06/11/2013
[Earlier: Nice Guys Get Illegal Immigrants, September 4, 2001]
The whole Anglosphere has gone mad. Instead of leaving our nations as they are, with their historic populations dominant, seasoned with an acceptable trickle of assimilable settlers from elsewhere, we are in a frenzy of demographic auto-annihilation.
Instead of tackling social and economic problems purposefully and methodically, as we once did, we neglect them while piling new problems on top of them.
It’s a collective insanity, all over the Anglosphere. Here is an op-ed by Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor of The Australian (with a hat tip to Australian blogger Oz Conservative).
Background: Australia is big, rich and empty. It has the lowest population density of any advanced nation: 7 inhabitants per square mile. (Tied with Iceland, anyway. The U.S.A. has 80 inhabitants per square mile.)
The bigness and emptiness need qualifying. Big, yes: but most of the place is uninhabitable desert. Empty, yes: but happy and prosperous in its emptiness.
Add in a generous welfare state, and Australia is a natural target for migrants from poor and dysfunctional countries. Hence the problem of boat people. Greg Sheridan:
The arrival of almost 45,000 boatpeople in Australia’s north since Labor unwound John Howard’s border protection policies in late 2008 represents the most comprehensive policy failure since World War II.Policy failure creating a monstrous problem, The Australian, June 08, 2013
Australia has two big political parties: the center-right Liberals (technically a Liberal-National Party coalition) and center-left Labor. The U.S. Republican and Democratic parties are fair approximations, though the Liberals are more tolerant of curmudgeonly patriots and less cravenly submissive to left-multiculturalist bullying than are the G.O.P.
The Liberals — they are right of center, remember — were in power 1996-2007 under Prime Minister John Howard. That was when the issue of boat people first came up. I wrote about it for VDARE.com in 2001. My conclusion back then:
The latest news I have is that Australian Prime Minister John Howard is “seeking a compromise.” That’s what politicians in Anglo-Saxon countries do. They “seek a compromise.” Then they surrender.
Sure enough. Howard’s compromise was the so-called “Pacific Solution” — bribing small, poor nearby island nations to set up “processing facilities” (i.e. camps) for the boat people. This cut down the flow, but most boat people ended up in Australia anyway.
Seventy per cent were resettled to Australia or other countries. Of those, around 61 per cent (705 people) were resettled in Australia.
In December 2007 a Labor government took over and abandoned the Pacific Solution. Boat people arrivals soared. Labor remains in power today, though just barely — it’s a minority (in Parliament, that is) government. The current Labor Prime Minister is Julia Gillard. Liberal Tony Abbott heads up the parliamentary opposition.
That’s the background to Greg Sheridan’s piece. More from him:
The rate of arrivals [i.e. of boat people] has continued to accelerate. This financial year, we will reach 25,000 in the 12 months to June 30. But the rate of arrivals appears to be accelerating even further. More than 3,000 people arrived on boats in April and another 3,000 last month. This month arrivals are already running at a higher rate than that.
If 3,000 a month is the new norm, the annual rate is 36,000. It could be more.
This, remember, is a nation with a population of only 22 million. If you scale up that 36,000 to correspond to the U.S. population, it’s equivalent to half a million coming into the U.S. annually … which is about how many do come in.
It is the greatest single disaster of the Gillard government and perhaps the hardest to undo.
Although the Australian public is profoundly hostile to this development, the elite debate on the issue has been overwhelmed by two considerations: humanitarian concern for the hundreds of people who have drowned trying to get here by boat, and the Gillard-Abbott contest.
Ah, the elite debate. Tell us about it!
But there are other grave policy concerns. This policy failure threatens to overwhelm and contaminate Australia’s entire immigration program, it has grievous security implications and may fundamentally change the nature of Australian society in a way that corresponds to no national policy objective. There are huge economic and social implications as well.
My emphasis. It can’t be said often enough: Mass immigration is a vast revolutionary social experiment whose result is unknown.
In reality, almost no one ever goes home from Australia against their will, no matter what their refugee status determination is. Certainly more than 40,000 of those who have arrived under Labor are still here, with a small number at [those “processing centers” on] Manus Island and Nauru.
Compare Michelle Malkin’s observation that “It ain’t over ‘til the alien wins.”
But who, exactly, are the Australians getting?
This boatpeople phenomenon is essentially a determined Muslim immigration … A former senior officer of the Immigration Department spoke to me this week, on condition of anonymity, on the way the illegal immigration trade to Australia has become regularised, from Iran in particular. When he first got involved in this issue, Iranians and others would go to Malaysia, then on to Indonesia, and it would be months before they could find a people-smuggler. Now, he says, it is more often like a travel agent service, with everything arranged inside Iran.
Most sensational of all are the figures for unemployment among boat people settled in Australia.
The Immigration Department’s figures, released last year, revealed that five years after arrival the rate of employment — not unemployment but employment — of Afghans was 9 per cent, while 94 per cent of Afghan households received Centrelink [=welfare] payments. From Iraq, 12 per cent were employed while 93 per cent of families received Centrelink payments. Overall, households that came under the humanitarian program had 85 per cent receiving Centrelink payments after five years. The family reunion cohort had 38 per cent, and skilled migration 28 per cent.
My emphases again.
In a follow-up piece, Sheridan is scathing about former (2007-10) Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
The obvious response of compassion — let everyone in who arrives — is not only cruel because it encourages more drownings but is also extremely bad policy. The temptation for moral grandstanding is obvious. One of the worst examples of this is Kevin Rudd’s comment that we learnt in the Holocaust the danger of turning away people fleeing persecution.
Before the 2007 election, Rudd promised to turn back the boats. As prime minister, on national television he labeled boatpeople “illegal immigrants.” People-smugglers, he said, were “the scum of the earth.”
Now the scum of the earth have become, in Rudd’s new vision, Oskar Schindlers sailing their arks of compassionate salvation to Australia. [Kevin Rudd’s compassion is cruel, irresponsible The Australian June 10, 2013 ]
What on earth is the matter with the Anglosphere?
(Vdare.com: See also Australian Media Bigfoot Greg Sheridan Declares Against Muslim Immigration — Where Are U.S. Counterparts? )
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.
