[Unemployment queues in the 1930s Depression in Australia, Source: AP]
Australia's immigration problem is the hundreds of thousands of economic migrants arriving at Sydney and Melbourne airports, not the few thousand asylum seekers arriving by boat.
If you want to know where the jobs, houses, hospital beds and education places have gone, look to the migrants taking them. This is the Immigration Stress created by too many foreigners granted the generosity of Australians. And look what has happened. Foreigners have got the benefits. 'Spot the Aussie' is now a rarity in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Australians have been displaced. Urban property prices have forced many to leave the suburbs they have grown up and flee to the Central Coast (NSW), Mornington Peninsula (VIC) and Sunshine Coast (QLD). Economic migrants are not paying their way. They are sapping our limited public resources to the detriment of indigenous, ancestral and birth Australians. Australia's tax revenue is insufficient to pay for all extra demands imposed by millions of new economic migrants.
Yet Australia could generously triple its asylum seeker intake with hardly any noticeable impact on Australia's quality of life or standards of living. However, the Australian Government needs to start realising that accepting asylum seekers remains with each asylum case until people are assimilated into Australian society and have achieved a financial level of self-reliance. Immigration does not end when the bureaucrat stamps the residency visa. It is inhumane for the Australia Government to abandon vulnerable asylum seekers to let them fend for themselves. Full integration into Australian society can take years and cost hundreds of thousands in public infrastructure.
But while Australia has 600,000 homeless people and more in housing stress and unemployment, all the economic migrants can damn well wait. In Australian and indeed in any country, indigenous and locals have a birth and ancestral right to come first in the poverty safety net. The million or so economic migrants that successive Australian LibLab governments have allowed in over the past decade need to be integrated into Australian society. The socio-economic cost must be in the billions.
But Australia's social priority is Australia's own. The hundreds of thousands of under-privileged Australians should come before exacerbating the social cost problems with more from overseas. Australians deserve an adequate public safety net, before any more economic migrants should be allowed entry. Else Australia will continue to see its downgrading in social living standards and worsening local poverty.
If it's skilled workers Australian industry clamours for, where's industry's investment in local skills training? Where the so-called 'education revolution aligned to industry needs? Skilled immigration is a shortsighted stop gap. Skilled immigration causes social stress. It is a form of social displacement and invasion.
Comments
Joan (not verified)
Mon, 2010-08-02 14:58
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Immigration.
John Marlowe
Tue, 2010-08-03 11:25
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Asylum seekers only 1% of Australia's immigration problem!
Clearly Joan in her comment above is either ignorant or just another misguided lemming* following the media spin about asylum seekers as if their less than 1% of immigration was serious.
If Joan cared to read my opening paragraph she may get the message that economic migrants comprised the 99% immigration problem. The facts are 99% of Australia's immigrants are economic migrants arriving by plane to mainly Melbourne and Sydney. If the media started filming this flood perhaps slower members of the public may start realising this is the real problem.
The issue has nothing to do with the few thousand people fleeing persecution and civil conflict. The asylum seeker issue is one of regional conflict. It is an humanitarian issue of the countries concerned. That people are forced to flee is a consequence of UNHCR neglect and failure to resolve and contain the problem within the countries concerned. The consequence is that the people themselves are given little choice but to flee and so the problem is handballed.
Australia's excessive immigration problem on the other is one of successive LibLab government active policy of selling Australian jobs to foreigners with economic means. Economic migrants continue to arrive in droves by plane at the invitation of LibLab governments in order to reap Australia's socio-economic wealth. Economic migrants are indeed those who have immense choice and they are exercising it at the expense of local Australians.
No more obvious is migrant displacement of Australians in the workplace than in government jobs. The public service is dominated by economic migrants. Yours truly has been on the receiving end of this displacement. Joan cites Strathfield, but look at Parramatta, Sydney's ethnic work hub, where the NSW Government is progressively transferring its many departments. Parramatta has become the migrant capital for well paid public service jobs.
