immigration

"A Christian nurse who refused to remove a crucifix at work has lost her claim for discrimination after an employment tribunal panel ruled that she should have reached a compromise with her hospital employers."
[The (UK) Sunday Times, 7th April 2010, 'Crucifix ban nurse Shirley Chaplin loses NHS discrimination case'].

The case was first reported back in September 2009 by the (UK) Telegraph newspaper article, Nurse faces the sack for refusing to take off her cross'

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UK Equality Act Open to Subjective Interpretation

It is inconsistent that a small neck cross worn by British nurse Shirley Chaplin could be health risk to patients, while bangles worn by Sikh nurses and while headscarves and long sleeves worn by Muslim nurses are not deemed to be a health risk to patients.

One rule for some?
Anti-Christian rules in a traditionally Christian country?
Workplace bias towards non-Christians?

The tribunal's judgment is inconsistent and discriminatory and so misinterprets the principle of equity in the workplace. It makes a mockery of the law. Worse, it contradicts and outlaws traditional British Christian values.

The UK Equality Bill became an Act of Parliament on 8 April 2010. [Easy Read Version].

The UK Equality Act 2010 was introduced to replace outdated, complex and inconsistent anti-discrimination legislation. It is intended to provide a more simplied legislative framework to protect the rights of individuals and advance equality of opportunity for all people in the UK.

The spirit and goals of the UK Equality Act 2010 seem fair and equitable for the most part by encouraging mutual respect, equal treatment and opportunity to people irrespective of gender, race, age, sexual preference, religion, ethnicity, disability, etc.

But is it achieving this?

The Shirley Chaplin case highlights a fundamental oversight in the legislation by permitting subjective interpretation of the Equality Act. The Equality Act's aim of addressing disadvantage and under-representation in British society, especially in the workforce, has to be consistent to be universally accepted across British society.

Shirley's tiny tight neckless cross a patient health risk? What a spurious diversion! What a dangerous social precedent for Britain! What gross injustice! The tribunal's biased decision exposes the failing of the Equality Act and a betrayal of British local tradition.

Are they going to ban church bells across Britain in case it may upsets immigrant Muslims?

The Equality Act rings dangerously like the Neville Chamberlain's Munich Agreement of 1938 which sought appeasement to avoid conflict. But equality is not about appeasement. It is about applying fairness consistently.

Inequality still prevails under the Equality Act. Now the pendulum has swung against the traditional Christian Brits themselves. What next, Sharia Law in the Royal Courts of Justice?

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"Positive Action to Increase Diversity" - means just what?

The Equality Act also has a troubling component as well. It prescribes "Using positive action to increase diversity" to the extent that social minority groups should be represented at executive level of government, across the judiciary, in commerce and indeed across all social institutions.

It states:

Positive action?

Comments:

Given Britain's long Parliamentary history, given that mass immigration has only been happening since post WWII, fifteen MPs of differing races is frankly a significant representation. But an MP does not have to be of the same racial background to be capable of representing special interests of migrants of a certain racial subgroup in Britain.

Britons are represented based on the electorate they live in, not according to race.
Would it not be approximating Apartheid to seek parliamentary representation on a racial basis. When immigrants settle in a country they assimilate into the population. Migrants to Britain become British.

In any case, how does Britain compare to the countries where many of these different races originate? I would argue that it fairs incredibly fairly. How many non-indigenous MPs are there for instance in Indian, Pakistan or Bangladesh for instance? The following table lists where most UK immigrants came from in 2001.

And yes, ideally the top university positions should be held 50/50 men/women. But are senior administrative roles the types of jobs most women want? Yes the opportunities should be equal to women as they are to men and this university issue perhaps requires case by case analysis, but what is the end game by putting token females in these roles just to make the statistics comply with some utopian ideal? It would only undermine the rights of women to be treated equally as men on merit.

The problem with this utopian social prescription is that it prioritizes perfect and complete demographic representation irrespective of merit. The Act also fails to clarify the underlying vaues of British society and to provide for clear guidance when minority diversity clashes irreconcilably with the social values of the majority.

Britain is naturally dominated by Britons of Christian Anglo-Saxon origin (those born there with local ancestry). It is therefore logical that most social institutions are dominated by those of Christian Anglo-Saxon origin. Leadership is a factor of many complex attributes of a person particularly the understanding of the culture of an organisation. Cultural fit is a mission critical attribute of a leader.

Migration is changing the demographic makeup and steadily new arrivals are being represented, but social change takes time and must take time. The alternative of rapid social change is to risk social unrest. Britain is one of the few ancient societies that can lay claim to having averted revolution.

Leaders of UK society, indeed any society should be chosen on merit. If all minorities are to be represented on all social institutions, that representation risks being tokenistic.

It is a noble and ethical aim to be nondiscriminatory. It is totalitarian to impose minority interests on the majority.

Perhaps migrants with vastly different values sets to the dominant British values should consider the reciprocal application of such a law in their country of origin. How long will it take for such social equality to apply in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh?

The new UK equality legislation is being subjective interpreted to enable some social minorities to be more equal than others.

The legislation needs to go back to the UK's legislation drafting board.

Sitting Bull (c. 1831 – December 15, 1890) was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man who led his locally indigenous people as a war chief during years of resistance to migrant colonisers in what is now South Dakota, USA.]
Read about the Native Americans

Cultural assimilation is about respecting and adopting the prevailing local ways of a place - language, laws, social values, behavioural standards, customs, intermarriage, and spatial distribution across the community, etc. Assimilation is a gradual change process.

Australia's most excessive immigration Prime Minister on record, Kevin Rudd, just gone, by allowing 300,000 immigrants into Australia in 2008 denied any chance of assimilation.

The idiom 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do', is an instructive guide applicable to any land - Australia, Kosovo, Mongolia, Tibet, Saudi Arabia, not just for visitors, but especially for immigrants. A country has no obligation to change and adapt to suit those from foreign soils. Indeed, immigrants have an obligation to be humbly grateful to their new host country and their new hosts. That gratitude deserves the respect of accepting the local ways, not seeking to change them.

Respecting locals, local rights and local values is akin to respecting one's elders - an underpinning principle of all human societies. Those that arrived first have highest moral claim. Nobody has greater right to a place than where they are born. No-one has control where one is born - as such birth rights morally prevail over non-birth (immigrant) rights; indigenous rights morally prevail over immigrant rights.

Where this lore has been savaged through human history is by the use of armed conflict.
That human history has been dogged with rape, pillage and plunder does not make it morally right that it should be repeated. Local rights morally prevail. This is a universal right deserving not just of the human world but also the natural world.

Immigrants rejecting cultural assimilation with the local population are unwelcome invaders by definition. Newcomers by rejecting adoption of the local culture, are disrespectfully asserting an unjustified claim to establish and impose a foreign culture. It is an invasion, albeit short of armed conflict, or what colonists euphemistically term 'annexing', but arguably that is one of the few differences.

