Indiscriminate QUANTITY immigration is bad for Australia

Australia is being run according to the mass-migration demands of Big Business and the Treasury with little regard for social cohesion or any other wider concerns.  

Three quarters of a million migrants will arrive this year and next – a huge jump on the 240,000 who arrived each year in the decade prior to Covid.  Australia’s level of immigration per capita is now the highest in the world.  The pushers of a “Big Australia” are clearly winning the policy stakes.

Britain, New Zealand and South Africa are the only significantly Western nations in the top ten.  Prevailing policy considers “diversity” an unalloyed good.   But is it?

We are being subjected to this program of quantity rather than quality because our business and political masters believe that straight-out numbers of immigration are the essential key to maintaining economic growth and even avoiding a recession.  They think we live in an economy rather than a society.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported in June 2021 that over the past decade, net overseas migration accounted for around 60 per cent of the annual increase in Australia’s population.   The federal government’s 2021 Intergenerational Report (IGR) forecasts this will hit 74 per cent by 2060-61, in part because of falling fertility in the domestic population.

Rapid immigration inflates the economy and maintains the illusion of a soundly-based society.  But these migrants overwhelming move into our large cities, and flooding the country with migrants ad infinitum harms ordinary Australians through rising congestion (pictured here in public transport and on the M1 freeway from Brisbane to the Gold Coast), house prices, and social fracture because of the culturally incompatible values and practices associated with some immigrant groups.

Who are the interest groups pushing this indiscriminate, “quantity” immigration?

Firstly: BIG BUSINESS in general, because all migrants are potential customers for goods and services, and increased supply of labour puts downward pressure on wages.

Secondly: UNIVERSITIES – because once former minister John Dawkins subjected them to cost-recovery requirements, full fee-paying students from overseas have become their business model.  At the end of July 2023 there were 852,000 foreigners here on student visas.

Thirdly: THE PROPERTY SECTOR – look at house prices in Sydney and Melbourne, and across the ditch also in Auckland (which is affected by the same mindless policy).

In the year to March 2023, record migrant inflow of 454,400 people raised population growth to 2.2 per cent.  If this continues as forecast, there will be a shortage of at least 175,000 dwellings over five years.  Renting has become difficult and much more expensive.

But what about social harmony?

Unfortunately, by making purely quantitative considerations the sole criterion, our decision makers are ignoring the crucial consideration of quality and harmony in social life – which can be fractured when we import people neither willing nor capable to accept and assimilate into our cultural values and way of life. The Cronulla Riots of December 2005 were a great shock, in which a certain section of mainly Anglo society gave a two-fingered salute to what it saw as disrespectful multiculturalism.

Britain is seeing the same calamitous policy – 1.2 million migrants in 2022, including 606,000 more people arriving than departing.  Does any sane person believe that Britain today is a better country than it was before the floodgates were opened to unassimilables?

Crime

One obvious consequence of indiscriminate immigration policies is the increase in crime.  Many of the groups we’ve imported under the aegis of economics or asylum are vastly overrepresented in our crime statistics.  ABS statistics show the Sudanese as the most crime-prone group in the country – imprisoned at a rate four times the Australian average.

Aside from the Romanians, all our major offenders – including Samoans, Colombians, Vietnamese, Lebanese and others – come from outside our European heritage and are incarcerated at higher rates than for European migrants and the native-born.

Consequences of Islamic immigration

Muslim immigration has substantially increased anti-semitism in Australia. The ISIS attempt to establish a Caliphate drew some support from Australia, including military. And vociferous intolerance of non-Muslims has been shown in some demonstrations here, including by young Muslim men in Sydney’s Hyde Park proclaiming Jihad as “Sixth Pillar” of Islam.

To forestall the threat of terrorist violence, our cities have been laced with ugly bollards. These two examples from Melbourne and Brisbane are hardly an advertisement for the benefit of multicultural “diversity.”

But don’t migrants bring in all sorts of needed skills?

About three quarters of our migrants are low skilled – around 1.4 million of the two million or so visas handed out over the last decade.  This is a major reason why real wages have declined.

Yet even skilled migrants pose problems.  Peta Credlin notes that “most so-called skilled migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds are not working in their area of supposed skills five years after arriving; once here, they often end up working as cleaners, carers, waiters and drivers.

The Welfare Drain

If our migrants aren’t in work, they’re on welfare. Our immigration program costs the taxpayer over $13 billion per year.  The further each migrant is from our Anglo-European core, the higher the cost.  Humanitarian visas cost the taxpayer the most.

Denmark tightened its migration regime in large part because of what a fiscal drain it was.  The Economist reported in December 2021 that while Western migrants into Denmark are a fiscal positive, non-Western migrants are a negative, draining 31 bn kroner (about AUD 7bn) from the Danish treasury or 1.4% of GDP. Islamic immigrants from 24 Muslim countries accounted “for 50% of the non-Westerners, but 77% of the drain.” 

Damage to education too

The effects of immigration on education are another undeniable ill.   Schools are now the site of knife possession and the associated stabbings, including by a Sikh student (permitted to carry a knife for religious reasons – that’s multiculti political correctness for you) in May 2021 at Glenwood High School in northwestern Sydney.  Outside the school gates, a growing cohort of children engage in inter-ethnic violence out in the community.  In May 2023 a 17-year-old stabbed to death 16-year-old Pasawm Lyhym outside a bus stop in Melbourne’s north.  This is just the latest in a series of such incidents in Melbourne alone.  Another in June 2020 was the murder of a 15-year-old within the Tongan community.

Demographic diversity is NOT a strength but a failure on any number of levels.  It increases crime.  It enables inter-ethnic violence.  It assaults our teachers and hurts discipline and academic attainment in our schools.  

An obvious solution would be the reprioritization of homogeneity.  This does not mean an explicit return to the White Australia Policy – those days are long gone – but it does mean a largely Eurocentric immigration program and an end to the lie that what we now have is good.

How is life in the heterogeneous West in any way better than homogenous Japan or Hungary?  How is our liberal order anything other than a failed program that’s increasingly dangerous and an obvious example of a decline?

Why should our Australian citizens be collateral damage for a political elite that views our society through the narrow lens of GDP?

In preparing this article, David Truman acknowledges that a number of points have been taken from an article by Trevor Tolstoy published on the Richardson Report of September 13, 2023, at  https://harryr.substack.com/p/quality-not-quantity