thankfully so. Just think, where would Australia be without such perennially aggrieved ethnic minority activists? - R.E.]

Academic Dr Gwenda Tavan claims the test indicates a narrowly conceived cultural-nationalist model of citizenship that undermines the appeal and advantages of citizenship by defining social membership in overly exclusive, vague and sometimes facile ways.

NSW Anti-Discrimination Board president Stepan Kerkyasharian said the test should rely less on culture and more on practical knowledge of Australia, "not about what happened 20 years ago in some cricket match."

Max Jeganathan, spokesman for Civil Liberties Australia, claimed the test was an attempt to promote Anglo-Celtic culture as being the dominant part of the overall Australian culture at the expense of multicultural identity.

Objection to the test seems more to do with objection to the idea that Australia has a culture of its own and that the nation's institutions, laws, politics, flag and history reflect that reality. The multicultural lobby would argue that mainstream Australian culture has nothing to offer them, but they have everything of value to offer Australia.

Which begs the question of why are they here in the first place?

There is no doubt that some minority cultures reject Australian values in favour of their own traditions which they are determined to maintain. For them, being in Australia - if not being an Australian citizen - is a matter of convenience. For them citizenship is just a ticket to social welfare benefits, job and educational opportunities and a guarantee against deportation should they or their kin embark on a career of crime.

Historian Ann-Mari Jordens (The Age, 10 January 2008) points out that citizenship for migrants involves a cost-benefit analysis. A sizeable proportion of migrants saw no tangible advantage in "making the leap". If migrants think so little of Australian citizenship - other than its economic aspects - who is to blame? Has Australia made it too easy for migrants to take up citizenship without demanding a real commitment to Australia? [The answer is, of course, yes. As Geoffrey Blainey once remarked, Australia hands out citizenship like fast food. - R.E.]

The absence of many persons of ethnic minority backgrounds in our armed forces and volunteer organisations suggests it is Australia which is being taken for a ride, not the migrants.

The Australian Government's embrace of dual citizenship only compounds the problem. Where do the newcomers' loyalties really lie? If they are only here for the money, where will they be in times of adversity? If they don't embrace Australian values - democracy, equality, freedom of religion, secularism - would they be prepared to embrace them let alone defend them if they came under attack?

To claim as the multiculturalists say, that there is nothing unique about Australian values is to deny reality. In most of countries of the world, from which we draw our migrants, these very values are either absent in the body politic or only honoured in the breach. How much democracy exists in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, or South America? The "all cultures are equal" mantra of the multiculturalists would leave a vacuum at the heart of the Australian story.

Objection to the citizenship test is a symptom of a larger problem - Australia's failure to promote its national story to its citizens - both native born and naturalised - through educational and cultural institutions. The idea that telling the national story - its achievements and failures - will cause newcomers to feel left out and alienated is a nonsense.

The 'progressive' left liberals who infest our universities and teaching professions are more at home in a global world than in a nation-state. To them national identity and culture are to be denigrated in favour of some woolly, basket-weaving world of cultural relativism.

The majority culture - the core culture of the nation - is entitled to its pre-eminent position for without it there wouldn't be a nation but a collection of tribes. To promote it is not to make newcomers unwelcome but hopefully remind them of why they chose to come in the first place.

Mass immigration and the intolerance of Western liberalism

British journalist Anthony Browne on mass immigration and the intolerance of Western liberalism:

The People Flow authors make a mistake common among pro-immigration advocates: seeing a nation as nothing more than a geographical entity with a functioning economy and a legal system. But a nation is first and foremost its people. It is the French people that define what France is, not lines on a map.

The pro-immigrationists are effectively trying to abolish nationhood, denying a country the right to sustain its own culture.

British-born white people, the progeny of the generation who survived the Nazi attempt to obliterate Britain as an independent nation state, now account for only 60% of the population of London. England has for more than 1500 years been a Christian country – its flag is a cross, its head of state is head of the national church – but in its second city Birmingham, Islam is now more worshipped than Christianity. In two boroughs of London, whites are already in the minority, and they are expected to become a minority in several cities in the coming decade.

If current trends continue, the historically indigenous population of Britain will become a minority by around 2100. Islam is the fastest growing religion, and much immigration to Britain comes from Muslims fleeing Muslim lands – around 75% of intercontinental asylum seekers are Muslim. But where are the limits? In an extreme example, would British Christians have a right not to live in an Islamic majority state?

For an answer to this, consider what that most liberal of American writers, Gore Vidal, said in a lecture in Dublin in 1999:

“A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. But now with so many millions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species.”