Immigrants seeking 'a new life' in Australia or New Zealand have a moral obligation to respect and adopt the ways of life of the local inhabitants, not to impose their foreign ways of life upon their new hosts.

Both Australia and New Zealand immigration policies have historically performed a disservice to both the local population and immigrants alike, by abandoning immigrants in the assimilation process. By ignoring the full cost of assimilation under the cloak of multiculturalism, successive governments may have kept their quarterly cash books in the black, but let the social costs soar. Government immigration responsibility stops not at the airport arrivals gate but after assimilation.

The British were unwelcome invaders when Cook landed at Poverty Bay New Zealand in 1769 and then at Botany Bay, Australia in 1770. Subsequent exploitation, colonisation and mass murder in these islands by the invaders was wrong and immoral and indigenous generations have remained aggrieved and downtrodden ever since. Both histories are of violent invasions of native peoples lands. History cannot be undone, but must not be repeated. The current indigenous peoples remain complex open wounds awaiting healing.

With history unchangeable, it would take many more generations to come to achieve acceptable conciliation by the respective indigenous peoples. This unresolved conflict has a higher priority than adding to the problem with new immigration waves - and that is even if a genuine conciliation process was to start now.

But the national identity problem faced by both New Zealand and Australia stews at the psyche mainly because this process has not even started. It is symptomatic of the national immaturity of both nations.

Instead history has been successively repeated - immigrant wave after immigrant wave. The problems have been compounded because of the lack of assimiliation.
Enclaves of ethnic migrants have cemented themselves and more recently been exacerbated by short-sighted concepts of multi-culturalism, addressing skills shortages, fueling economic growth and allowing massive influx.

It is the disgrace of both these nations that generation after generation they shun conciliation with their indigenous, while generation after generation both nations perpetuate the fragmentation of their societies by encouraging migrants bringing 'old country' baggage with them. Seeking a 'new life' in a new country means just that!
Perhaps New Zealand as always leads Australia in some respect as it questions the 1840 multiple versions of the Treaty of Waitangi and M?ori-P?keh? relations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Australian Aborigines have not yet been offered a treaty. [Read More]

As the immigration wave cycle is allowed to continue without assimilation, the largest populations of the world will ultimately swamp both nations, overwhelming locals, local rights and local values, ultimately with their own. As both New Zealand and Australia are democracies, once the migrant number reach majority, migrants will be in politics and power. Locals will become downtrodden and ultimately extinct like the Thylacene and Moa.

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Related articles and comments on CanDoBetter on this issue:

Multiculturalism is more an effect than a cause In " How Immigration is Leading Us Down The Road To Sarajevo", Frank Hilliard writes: "Supporters of mass immigration often point to the past success Canada had in assimilating newcomers into Canadian society. They say by the third generation most immigrants are thoroughly Canadian in thought and action. To these proponents, there is no need to change our open-door immigration policy because it’s been, in their view, a roaring success. Unfortunately, what was true in the past is often not true now and may not be true at all in the future. Some newer immigrant groups don’t want to assimilate and prefer to remain distinct." http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_u... I would question the last statement. The self-appointed advocates and ethnic power-brokers of newer immigrant groups don't want them to assimilate, nor do the politicians who find it convenient to bus in ethnic voting blocs into nomination meetings or manipulate them for electoral purposes. In my experience, however, immigrants themselves very much want to participate in mainstream society, but are unable to do so. Why? Most of them are too damn exhausted trying to put food on the table. They have the will, but neither the time nor the energy to participate in much of the public activity around them. Even the 20% who have skills often do not find jobs to employ those skills---just like many educated native-born Canadians. Consequently they must work longer hours on lower incomes to keep their heads above water. It usually takes a decade before the average immigrant achieves the average Canadian income. As has been the case for more than a century, too often it is their children who act as interpreters for what is occurring in Canadian society at large. As I wrote before (http://candobetter.org/node/2007) , ethnic enclaves should be seen more as life rafts than defiant fortresses against assimilation. Case in point. My great grandparents came to Canada with every intention of learning English and following local customs and laws. But seeking the support and job opportunities offered by those from their homeland was a necessary stepping stone to eventual integration into Canadian society. Then once on their feet, and finally fluent in English, they were able to move out of the Scandinavian area of town to a bigger city with a dearth of people of their former nationality. Now, as then, I would submit, the pace of assimilation is governed by economic considerations---not by any stubborn or recalcitrant refusal to embrace the dominant culture. We have imported a slave labour caste to provide services which we want on the cheap, and for which employers in a competitive market, either will not or cannot reward with a living wage. Thus most immigrants cannot earn the $25,000 in annual income that government requires before tax revenues offset the costs of services provided to them. Mass immigration is essentially a corporate welfare scam, and multiculturalism a de-facto apartheid strategy to build walls between people who might otherwise unite to challenge the system. Mr. Hilliard argues that the high volume of immigration, drawn as it is from “non-traditional” sources, grows cultural ghettoes and in tandem with the prevailing ethic of cultural relativism---the philosophical underpinning of Official Multiculturalism---makes it possible for immigrant groups to more effectively lobby for the acceptance of practices like genital mutilation, the stoning of adulterers, polygamy, child marriage and the like--- practices that are lawful in their homelands. But against this centrifugal force to bind with what is traditional is a very real countervailing impulse, particularly among the younger generation, to join mainstream society. There is both a “push” and a “pull factor” at work. While ethnic power-brokers are attempting to pull their flock closer to their orbit, most immigrants feel pushed outward by a desire to grasp the wider opportunities that await them beyond their cultural cocoon. After all, immigrants, almost by definition, are people who are willing to leave their comfort zone to grasp for opportunities. Leaving one’s homeland is the ambition of risk-takers. The growth of an ethnic enclave in itself is not decisive in impeding assimilation. What is critical is the ability or inability of an immigrant population to join in on the cultural and political life of the nation as a whole. A sixty-hour work earning inadequate wages is a greater stumbling block to this possibility than an ideology which counsels minorities to maintain a separate cultural identity. Cultural relativism is a rationale for what corporate capitalism most wishes. It only attempts to legitimize the plurality of manufactured solitudes. As Bob Birrell, Robert Putnam and other academics have documented, the mutual isolation of contending sub-cultures erodes trust and volunteerism, two vital ingredients of civil society, thereby helping to create a society of consumers from what was formerly a society of citizens. Consumers behave as the atomized agents of the economic system, but citizens see an obligation to deliberate and decide the course of society. Corporate capitalism is fettered by the active participation of citizens, but left foot-loose by politically inert and self-absorbed consumers. Diversity may impede cross-cultural communication and solidarity, but it never inhibits cross-cultural congregation at the local shopping mall. Multiculturalism, seen in this light, is merely useful to the power elite. A means to an end, but not an end in itself. A moratorium on immigration, higher minimum wages and union-friendly laws to bring this class under collective bargaining protection would go a long way to undercut the opportunity and incentive to displace more expensive indigenous labour with that of foreign-born workers. Multiculturalism is not the root cause of cultural fragmentation, but a cloak for a more sinister economic agenda which celebrates cultural diversity as it rings the cash register and counts the profits. Let's not confuse cause with effect, or needlessly alienate those who are even more a victim of growth-madness and balkanization-by-design than we are. Let's not make immigrants the easy recruits for the growth lobby who use their fake enthusiasm for “cultural diversity” as a political battering ram against sustainable population strategies. Most who emigrate do so to create more opportunities for their children, and therefore have the potential to understand that is their children who will suffer most from an inflated labour pool and an unsustainable population level that will diminish their share of available resources. Tim Murray July 26, 2010

Domestic students disadvantaged from tertiary education placements

Successive Lib/Lab common ideology in Australia has migrant students displacing indigenous & domestic students. What is the standard of literacy and numeracy of domestic students compared with children of recent economic immigrants - notably the many dominating expensive selective schools! Where is the research?