*The "lemming suicide plunge' was first espoused in a 1958 Walt Disney movie, 'Wild Wilderness' showing lemmings mass suiciding off a cliff. While the origins of the myth are false, the myth has useful application. People that unquestioningly follow and believe what the read and see in the media may be likened to the lemming suicide plunge myth. Joan needs to question her lemming tendencies.
Vivienne (not verified)
Tue, 2010-08-03 12:07
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Climate change, overpopulation, not "refugees"
Joan (not verified)
Tue, 2010-08-03 18:04
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Greater tolerance of alternative views on immigration, please.
John Marlowe
Tue, 2010-08-03 19:51
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Why waste effort on 1% of the immigration problem?
Joan (not verified)
Tue, 2010-08-03 22:02
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Immigration.
John Marlowe
Wed, 2010-08-04 17:56
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People smuggling is a LibLab distraction from economic migrants
Dear Joan,
My response to your first comment 'Immigration' [2nd August 2010] was not intended as a personal attack. If you took it as such I apologise to you. I see no need for personal agendas to distract from any issue. What does ego have to gain in any issue debate?
It is what you wrote that I criticised, particularly since it conveys a mainstream perspective which is misguided - that asylum seekers comprise anything more than a minuscule contribution to Australia's immigration largesse. Read my response again!
In your comment you highlighted both the tired over-hyped people smuggling issue and about Visa over-stayers. These issues are so unimportant as a proportion of the immigration numbers. They comprise less than 1% of the overall problem, so why waste time focusing on it and by distracting others from the real 99% problem of Australia's Economic Migrants?
Such sub-issue red herrings only play into the distractive political agenda of LibLabs and their selfish growthist agenda.
Check your facts and if you can't handle criticism of your argument, stick to the issue.
Public commentators (including us bloggers) must take criticism if they dish it. Criticism my argument all you want, but keep to the issue.
admin
Tue, 2010-08-03 20:13
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Toleration of people smuggling will make system unworkable
John Marlowe
Tue, 2010-08-03 20:44
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Why spend any more than 1% of time on people smuggling?
Anonymous (not verified)
Tue, 2010-08-03 17:05
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Citizenship in Australia is too cheap and easy
There are many privileges in becoming an Australian citizens. The following are the only obligations:
New citizens should be under probation. Car drivers must be under probation for 3 years, so Citizenship also should be, and the impacts of not complying with these few obligations could be more wide and perverse than breaking those of a probationary driver. Any abuse of our generous welfare system should immediately mean a revoking of citizenship.
People accepting Australian citizenship should deny citizenship to any other country when their probationary is over. Any indications that immigrants commit crimes, try an impose another type of government (such as sharia law) or who directly challenge our ideals should be deported.
Citizenship to Australia should not come cheap and easy!
John Marlowe
Tue, 2010-08-03 21:19
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LibLabs sell Australian citizenship like they sell Aussie assets
Damn bloody right!
LibLabs sell Australian citizenship like they sell Aussie assets!
Look at foreign ownership of corporations, natural resources, property across Australia!
Citizenship in Australia and indeed any country is a privilege with moral and legal obligations accepted by foreigners into their new host country and its people.
But breach those obligations and foreigners must show cause to otherwise forgo their citizenship rights.
Yet LibLabs sell Australian citizenship like they sell Aussie assets.
Why are foreigners rejecting assimilation in Australia?
Why are foreigners allowed to perpetuate ghettos like the Jews do in St Ives, the Pacific Islanders do in Logan, the Lebanese do in Lakemba, the Indians do in Harris Park, the Vietnamese do in Springvale and Richmond?
Australia's national language is English, so why are these foreigners permitted non-English shop signage and to overwhelm areas with their high concentration of numbers?
Why are foreigners taking up space in Australian gaols?
LibLabs sell Australian citizenship like they sell Aussie assets
Look at the number of foreigners branch-stacked into MP appointments!
NSW Lower House
NSW Upper House
Vic Lower & Upper Houses
QLD Legislative Assembly
[Queensland has no Upper House]
Immigrant influence and political power only grows and increasingly dominates as more arrive and assert and impose their own cultures.