But at what point are people of the west allowed to say that enough is enough, it is time for us to be allowed to preserve our culture? This is an issue of almost total, mind-numbing hypocrisy among western governments and political elites. They defend the inalienable right of other peoples – the Palestinians, Tibetans, native Americans – to defend their culture, but not the right of their own peoples.

It is vital to emphasise that mass immigration and the remarkably intolerant ideology of multiculturalism are exclusively western phenomena. Indeed, the striking thing about the global immigration debate in the west is its determined parochialism. If people in India, China, or Africa were asked whether they have a right to oppose mass immigration on such a scale that it would transform their culture, the answer would be clear. Yet uniquely among the 6 billion people on the planet, westerners – the approximately 800 million in western Europe, North America and Australasia – are expected by the proponents of mass immigration and multiculturalism to abandon any right to define or shape their own society.

Full article

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."

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

Immigration policy and health care costs in Australia

From The Social Contract:

How Long Is a Public Purse String?

Immigration policy and health care costs in Australia

By Denis McCormack
Volume 14, Number 1 (Fall 2003)

Try this from a bygone era of Aussie public health pragmatism. It's an item from Melbourne's The Age dated 24 August 1896.

"Leprosy in New South Wales: Chinese patients shipped to Hong Kong"

"Arrangements were recently carried out whereby 19 of the 20 Chinese lepers in the Little Bay Lazarette [hospital in Sydney] were shipped on board a vessel, and they are now on their way to Hong Kong... but one of them managed to hide himself and could not be found in time... Everything has been done to make them comfortable... now in [the] charge of an experienced warden... a small sum of money has been given to each so that on their arrival in Hong Kong they will have means to go to their respective districts. It has been ascertained that no trouble will be experienced in landing the lepers in Hong Kong... Some two years ago a leper was deported from Victoria to China at great expense..."

Contrast the above with today's public health/immigration insanity. I'm listening to radio news as I write (6 August 2003) and by coincidence it carries a report of Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock having exercised his lawful but controversial "discretionary powers" to intervene in a "humanitarian" case in favour of allowing an African with AIDS to be reunited with family already in Australia. One could be forgiven for thinking this is just a bit of image softening from a government lashed for and to its tougher border protection policy of recent times, but the facts would suggest a wider set of problems arriving.

"African migrants will double this year with 5206 expected... African refugees will make up 43% of Australia's humanitarian intake."(1)

It's just this sort of no-brainer from a supposedly conservative government that drives reasonable people nuts in this country. We the reasonable majority who read of police services mobilizing against nascent African gangs (2) are supposed to continue supporting the "conservative" Government of John Howard because the Labor Party Opposition tells us that they would be even more "compassionate" on refugee/asylum issues should they take government at the next election. Heads they win, tails we lose, but I digress...

Unraveling immigration's costs to full length, to separate and identify the many strands, to tease them out and run the micrometer over the cascading, inter-twined masses of fibers, is a forensic accounting task which can be accomplished, but only by a willing bureaucracy directed to do so by government at all three levels in a federal, state and local government system.

In 1991, impatient of successive governments ever undertaking such purse string measurement and analysis, Stephen Rimmer, a senior economist knowledgeable on all three levels of administration, wrote a no-nonsense booklet, "The Cost of Multiculturalism" which was briefly reviewed in The Social Contract (vol. II, no. 4, Summer 1992, p.251). Having had an arms-length hand in editing, proof reading and funding the first print run of Rimmer's booklet, I wasn't surprised to see the consternation it attracted from all the usual suspects in the mainstream Australian press and the immigration industry at the time. Happily he was given right of reply in the press, nor did he lose his job.

A point he was at pains to make on page one was the difficulty in cost separation when tracking Federal funding of immigration and multiculturalism once those funds are added to, atomized by, and filtered through:

"Hidden expenditures by other state and local governments... The control of information is designed to minimize public debate and allow governments to hide from the public the economic costs... In addition the indirect costs... including the growth of organized fraud against governments; organized crime; terrorism; declining community health standards and affirmative action policies."

He even touched taboo topics like migrant workplace accident and motor accident insurance fraud. It was a punch-packed 71-page booklet not since bettered, and for the above good reasons laid no claim to be comprehensive. It begs statistical update and reissue for its shock value alone.