We know that migrants settle in the capital cities where work opportunities are concentrated and perpetuated by government policy and funding. So it is rural Australia where the situation of non-migrants perhaps is more evident.

A 2007 study 'Regional Young People and Youth Allowance: Access to Tertiary Education' by Naomi Godden of Charles Sturt University found gross education disadvantages faced by young people in regional Australian in regards to access to tertiary education. The majority of these young people are non-migrant.

An '#hl=en&q=access+tertiary+places&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=ed3f4f790dd975e5">Inquiry into Rural and Regional Access to Secondary and Tertiary Education Opportunities' has found that in the NSW rural town of Young typically less than half of Year 12 graduates are accepted into university, and that of them less than 20% are able to take up the offer.

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Australian education discrimantly migrant-student-dependent for financial survival

Australian Universities have had their funding slashed by successive Lib/Lab governments forcing the universities to source their own funding. That funding is most readily available from migrant students prepared to pay full fees up front.

It is a systemic problem undermining Australia's competitive capacity. It is one of the despicable legacies of the Howard Era, as elucidated in the following Sydney Morning Herald article by journalist, Simon Marginson, 'Let's work together to fix university funding', back on 22nd February 2008:

'Melbourne University, like other universities across Australia, is heavily dependent on international students and their full-fees to subsidise places for domestic students, whom the federal government under-funds.' [Source: 'Melbourne’s financial viability questioned as graduate employment rates plummet', by William Horton 15th March 2010].

Successive Lib/Lab governments have sapped taxation funding from educational institutions from child care through primary and secondary schools to tertiary level including both universities and TAFE alike. Teaching quality in the public system has declined resulting in a boom in private education but only for those who can afford it.
Typically well-heeled economic migrants can afford it, while many domestic students, particularly indigenous Australians and regional Australians cannot. So we have an increasing class society increasing dominated by a new class of economic migrants who are increasing their socio-political influence in this country.

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Look at Australian migrant student statistics!

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, International Students in Australia, "the number of overseas visitors arriving in Australia to study in 2005 was 375,000, more than ten times the number (30,000) that arrived in 1985. In 2004, Australia was the fifth largest destination globally for overseas students."

According to a recent Parliamentary report ' Overseas students: immigration policy changes 1997–May 2010' dated 18th June 2010, the Howard Coalition Government from 1998 instigated a major international marketing campaign to promote Australia’s education and training services industry overseas focusing on traditional Asian markets as well as emerging markets of India, China, Europe and North and South America. It spent $21 million on the campaign under the new dedicated Australian Education International (AEI).

The clichéd justification was to address 'skills shortages and an ageing population' but instead of educating domestic students, Howard invited 'skilled migration' and migrant students. Somehow this was to 'increase Australia’s global competitiveness'.

Then in March 1999, Howard introduced the Migration Occupations in Demand List (MODL)—a list of occupations that were deemed to be in national shortage. Australia then got swamped with accountants, cooks, waiters, hairdressers, construction contractors, mining contractors, transport drivers and taxi drivers. [These are jobs many Australians missed out on. In the public service there is even more evidence of reverse discrimination. Most non-executive government position are now occupied by migrants particularly those based in Melbourne and Sydney - the Education, Health, the RTA, VicRoads, Railcorp, Sydney Buses. Indeed, this author's personal experience in government has observed over three quarters of positions occupied by workers with non-Australian accents].

Then in July 2001, Howard allowed overseas students who had completed their course in Australia to apply for permanent residency through the Skilled-Independent (and related) visa categories of the GSM program and were exempted from work experience requirements. This lead to a 27% increase in offshore student visa grants between 2001 and 2003.

Then in December 2003, Howard relaxed the requirement to have sufficient funds to live and study in Australia and being proficient in English. Strangely enough subsequent studies in 2005 and 2006 revealed that while, generally, skilled migrants were achieving high levels of employment former overseas students may not have been achieving employment outcomes that were commensurate with their skills and qualifications. Evidence suggested that strong English language skills and relevant work experience were crucial to achieving good employment outcomes.

Under the Rudd Labor Government [2008–May 2010] permanent skilled immigration was increased by 30% - 6000 places in February 2008 and a further 31 000 places in May 2008. Skilled migration now comprised 68% of the entire Migration Program.

The Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) has revealed:

The Migration Program planning figures for 2010–11 increased the skilled migration program by 5750 program places.

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With the mass influx of economic migrant students attracted to many Australian universities, rental accommodation has dried up and rents have skyrocketed. Again this favours the comparatively more wealthy economic migrant students over domestic students and indigenous Australians. The locally poorer are displaced.

Then the developers have moved in and cashed in on the massive student accommodation boom and destroyed surrounding suburbs in the process. Look at new tacky shoebox highrise that has taken over Randwick and Kingsford around the University of NSW! Look at Carlton around the University of Melbourne, or Hawthorn around Swinburne or Clayton and Mount Waverley around Monash University!

Residents in these suburbs have seen their suburban amenity destroyed by the migrant putsch!

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The Department of Immigration ignores the social costs

Aside from the millions in export revenue making successive Australian governments balance of trade figures look good economically, what social and moral justification could there possible be for favouring migrant students to take up tertiary places over domestic students?

Successive Lib/Lab Australian governments have granted tens of thousands of permanent visas to these migrant students to stay in Australia and obtain Australian jobs. What social and moral justification could there possible be for favouring migrant students with these new Australian qualifications to take up employment places over domestic students?

The federal Study in Australia web site "aims to promote the Australian education and training industry to the world by providing free impartial advice on the benefits of studying in Australia."

The Australian Government has a dedicated department to encourage migrant students Australian Education International. This is where Labor's so called 'education revolution is taking place!

The Australian Immigration Department and Citizenship offers what it calls a 'Professional Development Visa (Subclass 470) and Occupational Trainee Visa (Subclass 442) to encourage migrant students here.

The Department of Immigration ignores the social costs. ...'We only process the Visas, after that, what happens is not our problem.'

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Student Visas simply backdoor immigration rorting

A whole industry of migration agencies has been set up. There have been many shonky institutions and private colleges allowed set up simply to target migrants to Australia via the student visa backdoor. They run 'bogus courses, take cash for certificates, demand bribes to upgrade marks and employ unqualified teachers.'

