It's normal in times of financial uncertainty, or even at other times, to call for reductions in immigrant numbers. It has always been a false response. We are part of a world of political and climatic uncertainty, in which for economic and political reasons people are on the move.
In 2007-08, we took in 129,958 immigrants. That, leaving aside the urgings of some who wish it should be a higher figure, is the minimum number we should take.
First, there are moral and humanitarian reasons we cannot ignore. This year, the total figures for what they call "persons of concern" to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is 31,677,620. They include internally displaced persons, stateless persons, and refugees in general. Is Australia, alone in the developed world, to be more indifferent, less moral, less generous, more isolationist, more closed and less internationally responsible?
In other ways, the external pressures on immigration policy will grow, not lessen. In Papua New Guinea there has in many cases been little or no improvement in standards of living since independence. We are deluded if we think that growth of information and easy transport will not bring more of our neighbours knocking on our door.
Tim Flannery argues our immigration rate is too high. Neither of us are climate sceptics. We believe there will be a global-warming advance of saltwater on, for example, the coast of Punjab and the Bay of Bengal. This will displace millions and create a tide of climatic refugees. Yet we are urged to do less for such people than we do now?
Flannery will say our environment demands a reduction in immigration. But it is our misuse of the environment which has created our environmental disasters. It began when we imported the "European Dreaming" of hard-hoofed animals to Australia. It went on with the first pastoralist who ring-barked for the supposed reason that "grass doesn't grow under trees". It continued with over-irrigation, the death of rivers, and the poisoning of a great area by salination. Our Euro-centric unwillingness, our psychological incapacity, to adapt to the Australian reality, as well as our lack of the skill and will to decentralise Australian population - these, and not immigration, are to blame for the parlous condition of our environment.
The argument immigration is a pressure on the labour market has been running since the 1830s, when convict labour was certainly a threat to the employment chances of the free, but when immigrants also were seen as a danger to workers' conditions. It was a bad argument then, and it's a bad argument now. Immigrants increase demand and so generate jobs. They bring wealth-creating skills - such immigrants are explicitly sought. In truth, shrinking and limiting immigration has always been an issue on which many have called for less, not more.
In 1947, Arthur Calwell negotiated an agreement with the International Refugee Organisation to receive displaced persons from the camps of Europe. The desperate and energised immigrants who arrived here speaking unfamiliar languages and wearing unfamiliar clothes were seen as both a cultural threat and a threat to employment. They were - went the cry - likely to deprive Australian workers of wages and conditions by working for cheaper returns. Obviously, that idea was as wrong-headed, as fraudulent, and as myopic as it is now.
As for public acceptance and fears about social cohesion, a Melbourne survey of 1948 showed a majority of those interviewed wanted only British immigration, though the Irish were tolerable too. If Germans were to be admitted, they were considered preferable to Jews. Southern Europeans were utterly undesirable. So no Frank Lowy, no Smorgons, no Gustav Nossal, no Judy Cassab, no Frank Knopfelmacher, no Harry Seidler, no Anthony LaPaglia, no Paul Mercurio, no George Miller (yes, Greek), no Mary Kostakidis, no Christos Tsiolkas. Imagine had the apostles of social cohesion and immigrant limitation and reduction got their way. The reality of immigration proved to be the polar opposite of what was feared.
We have here no secular theology of immigration. We have no public monuments to ragged masses yearning to be free. We have sometimes intense initial resistance followed by tolerance, fraternity and the highest level of ethnic inter-marriage in the world. Australian inclusiveness gradually spreads to include new-coming group after new-coming group. This history of immigration indicates it has enriched the community by creating wealth and cleverness and imagination - all without destroying the cohesion we want, and without creating ghettos. Why reduce these possibilities? Under the sanction of mere reason, less immigration will make Australia less wealthy, less clever, less imaginative and less of a successful polity. Who wants that?
At the iQ2 debate in Sydney last night the author Tom Keneally argued against the proposition that our immigration rate is too high.
This article first appeared in The National Times
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