Here is what Rimmer had to say on "Community health and the policy of multiculturalism... Measuring the indirect economic costs" pp. 48, 49, 53, 57 about which little has changed:

"For instance, in the 1980s the Federal government assured the Australian community that all migrants and refugees settling in Australia were medically screened prior to migration (Senate Hansard 22 August 1988). However, throughout the 1980s State governments and medical professionals publicly claimed on numerous occasions that such medical screening of immigrants was ineffective.(3)

For example, in 1986 Dr Streeton, Adviser to the Victorian Public Health department, indicated that of the 246 cases of tuberculosis in Victoria, sixty percent were migrants and most had not been effectively screened prior to entering Australia. Professor Boughton, a leading figure in the development of the hepatitis vaccine, claimed in 1988 that approximately 10 percent -- or 4000 -- of Asian migrants who came to Australia each year carried the hepatitis B virus (Daily Telegraph 1988).(4) In addition, the incidence of syphilis had increased dramatically in Australia since the 1960s, when there were tougher health screening procedures for migrants. However, a spokesman for the Minister for Immigration, Mr Holding, said that health screening procedures were considered adequate by the Federal Government (Messina 1988a).

In 1987 the Australian Health and Medical Research Council said that large numbers of immigrants with active cases of leprosy and tuberculosis had passed through Federal Government medical screening tests without their condition being recognized. The Council recommended that the immigrants from high-risk areas be screened prior to reaching Australia by the Federal Government, and evaluated again when they reached Australia. (Sun, 1987). This finding was confirmed by the "Medical Journal of Australia," which expressed alarm about the number of immigrants and refugees entering Australia with infectious diseases (1987).

In 1988 the Victorian Health Minister, Mr White MP, called on the Federal Government to upgrade medical screening of migrants for infectious diseases. He argued that because of the ineffective screening Australia faced the threat of existing and eradicated diseases being reintroduced and Australian children contracting and spreading the diseases further (Messina 1988b). Consequently, large numbers of migrants with infectious diseases such as hepatitis A and B; AIDS; tuberculosis (TB); leprosy; malaria and syphilis are reported by such authorities to have been allowed into Australia over this period.

However, the Federal Government appears to have ignored these pleas, arguing that only a small number of persons with infectious diseases slip through current screens. By 1989, 238 cases of tuberculosis were reported in Victoria and 73 percent of these were migrants. Dr Jonathon Streeton, who co-authored a National Health and Medical Research Council report on TB, indicated that unless effective screening measures were implemented, TB would be spread throughout the community (Australian 1990b). In addition, in 1989 Dr Rouch, Victoria's Chief Health Officer, claimed that 10 migrants from Africa, who had settled in Victoria, had been found to have AIDS shortly after migrating to Australia. He indicated that both the Victorian and NSW State governments had consistently urged the Federal Government to introduce more widespread medical testing and stated that: "Its really high time there was an adequate policy for screening migrants" (Allender 1989).

In 1991, the Medical Journal of Australia again expressed concern about inadequate screening of migrants, who were contributing to the spread of TB. While there was an apparent shortage of statistics available to health researchers, some 225 of the reported 290 cases of TB in NSW in 1986 were migrants. While the United States government was campaigning to eradicate this disease by 2010, negligence by Australian governments had seen cases of the disease increase rapidly to the point where it might become common. The journal stated that: "It would be an indictment of our public health system if a disease of yesteryear, so close to elimination, returned with its resultant human and economic costs" (Canberra Times 1991b). The Medical Journal of Australia was also reported to have found cases of migrants entering Australia with live roundworms as long as 13cm in their bodies. It was claimed that the worm had infected 1.3 billion people worldwide and that immigrants who tested positive were not routinely treated, as it was felt that the parasite did not pose a significant risk (Canberra Times 1991c).

It has to be taken into account that medical screening of migrants, foreign tourists and students will not be effective in all instances, because of the nature of the diseases and the inexperience of many health professionals in identifying the early signs. However, it is also clear that throughout the 1980s the administration by governments of health screening of migrants has been negligent. Australian governments appear to have displayed an arrogant disregard for the health of current and future generations of Australians, regardless of ethnic background. The policy of multiculturalism has assisted governments to ignore pleas by health professionals over the last decade to implement effective health screening in the national interest...