According to one account in Victoria in 2009:

In late 2009, the Rudd Labor Government was forced to assist 4000 odd migrant students affected by the closure of 12 dodgy education providers which had gone broke. How many millions did that cost the Australian taxpayer? What's changed to prevent more dodgy migrant student businesses setting up down under?

This is not an issue of Australia's humanitarian commitment to people fleeing persecution in their home country. This has nothing to do whatsoever with asylum seekers. This is the Lib/Lab electioneering distraction, and the Lib/Lab media are lapping it up.

The core Australian social issue is the problem of economic migrants displacing Australian domestic students from educational opportunities, and consequently from employment, from housing, from the Australian fair go. Invasive immigration is destroying our once celebrated 'classless' society.

What social and moral justification could there possible be for migrant students with these new Australian qualifications denying their skills back in their home country to help their home country prosper? By remaining in Australia and taking Australian jobs, foreign students are selfishly thinking not of their country of origin, nor their host country, but of themselves. They are parasitically enriching themselves on the back of Australia offering itself as a generous educational host nation.

Once again Australia prostitutes its attractiveness for cash.

The Australian Growth Lobby has only a couple of primitive weapons - calling the PM a racist and misrepresenting the figures. The other side has all the good arguments, as well as truth on its side. This article analyses the childish statistical misrepresentation and social innuendo in the Australian Financial Review editorial, "PM's own goal on population," 5 July 2010, p.54.

Who's afraid of Julia Gillard?

Fears about what Gillard's population policy statements mean are coming from the commercial growth lobby and, to a lesser extent, from the NGO sustainable population lobby. The first fears that Gillard is serious about not wanting a big Australia and beyond their control. The second fears that Gillard, too, will let democracy down and fall in line with the depraved agenda of the growth lobbyists, like so many Australian prime ministers. Using the commercial media, the Growth Lobby has prevailed over this country since Captain Cook brought over the first political prisoners, known then as convicts, later as colonists, never really as citizens with rights.

The apparent fear in the hearts (do they have them?) ... well, minds ... what about small, reptilian brains? (Oh, dang it, that's disrespectful to snakes)... of the growth lobbyists is therefore encouraging, because unless they are playing a truly elaborate farce, they really are worried that they have lost control of the P.M.

A few more intelligent ones may realise that it is the economic situation over which they have lost control, but the multitude are dimmer witted fundamentalists who still believe they can control the economic situation by controlling the P.M.

They only have a couple of primitive weapons to do this with - calling the PM a racist and misrepresenting the immigration and economic figures. All the good arguments are on their opponents' side. However the Growth Lobby does control the mainstream media still.

Silly numbers

"PM's own goal on population" (Australian Financial Review, Editorial, p. 5 July 2010, p. 54) misrepresents the immigration figures by presenting them as percentiles of population growth. By stretching an average over 40 years between 1971 and a projected 2011 they manage to get a figure of 0.6% risk of being an immigrant per 100 people in Australia. What they don't say is that that percentage steadily declined over that time because the actual numbers of immigrants stayed the same at around 80,000 per annum. What changed was the total population numbers, as immigration and natural increase added to them.

See, if you start out with 13,177,000 people in 1972, 80,000 represents about 0.6%. Added to the baby-boom, that 0.6% grew the population at quite a clip, until, in 2000, Australia had a total population of 19,169,083. The actual number of immigrants, averaging around 80,000, now only represented 0.41% of the total population. [1] By the time the population reached 21,180,632 in 2007, 80,000 would only have represented 0.3% and the growth rate would have have been slowing continually (on average, although there were spikes, notably around the time of Tianamen Square under Bob Hawke and a negative number under Gough Whitlam, during the first oil shock).

But, as the anonymous author of the Australian Financial Review editorial says, in 2007, 2008 and 2009, the numbers of immigrants did not stay around the average. They more than doubled, to about 180,000. He or she also does not say that 180,000 represented 0.85% of the total population in 2007 instead of 0.3%. That's quite a leap.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which really is where the expert demographers are, doesn't talk in terms of immigration as a percentage of the total population because it is actually far more usual and more relevant to say what per cent of the total annual increase immigration represents.

This more usual measurement of immigration, however, wouldn't help The Australian's anonymous writer to fudge the facts.

In fact, in 2007 the ABS sent out media releases to tell Australians that the population had just increased by the most people ever and that net immigration had contributed 54% of that increase. This was the first time that immigrants minus emigrants had outnumbered births minus deaths in Australia.

ABS MEDIA RELEASE September 24, 2007

"Largest population increase ever: ABS

"Australia recorded its largest annual population increase ever, according to figures released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Australia grew by an estimated 307,100 people for the year ended March 2007, the largest increase since record keeping began in 1789. The increase gave Australia an annual growth rate of 1.5% (the highest rate since 1990), and brings the population to an estimated 20.9 million.

Net overseas migration contributed 54% (162,600 people) to this growth, which was more than the natural increase of 46% (138,100 people or 273,500 births minus 135,400 deaths).

Queensland again recorded the highest growth rate of all the states and territories, at 2.3%, followed by Western Australia at 2.2%, the Northern Territory 2%, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory 1.5 %, South Australia and New South Wales 1% and Tasmania 0.6%. "

On 30 June 2010, the ABS put out another headline, which said that immigration was now contributing to two thirds of the annual population increase!

"Population growth

There were 22.2 million people resident in Australia in December 2009, with 432,600 people added in the year to December 2009. Despite recent increases in the fertility rate, nearly two-thirds of the gain was from net overseas migration. In the year to June 2008, there was a doubling in the net gain of people on student visas (to 109,000). ABS projections show, depending on assumptions about migration and fertility, that Australia's population may be between 34 and 40 million in 2051."

The editorial in the Australian Financial Review also describes the intakes as if they had occurred accidentally or naturally, when in fact the growth lobby organs played a role in forcing those figures up.

Growth Lobby scapegoats PM to avoid its own responsibility

But the Growth Lobby doesn't want to be identified with its actions, let alone take responsibility for them. It would rather imply that the Prime Minister - an immigrant - is a racist or an immigrant turn-coat, in as contrived a manner as it has used in its 'explanation' of immigration statistics.

See what you make of this concluding statement in the anonymous editorial:

"Ms Gillard is Australia's first foreign-born prime minister since Billy Hughes. It will be a sad irony if the first word of her premiership becomes the final word of historians on her time in office: the leader who diverted the country from a future open to the ideas, creativity and effort of tomorrow's equivalents of her own parents, into a cul de sac of stagnation, insularity and rapid ageing."

Rather than a 'sad irony', many Australians would see Gillard's attitude as comforting in its loyalty to her new country and a sign of courage. Courage in the face of a low kind of blackmail which has seen fainter-hearted immigrants shut up about the dangers of over population simply because they are afraid of being accused of shutting the door behind them. Such immigrants are a liability in a time when the growth lobby has forced us to pay through the nose for desalination plants, when the supply of cheap oil upon which the unprecedented population numbers of the 20th and 21st century rely upon, is dwindling, and food and water are looming as scarcities.