Milly (not verified)
Wed, 2010-08-04 20:15
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Australia as a racist nation - another form of manipulation!
John Marlowe
Thu, 2010-08-05 12:39
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Australian tolerance is being abused by excessive immigration
Vivienne (not verified)
Thu, 2010-08-05 13:53
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Perth muslim woman pushing the boundaries of tolerance
Anonymous (not verified)
Tue, 2010-08-03 20:40
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Claims that we need to emulate Canadian "immigration miracle"
Milly (not verified)
Thu, 2010-08-05 18:46
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UN aim to promote "human rights", immigration and one government
James Sinnamon
Fri, 2010-08-06 19:41
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Mass immigration denies rights of people in receiving country
Mass immigration is a denial of the rights of the people in the existing community regardless of their racial origin and regardless of the racial origin of the immigrants.
At other times in history, people other than Europeans have similarly sufferred as a result of mass immigration. This fact doesn't justify the way predominantly European inhabitants of countries like Australia are now being treated little better than people in other societies that suffered mass immigration in previous centuries as part of the process of colonisation.
John Marlowe
Sat, 2010-08-07 07:39
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I am not an international citizen. I am Australian
Quite right James. "Mass immigration is a denial of the rights of the people in the existing community regardless of their racial origin and regardless of the racial origin of the immigrants."
In response to Milly, yes, the UNHCR aims to promote "human rights" but does a crap job. It has a despicable record of failure (Rwanda in 1994), slow response (Bosnia 1992 to 1995, North Pakistan right now!), turning a blind eye (Burma, North Korea, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Kyrgyzstan) and complicity in persecution (Palestine, Sri Lanka). [Read More]
Utopian ideals like "the belief that the world is now ready to accept a "global civic ethic" based on "a set of core values that can unite people of all cultural, political, religious, or philosophical backgrounds" is also crap.
Many cultures are morally mutually exclusive. Female cultural equality in Australia is incompatible with female oppression and persecution in Saudi Arabia and Sudan for instance. Unrestricted mingling is a consequence of socio-political problem avoidance. Civil unrest in a country is allowed to remain unresolved and to fester and build until civil war breaks out, then the populous flees to another country. The ruling powers argue for international intervention to stay out for reasons of it being a matter of its 'internal affairs'. Yet refugees then become external affairs. The socio-political problem is geographically shifted instead of being contained within the country.
I am not an international citizen. I am Australian. When I work hard, build a house and a comfortable lifestyle, it is not up for grabs by others. Those lucky to have a choice certainly should help others that don't have choices, but not give up their homes in the process.
Milly (not verified)
Sat, 2010-08-07 08:39
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Human groups are far more complex than livestock
Utopian and business ideals are imposed on populations without considering the nature and willingness of the human species, and by considering them a simply a resource, like livestock, to manipulate, impose upon, and expect them to comply.
We have business pro-growth groups, with bipartisan support from political parties, who want continual population growth, without considering our fragile and limited environment, without considering that the great majority do not want higher density living and larger cities, and without considering the social and financial impacts.
There are mega cities in the world, with sprawling tentacles across their landscape, however, those that are successful have highly monolithic cultures and homogeneous populations. Cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore and in Japan are monocultures.
Our leaders, supported by these pro-growth businesses, want high density populations as well as multi-culturalism.
The ideals imposed on populations by the UN (non discrimination and human rights) look Utopian, but they hide wider agendas and ignore the limitations and the psychology of humans groups.
We read of increasing violence and crimes in our cities, and "racist" attacks. The stresses of coping with a divided society, and ramped population growth, show that our society is stressed to the core.
Human groups are far more complex, and have many more needs and dimensions than the simple requirements of livestock that can simply added to paddocks. However, overstocking paddocks will have negative impacts too, and negative returns.
billy (not verified)
Sat, 2010-08-07 14:51
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Immigration - Social Harm
PR for Australia (not verified)
Fri, 2011-06-03 09:46
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PR for Australia - another immigration touting site
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