While the economic cost of ineffective screening of immigrants are unknown, Mr Paul Gross, Director of the "Institute of Health Economics and Technology Assessment" estimated that in 1987 Hepatitis B, which is far more infectious than AIDS, cost the community over $50 million per year diagnosis and treatment costs and indirect costs such as lost productivity and premature death. The cost per patient was estimated to be more than $22 000 (Romei 1987). Given that approximately four thousand migrants are reported to come to Australia each year with this disease alone, the estimated cost to the community of ineffective health screening for Hepatitis B is $88 million per year, expressed in 1987 dollars. However, the cost of other infectious diseases imported into Australia by legal and illegal immigrants, foreign students and tourists cannot be ascertained. Nor can the cost of Australians infected with such diseases be ascertained. Clearly, a conservative estimate of these costs would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year - the total cost is likely to be several billion dollars higher than the estimate provided here."

It is fair to say that over the last decade or more as increasing numbers of Asian, Sub-continental, and Middle Eastern immigrant doctors have become more established across the Australian medical scene, one sees and hears less of the criticism catalogued by Rimmer above. Can professionally prudent self-censorship in the service of "community harmony and understanding" be more accurately described as institutionalized cowardice leading to abrogation of responsibility and duty of care?

Three years after Rimmer's booklet, The Age of 5 December 1994 carried the article "Migrants more likely on welfare" by Karen Middleton reporting unsurprising but surprisingly-admitted findings of the then Labor Government created and funded pro-immigration think-tank, the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research (now defunct):

"A higher proportion of migrants receive age or invalid pensions, sickness benefits, and the dole than do people born in Australia..."

According to a report in The Australian Doctor, 4 April 1997, "HIC swoops on medicine exports at airports" by Christina Anastasopoulos, a one-day search operation of passengers' luggage run jointly by the Health Insurance Commission, Federal Police, and Customs Officers at Sydney International Airport in November 1996 resulted in 24 people being charged under the National Health Act for attempting to illegally take medicines overseas which had been obtained through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (read public purse):

"All travelers involved were boarding flights bound for the Middle East or South East Asia."

Multiply by number of international airports, times 365 days, by how many years? (5)

Most recently a Melbourne University study of increased welfare dependency over the last twenty years reported in the Australian, 11 July 2003 by Christine Wallace said:

"Most of the increase appears to have occurred after 1989-90 and has been most pronounced among single males, particularly those born outside Australia."

Worry as we should about immigration's day-to-day public health costs, they are minor in the order of things most concerning about immigration. Think about the mass mental health implications for frustrated dwindling white majority societies whose well-founded and well-documented fears about our ongoing multiracial immigration continue to be flatly ignored by their elected governments, decade after decade. To what degree does the generalized repressed frustration and resentment so generated feed into mass subliminal post-modern apathy and political disengagement? Think about rising levels of despair, depression and dysgenic behavior -- conspicuous consumption, substance abuse, below replacement fertility. For too many people who have never considered the culture/history/curricular wars to be their business, life seems naturally disconnected from their past or future. As life's passengers they work, shop, eat, drink, watch TV, party, and too often holiday right on past family and children, trying to be merry today -- for tomorrow, continued bipartisan immigration policy ensures displacement, and eventual replacement by Third World immigration. Although a whole range of demographic and social indicators don't look good at present, these trends need not be terminal -- which reminds me of an alternative title I considered for this article, "Immigration Overdose: When tonic turns toxic, STOP!"

For the hyper-informed readership of activist newsletters and journals such as The Social Contract, the daily deluge of bad news from the mainstream media continues to confirm our worst fears about where immigration is taking us. We sift and clip, copy and fax, post, email, download and quote, discuss, catalogue, file, and otherwise integrate and incorporate the latest details into a broader more intricate mental landscape of related information. Sometimes for we realists, it may all seem a bit daunting or depressing even, but that's only to be expected:

"Indeed some studies have postulated the existence of 'depressive realism,' on the basis of evidence which suggests that depressed people have a more realistic assessment of both their level of control over events and their likely future circumstances than the non-depressed... those who are in a condition of mild depression that tend to see themselves and their world with the least amount of cognitive distortion." (6)

So there you have it -- our well-earned excuse to wallow in the occasional downer. Yet, irrepressibly, we are the types who leap at the letterbox on arrival of the latest edition of expert distillations on our collective predicament. We read in wonderment the detailed mirroring of our local immigration-derived problems reflected from around the world. We observe increasing numbers of journalists who are no longer able to so comprehensively avert their gaze from immigration's multifaceted downside. They signal an awakening that is as yet inchoate as it is general among Europeans worldwide: that Third World mass immigration and multiculturalism are unfolding disasters, only brought into sharper focus and magnified since 9/11. As social capital heads south along with social cohesion in increasingly multiracial "western" countries, collective white survival anxiety must eventually rise as a result. But what of the white masses around the world right now? Do they not fret as we do over the immigration/multiculturalism/demographic bad news stories sprinkled throughout the media? Do they not ponder a dim future for them and theirs? As T.S. Elliot observed in his Four Quartets, "humankind cannot bear very much reality," a concept perhaps reflected by some recent research:

"Humans possess a psychological immune system that allows negative events to fade from memory much faster than positive ones...� Researchers have found the human memory to be heavily biased toward the positive. But far from simply being in denial, the study says our memory systems process pleasant and unpleasant emotions differently. The study to be published in the Review of General Psychology says that the fading of negative memories faster than positive ones should be viewed as a 'healthy coping process.'" (7)

"Perhaps that might be one explanation..." -- so mused Jean Raspail through his narrator (more than once) in The Camp of the Saints when pondering the docility of the "paralyzed west" facing imminent immigration inundation. (8)

Having blacked out for too long under the accelerating G force of immigration-induced social change, more of our opinion makers and leading writers are awakening in white-knuckled fright to an imminent civilizational psycho-sonic boom-crash scenario. With immigration's reality kicking in so rudely and widely, some of print and TV journalism's long-embedded left are turning right. In Britain especially (9) they are stimulating the release of more adrenaline fueled "future fear" into the white English-speaking world than has been pumped into its mainstream organs since Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes, along with President Woodrow Wilson, won their unorthodox tag-team TKO at the post-WWI Paris Peace Conference. Against the odds, and at times each other, these two men prevailed to ensure immigration restriction and regulation remained in the domestic policy domain of sovereign nations. They stopped immigration becoming the plaything of internationalist do-gooders in Paris and thereafter at the soon forthcoming League of Nations.

We live in hope. It's only the end of the beginning. The fat lady is merely clearing her throat. There is every chance that eventually she'll be singing our song, in harmony with a growing chorus of those who are now hurriedly rehearsing to make the lyrics their own.

Denis McCormack is Australian correspondent for The Social Contract.

Notes:

1. Melbourne's Sunday Herald Sun, 25 May 2003, "African intake to rise."

2. The West Australian, 23 July 2003, "Police plan gang squad." "It will respond to the bloody machete and knife fights between the Asian gangs... the unit will also target the predominantly Lebanese gang the Sword Boys and smaller groups including an African gang with the potential to develop into a powerful..."

3. On the Australian Government website covering immigration health clearances updated to 30 June 2003, all the predictably exculpating caveats are cited including:

"Australia's health requirements are designed to:

a) Minimize public health and safety risks to the Australian community;

b) Contain public expenditure on health and community services including Australian social security benefits, allowances or pensions... No health condition with the exception of tuberculosis automatically precludes the issue of a visa...where signs of earlier infection, however small or old are apparent...you will not be permitted to visit Australia until you have completed recommended treatment and successful re-testing" Needless to say, cases of TB x-ray substitution fraud are not unknown."

4. Australians Against Further Immigration with Graeme Campbell, former Federal MP for Kalgoorlie, expended great effort and attracted much P.C. flack for politicizing the immigration -- Hep B connection as spelled out herein by the medical profession heavy-weights. A Federal Government recommendation for childhood Hep B immunization was eventually declared in May 2000 with little fanfare and no public acknowledgement as to Asian immigration being the driver of the belated recommendation.

5. Cited from an Australia First Media Release by Campbell and McCormack, 6 April 1997.

6. Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Post-modern World by Oliver Bennett, Edinburgh University Press 2001, pp.194-5.

7. Melbourne Age, 10 June 2003 "Bad News? Forget it, we all will."

8. The Camp of the Saints is available from The Social Contract Press.

9. There is next to no daylight between what the top end anti-immigration literature has been saying for fifteen years and the recent anti-immigration writings of widely published British journalists like Anthony Browne, Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchins et al. Sample Anthony Browne in The Spectator, 2 August 2003: "Some truths about immigration" (or "Britain is losing Britain" also by Browne in The Times, 7 August 2002) in which immigration/public health concerns are worked in well with all the usual themes. British tabloids such as The Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, and Daily Mail have been pounding the Blair Government on immigration's downside, including its impact on the National Health Service. For a good summary see Spearhead, September 2003, "The great health scandal" by Rob Smyth. Also a very useful and welcome change has been BBC Radio World Services' frank reportage on immigration. Ethnic demographics, multiculturalism's dilemmas, and mounting asylum problems are now getting something closer to the coverage they deserve on BBC radio which is in stark contrast to their previous studied neglect of these issues.

Original article