These costs of population growth are never weighed up against the paltry gains of those who directly invest in it, in the narrow and false economic arguments which are the final weak links in the Growth Lobby's chain that binds us.

NOTES

Just to complicate things, that meant that the population growth rate was slowing. Because the population was so much bigger, however, the smaller rate of increase still represented a much greater number of people.

The latest figures on population growth in Canada from Statistics Canada once more underscore the fraud and futility of the strategies against climate change recommended by mainstream environmental organizations and the corporations who support them financially. http://www.ottawasun.com/news/canada/2010/06/28/14542971.html

In the first three months of 2010, Canada grew by .26%, adding 88,449 consumers to its population, now exceeding the 34 million mark. If that growth rate persists, Canada will be home to some 353,788 more consumers at year’s end than it had the year before. This is only slightly less than the average 367,200 who were added each year between 2001 and 2006 when the country grew by 5.4% or 1.08% per annum. By the same measure, British Columbia, which grew by .37% from January to April this year, is on pace to add 66,760 people to its population, which represents some 13% of Canada’s. This will translate into about 24,000 extra households and 43,000 extra cars. Good news for the home building industry, the developers, the banks and the auto industry----but bad news for the environment.

So much for the much vaunted carbon tax that the British Columbia Campbell Liberals introduced two years ago, with applause from Tzeporah Berman and the environmental movement. According to the BC government website, that tax would reduce green house gas emissions equivalent to taking 787,000 cars off the road by 2020. But as mathematician Rick Shea observed at the time, our provincial population growth rate, which is exponential, would add 520,000 cars to the road by that time, and by 2026, wipe out all gains made by this tax. http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_printable&PAGE_id=3396&lay_quiet=1

Similar calculations could apply to the nation as a whole. The CBC and its trendy mouthpiece, George Strombopolous, boasted last year that its “Million Acts of Green” campaign to encourage “green” living by highlighting and celebrating the initiatives of ordinary Canadians succeeded in reducing carbon emissions equivalent to taking 10,000 cars off the road. But at least 350,000 people who jumped on board HMCS Ecological Titanic that year spurred the construction of 140,000 more housing units and the purchase of 252,000 automobiles. On average, each Canadian is emitting more than 20 metric tonnes of GHG annually, so the extra passengers we pick up burden the atmosphere by over 7 million metric tonnes of GHG each year. In the face of this growth, technological efficiencies are also of fleeting value. Analyst Brishen Hoff calculated that the energy supplied by the proposed wind farm in Sarnia, Ontario would be negated by just 22 days of “business-as-usual” immigration. http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_printable&PAGE_id=1976&lay_quiet=1

Oddly though, the “green living” evangelists make no mention of population growth and its impact on GHG emissions in Canada. Collectively, the BC Sierra Club, the David Suzuki Foundation and prominent environmentalist Guy Dauncey have offered some 121 “solutions” to climate change, but not one of them advises readers to practice birth control. Instead, we are exhorted to “change our behaviours”, but not our behaviour in the bedroom. And of course, the ugly “I” word----immigration---is left out of the discussion. That of course, is the most conspicuous omission of all. The environmental NGOs never tire of telling us that climate change is the result of human activity, but they leave the distinct impression that the number of humans has nothing to do with the scale of this human activity. David Suzuki, for one, feels qualified to lecture us about environmental responsibility despite having sired five carbon footprints from two marriages. In his “Penguin” commercial for Ontario power users, he told Ontarians that if they turned down their air conditioners by one degree, enough energy would be freed up to power another 36,000 homes. What he did not say, however, is that each annual crop of immigrants to that province requires the construction of 75,000 homes. Every Canadian with an air conditioner would have to turn it down by 3.5 degrees C just to offset the consumption of the new energy users who emigrated to Canada. Maybe Suzuki’s next energy conservation movie should be called “Sleepless in Toronto".

Two of three new Canadians, are foreign-born and immigrants on average, quadruple their GHG emissions upon their arrival in North America, thereby accelerating the timetable of our global demise. Stating this inconvenient truth is not to make immigrants the whipping boys for our profligate ways. Immigrants come to aspire to our lifestyle, not escape to the austerity they left behind. They were not responsible for our consumptive patterns, but they are eager participants in it. This is not an indictment but a statement of an understandable ambition, shared by all who came before us. But while it is our obligation to reduce our ecological impacts, that endeavour cannot be an excuse or rationale for importing more climate-changers and converting them to hyper-consumerism. Generosity to migrants can be a callous disregard for the world as a whole, as well as an imposition upon those who already live here.

It should also be noted that our carbon footprint is only a subset of our ecological footprint. Population growth is a critical variable in environmental degradation of all sorts---the loss of farmland, soil productivity, water, wetlands, species and biodiversity services. However much we conserve, recycle or reuse, reducing our footprint is futile if the number of feet coming through the airport or the maternity ward offsets those economies. Mother Nature takes no account of our acts of personal green abnegation----only our total consumption. While we are performing “one million acts of green”, there are 34 million acts of brown being committed every day in Canada merely by virtue of our existence. The very last thing the global environment needs is more Canadians---from wherever their source.

Tim Murray
June 28, 2010

For those who follow the stock exchange, building materials share values are the key to the boom and bust cycle of Australian (and similar systems) property, infrastructure and construction booms. When building materials values go down we know that overall market demand decline has settled in. It means that the developers and engineers have reduced their forward orders for bricks and mortar. At the same time Australian state governments have been told to reduce their own little-known immigrant-sponsorship programs.

ALP Investments

Are business forecasts another key to Julia Gillard's apparent sea-change in population policy and Rudd's disappearance?
The ALP doesn't rely on mere donations from developers; it has its own huge investments in finance, insurance, mining, development and property, which act as a barometer for the benefits of growth. Could ALP investments and other big business now be warning the Labor Government that construction will no longer be able to soak up immigrants? Sure, pumping up population pumps up demand, but only if there is money to invest. Problem is that the money seems to be drying up.

Boral pulling up sticks

Building materials giant, Boral, long a veteran investor in Australian population growth and an early vocal member of the 20th century Australian population growth lobby, is downsizing some of its Australian and US operations and heading north, presumably scavenging the last inertias of scale in the post-colonial malignant growth of China, India and South East Asian regions.[1]

The Australian Financial Review reported that Boral made a $49 million loss before interest and taxation in the first half of 2010.[1]

The most tasteless era of ostentatious spending on multi-management layers wining and dining big projects and buyers since the one preceding the Great Depression may be on its last legs. The US housing market has gone phutt. The Australian market will follow.

And Boral shares, running at around $10 in 2006, are now about half that.

"Deutsche Bank believes that although Boral's Australian construction materials arm has been one of its strongest-performing divisions, with earnings before interest and taxation up 12 per cent to $107 million in the first half, it could easily cut some $14 million in costs by eliminating several layers of management." [1]

This will be a relief for less exalted workers and managers in the sector. Survival is possible in such industries if they follow the post 1970s oil-shock European model of maintaining infrastructure and housing stock instead of investing in population and construction growth. However, there won't be room for wedding-cake management tiers.

States told to cut their 'secret' immigration programs

Another sign of terminal decline in bricks and mortar bubbles is the new Federal Government's request to the states to cut back their semi-secret immigration programs, including the 176 visas.[2] The states control land and derive income from its sale, notably through stamp duty. To generate land and housing sales they have been engineering population growth, in tandem with property developers and financiers. The associated state-sponsored immigration programs seem to have started in Victoria and are the most excessive there. Introduced by the Kennett government, one of their ploys was to make a low profile category of 'regional immigration' (once designed to assist low-population rural areas by facilitating skilled immigration and loosening definitions of family reunion) into one that applied everywhere, designating dense urban areas as in need of immigration. Long and short-term immigration in numbers previously unimagined has generated a demand for housing and jobs in construction. The same immigration probably supplies many of those non-English speaking construction-workers one sees moving like ants on roadways and tragically moon-scaped once green patches in Australian suburbs, carrying out orders at which most locals would bawk, if in control of the process.

State government spokespeople, including growth-corridor spruikers, have repeatedly claimed that immigration numbers were outside of their control, yet the states advertised aggressively for immigrants. See these articles, for instance: "Premier Bligh pretends Queenslanders cannot cap population growth although 60% want to" and "Melbourne 2008, Life in a destruction zone" and "Julianne Bell delivers resolutions to Planning Minister Madden in late impromptu meeting."

Yet the State Premiers continue to try to mislead the public on this, even subsequent to Gillard's new policies:

"We can't control who comes over our state borders, but the federal government can control who comes into Australia," (Anna Bligh) [3]

Tragically and wastefully the tendency of state governments to deny reality may see green wedges rezoned and destroyed even at this stage of construction detumescence by parliamentary rogues. See for instance, http://candobetter.org/node/2058 and http://candobetter.org/node/2067 Yet it may all be for nothing; those wedges might be sold at a financial loss in the end.

Women in power

We may gauge the panic of big business to the idea of a real debate on population through its mainstream media mouthpieces' hopeful perseveration with tying that rusty and irrelevant old racist can to the idea of sustainable population and Julia Gillard, reflected for instance, in this glowing chestnut where Gillard's red hair provides a cliched motif:

"Who can forget the last redhead to talk tough on immigration and protecting Australian values?

and "This isn't just about talking to voters in western Sydney but also in Queensland, which gave rise to Hansonism. Maintaining seats there is shaping as a major challenge in the federal election."[4]

The comments above evoke the medieval European stigmatisation of red-heads, not to mention witch-hunting. Starting with the new Primeminister, women in Australia may be in for an interesting time as the boys start fighting over the scraps, in the property sector and government.

Notes

[1] Jeremy Wiggins, "Boral set to offload dead wood," Australian Financial Review, 28 June, 2010, page 1.
[2] Sophie Morris, "States' visas blunt skills thrust: Migration," Australian Financial Review, 28 June, 2010, page 8.
[3] Marcus Priest, "Values, being sustainable are the keys: Population,"Australian Financial Review, 28 June, 2010, page 8.
[4]Marcus Priest, "Lurching to the right on boat people: Comment," Australian Financial Review, page 8.

Populate of Perish?

Since the slogan ''populate or perish'' was coined during World War II we have forged a consensus that a growing Australian population is mainly good for national prosperity.

The populate or perish policy is nothing new, of course. Under various guises, it has driven growth in Australia for more than 200 years. However, those who argue that big population equals better everything are wrong.

1968

(photo: Perth in 1968)
In 1968 we had a population of around 12 million. The year 1968 was a tumultuous one in the world beyond Australia. Nothing so dramatic occurred in this country!
Officially, the economy was ‘buoyant’, with an 8 per cent growth in GDP in 1967-8. Private spending rose sharply (especially for cars and consumer durables), average weekly earnings continued to rise by 6 per cent, and private fixed investment leapt by 11 per cent in 1967-8.

(photo: Billy Snedden)

Billy Snedden, the Minister for Immigration, said that Australians, and certainly the government, did not want a multiracial society. Prosperity, the gathering mining boom, job security, an increasingly comfortable lifestyle had protected most Australians from imported excitement.

People on a reasonable income (slightly higher than median) can no longer afford to purchase a reasonable house (2-3 bedroom, one bathroom), a reasonable distance from where they work. In 1968 interest rate was 5.38% and steady. Homes were in good supply and inexpensive, and there were jobs for everyone who wanted one. We had “full” employment. There was no real waiting time for hospitals and emergency services were all first class.

(photo: PM John Gorton)

Under the Liberal Government, Prime Minister John Gorton (1968-71), the Australian dollar was worth $ 1.25 US.

The trains and buses were uncrowded, as were beaches and public facilities. People could afford holiday houses. Public transport was not yet privatised. The drought had ended and water was not even an issue in the big cities. The crime rates were very low and and violent crimes as it is seen every day today were almost unknown.
In 1968 the average price of a vacant Melbourne home site was $3659 and the average after-tax earnings $2825.

The culprit of higher housing prices in Australia was clearly identified as being the price of land which had been driven up by planning controls often designed to create more compact cities.

Our lifestyles, for the most, are spiralling downhill due to the stress of population growth and the associated costs and loss of social capital. Once ecosystems melt down, they are gone. It doesn't depend on what we want, but how many people our land can realistically and desirably support. Big is not necessarily better. Bigger populations can be harder to move away from disasters, like the financial crashes, natural disasters and climate change.

Peak Oil

 The US military recently warned that the world faces a "severe energy crunch" and looming oil shortages. The military predicts a "Peak Oil" scenario - where demand outstrips the world's supply capacity - as soon as 2012.

The world's oil reserves have been exaggerated by up to a third, according to Sir David King, Britain's former chief scientist, who has warned of shortages and price spikes within years.   Peak Oil is not some doomsday myth. It is a very simple equation based on supply and demand related to a very finite resource.

Australian Conservation Foundation

Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) president Professor Ian Lowe says the belief that population growth leads to economic prosperity is flawed. You don’t have to be Dick Smith to realise that our continued reliance on population growth as a key economic driver has serious environmental and societal implications.

Nation building?

The argument that a nation-building government would be bold enough to choose a bigger Australia has absolutely no merit at all, because as we can see today all what was good about Australia in 1968 are not good today, yet our population has almost doubled which proves conclusively that more is NOT better.

How fraudulent this model of limitless growth is! There is unwillingness to consider the finite nature of our material world and properly value negative externalities and the non-material factors that contribute to our well being.

Norway

Charles Berger’s valuable piece “If Norway can prosper with a stable population, why can’t Australia?” On Line Opinion, February 22, 2010 highlighted the lack of evidence supporting the supposition that population growth stimulates economic prosperity.

GDP

Economic modelling conducted for the Intergenerational Report concluded that lower population growth would mean lower per-capita GDP for Australia, among other ills. If you look at what's happened to real gross domestic product per person, you'll see it has fallen in three of the past five quarters.

Over the past seven financial years, real GDP has grown by 23 per cent, but real GDP per person has grown by less than half that. So we haven't been doing as well as the headline growth figures imply. In fact, there is now more mortgage stress and increasing costs of utilities, rates and charges.

Infrastructure

Let's consider NSW's population growth, which increased 80% from migration last year. Its needs for upgraded and new infrastructure are arguably more pressing than anywhere else in Australia (new land release, infrastructure for higher housing density, transport, water; tax revenue for health care, education, law enforcement etc).
Effectively, Australia has to go into debt to provide the infrastructure for a growing population. Why is this so?

Please explain, Mr Rudd

The main mechanism through which the economy benefits from immigration is the lowering of wages by increasing the supply of workers. Cheaper labour costs eventually mean lower consumer prices... but also higher profits to business. The fact the economy is slowing and inflationary pressures easing, the Rudd government needs to explain its justification for an acceleration in the immigration program.
There are already too many people on the planet and in Australia, but all we hear is that we need to increase our population dramatically if we are to survive. This mindset is a slippery slope to oblivion!

Allied with the attitude that too much growth is never enough is the belief we need all the growth in population we can get, particularly through immigration.

The evidence to sustain the view that national well-being is best achieved by high GDP growth cannot be found.

Kevin Rudd and his Federal Government ministers have lately taken to uttering the catch-cry that they "want Australia to be a place that makes things". However, this will not happen in a world of slave-labour economies, until the abandonment of protectionism, supported by both the major Australian political parties, is reversed.

Surprisingly this harmful policy began in the years of the otherwise largely economically nationalistic Whitlam Labor Government.

Martin Feil writes in his opinion piece in the Age newspaper of where this has led Australia three and a half decades later:

No doubt not far behind would be other unproductive categories such as finance and land speculation. Property development, including construction, whilst superficially appearing to be a productive economic activity, merely facilitates adding more to our population for which sustainably productive employment has yet to be created. The same applies to the construction of roads, and other infrastructure to service the areas in which the new arrivals will live.

Whilst Premier Kevin Rudd and Queensland Premier Anna Bligh apparently believe that these activities can indefinitely continue to be a major component of Australia's economy, common sense tells us that they cannot.

Martin Feil continues:

See also: "Whatever happened to Australian manufacturing?" by Martin Feil in the Age of 20 May 10.

As I noted in my earlier miscellaneous comment and as was reported in the Melbourne Age of 9 May 2010, the Anglican church has rightly called for both a decrease in natural population growth and a decrease in Australia's current record high rate of immigration. The Citizens Electoral Council, which believes that not only Australia, but the whole world, is underpopulated, responded, on 11 May 2010, with one of its typical hyperbolic media releases. The CEC accused the church of promoting the British Royal Family's secret plan to cull the world's human population. It also accused it of promoting pagan beliefs in support of preserving the natural world, rather than what it held to be true Christianity focussed solely on what is (supposedly) good for the human species.

Below I reproduce the whole media release, together with my responses.

The Anglican Church General Synod paper can be downladed from here (pdf 277K),

My response: A human plague would cause "genocide", not population targets.

My response: Letting people live in their own country is their definition of "genocide"? Family planning is not "genocide". How can those not even conceived be killed?

My response: How does this logic work? Genocide by definition is: "The systematic and widespread extermination or attempted extermination of an entire national, racial, religious, or ethnic group". On the contrary, mass immigration is blurring national boundaries and ethnic and national groups. Stabilising population is about protecting human lives, of now and future generation, and is in our best interests.

My response: What's Prince Philip got to do with Australia's immigration policies?

My response: How are humans different from any other species without predators and natural enemies to stop their destructive over-population? Malthus was ahead of his times. Overpopulation is the cause of terror, wars, diseases, conflict and famine.

My response: Since when did environmental responsibility and not overstocking the paddocks become "culling"? Once the paddock is full, it is negative returns for the farmer.

My response: The "image of God" was in Genesis, before the Fall, not now! If we are in the state of sin, we are not "sacred". That's why Jesus had to die on the cross - as a redemption.

That Christian idea actually expresses the unique human quality of creative reason, by which human beings make the scientific discoveries which produce the new technologies that enable humans to support expanding populations.

My response: Our finite planet, and natural resources, won't keep expanding, and this is clear today. There is no biblical basis whatsoever for this idea.

My response: The degradation of soils, waterways, the Murray river, loss of biodiversity, climate change, peak oil and peak everything are signs that Australia is already overpopulated -- as is the rest of the planet. Basing human population growth policies on yet to be achieved scientific achievements and exploration is dubious policy-making, to say the least!

Adhering to and preaching obsolete ideals, even when those ideals fly in the face of the mathematical and scientific reality, and is mis-representing Christian doctrine and our responsibility to care for Creation.

There is no God-given mandate that permits humanity to liquidate ecosystems that are needed for our shared survival just because of our economic and social systems demand growth. Already we have ecosystems and finite natural resources being consumed at peak levels. Ecosystems, including forests, water, oceans, fish stocks, waterways, wetlands are under stress, and with the overlay of climate change, could collapse large portions of the Earth and cause famine and drought - and ultimately become uninhabitable. We could be the next threatened species!

“Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.”

– Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society

Vancouver a world in a city

It was a poignant homecoming. It has been over three years since I last visited Vancouver, “the big smoke”, the grand old lady who, despite our half-century-long relationship, still manages to surprise me. She’s had an expensive facelift recently, with multi-billion dollar monorails and Olympic venues complimenting the forest of new high rises which sprout up with astonishing speed. But the makeover only serves to highlight the wrinkles Vancouver can’t hide. The homeless, the addicted, the mentally troubled and the stressed-out masses who run faster and faster just to remain stationary.

…Lower Manhattan and Vancouver’s downtown peninsula share a problem that most North American cities would love to have – too much interest in new downtown housing. [But] it is important to look beyond the current housing bubble to ask whether the wholesale exchange of offices for condos is in the long-term interests of the economic health, even the urbanity and livability of these two cities.”

Vancouver ... doesn’t have another commercial core even while it wipes out the one it had in the name of developing a densely populated urbanist paradise (and we all know “paradise” is just another word for “too much of a good thing”). Source of inset and photos: PolisNYC

There is a reason why Vancouver is called “a world within a city”. Speak to any representative spectrum of people and you feel like you are watching a foreign travelogue. Especially on the gritty east side, where I grew up. I earned my degree in cross-cultural relations at school, at work and in the neighbourhoods I lived in. These were my people, the ones I still feel most comfortable with. The Portugese, the Italians, the Greeks, the East Europeans, the Chinese. Subtract their accent and their cuisine, and they are guys just like me. Their language deficits actually facilitated a deeper communication-- while Anglo-Canadians can find the words to obfuscate and beat around the bush, those with rudimentary English tend to be direct and blunt, employing expressive body language to fill in the gaps and emphasize their points. Our cultural differences were overshadowed by our common class affiliation, and on the picket line, we belonged to the same tribe. When I spend a day in East Vancouver, I feel like a man released from solitary confinement and given a day pass. Finally I get to speak to people with blood in their veins, not the Borg units in my artsy-fartsy soft-green haven who robotically regurgitate CBC-speak and live on the spoon-fed filtered information of Sierra Club newsletters. (God help them if their Mother Ship---CBC Pravda---went down and their umbilical cord was severed----the solitude of independent thought would fatally traumatize them. Imagine them having passed through a gauntlet of PC courses at college or university that screen out original or unorthodox thinking only to be suddenly left to think for themselves. Or worse yet, having to resort to candour.)

The things that immigrants say that ethnic leaders don’t

Each Vancouverite, it seems, is a library, and those from abroad consist of many volumes. I met several who had much to tell. Of the five people at the hotel desk in Richmond, four were of Chinese origin and one South Asian. The fast food outlets in Burnaby were the same, and half the tellers in my old bank branch likewise. I took every opportunity to speak with these individuals, to hear their story. One young man revealed that he had left Hong Kong some six years ago, and found life here marginally less frenetic than the city he left. The bank guard, a gentleman from India, told me how he struggled to provide for his family on the meagre salary his position afforded, and that his efforts to organize a union met with intimidation and threats of dismissal from the Royal Bank, the one that has apparently bought David Suzuki’s silence on immigrant-driven population growth. He told me how Vancouver had become progressively more congested, expensive and crime-ridden in the twenty years that he had lived here. Then I spoke at length with a shopkeeper from Iran, who once lectured in electronics at a prestigious London university, but found the promise of professional employment in Canada hollow. He made a point that most Canadians do not appreciate. While he has made it his mission to impress upon his sons that Canada and only Canada is their home and nation, he maintained that immigrants are too damn exhausted trying to establish themselves to learn much about the politics and culture of this country. Too often it is their children who act the only conduits to mainstream culture. It took him five years to get on his feet, and like most of us, his energy is too consumed fighting to survive debt and dispossession to be spent on any political or community activity. His take on multiculturalism was similar to mine. Exotic cuisines and splendid costumes do not disguise its motive: to provide a fig-leaf for the corporate goal of driving down labour costs by displacing relatively expensive indigenous workers with cheaper imported ones. “That is what immigration has always been about”, he declared in an accent that blended Farsi with a mid-Atlantic hybrid of Canadian and Geordie English.

Indebted consumers too busy and exhausted to jump off the treadmill

Mass immigration has also been about expanding the number of consumers. Especially the consumers of real estate. The shift away from “traditional” European sources was convenient for the big banks, who have set up shop in South Asian to cultivate customer loyalty before the customers emigrated to Canada. Financial institutions see the growing Asian demographic as superior savers and avid clients for hefty mortgages. Moreover, workers recruited from Europe had the bad habit of organizing unions or participating in them with vigour. Workers from undeveloped societies were more compliant. Their focus was on their extended families, not their civic responsibilities, and working at a minimum wage can suffice for someone who pools his income with a large extended family. A tenuous foothold in a fast food outlet or driving a taxi is seen an acceptable stepping stone on the road to eventual prosperity. Trouble is, while it once took five years for an average immigrant to earn the income enjoyed by the average Canadian, it takes ten years now. According to the Centre for Policy Alternatives, 38% of Vancouverites fail to achieve the wage level deemed necessary to eke out a semi-decent living. Coincidentally, 38% of Vancouverites are immigrants. Some are wealthy, but most are not.

Photo: Uknown homeless female Canadian citizen & Vancouver street resident.

Actions have recently been taken by the Vancouver Anti-Poverty Committee against the various levels of Government (provincial:BC Liberals & civic:Vancouver Non-Partisan Association (NPA)).Some media outlets and political pundits have gone so far as calling the APC's protests borderline terrorism.This is somewhat laughable.In fact I laud those people that take a stand against the proverbial 21st century Goliath,that being Government & Bureaucracy.
All that I know about this protest is that certain promises & prerequisites for staging the 2010 Winter Olympics have not been met or acknowledged (ie.low income & affordable housing).It could also be said that Vancouver has become a haven for construction of luxury apartment towers,whereas affordable housing has become non-existent.As of May,2007 these unfulfilled promises have given substantial weight for the protesters cause.
Posted by VancouverBlueEyedGuero at http://vancouverblueeyedguero.blogspot.com/

As labour historian Mark Lehrer of Simon Fraser University recently noted, over the last 35 years Canadians have had to work much longer hours for much less in real wages. The major inflationary factor has been the cost of housing. The cost of rents, mortgages and property taxes consume at least 40% of the average disposable income. The rising cost of living has driven married women into the workforce and put all of us on a treadmill. Feminists call this process "women's liberation", but in fact it has resulted in our collective, gender-neutral enslavement. Immigrants, 80% of whom are unskilled from "non-traditional" sources, and half of whom are functionally illiterate in both English and French, must run on this treadmill at an even faster pace for a longer time. Ironically, it has been immigrant-driven population growth that has inflated the housing costs which have forced them into a lifestyle of chronic workaholics, cloying to the company of other émigrés and relatives for mutual support. For this sin, they often reviled for their failure to “fit in”.

Immigrants want to assimilate, but are denied the time to do so

We have imported a slave labour class and condemned them for their inability or unwillingness to assimilate. But the truth is, the vast majority of these immigrants want to assimilate. They want to become Canadians and fully participate in our society---but their circumstances do not allow them to do so. Ethnic enclaves should be regarded more as life rafts than defiant fortresses for those who would resist acculturation to Canadian values. They are a testimony to economic apartheid, not divided loyalties. Scan the footage of the 2010 Winter Games, and you will notice that a great many of the spectators who waved Maple Leaf flags were New Canadians.

”Calif”, who came from Somalia some two decades ago, is a case in point. He virtually lives in his taxi, fighting Vancouver traffic all day and night in order to support his son, whose passion for our Canadian fixation, ice hockey, formed much of his conversation. His gratitude for my interest was witnessed by his refusal to accept payment for the ride. It would be perverse to regard him as an agent of our cultural marginalization and displacement rather than what he is---a victim of economically imposed isolation. He is a pawn, not a colonist. Meanwhile, ethnic power-brokers, the self-appointed advocates of people like him, suck from the tit of government grants and appointments advancing a cause----cultural sovereignty and fragmentation---which immigrants themselves do not want. Calif is a passenger from an African shipwreck who boarded a Canadian lifeboat that, despite its apparent size, is overloaded. He cannot be made a scapegoat for our misguided policy. Eighty percent of immigrants and most asylum-seekers are unskilled. They do not earn the necessary $25,000 in annual income to pay enough taxes for the government services they receive. As such, they impose a net fiscal burden on the rest of us. So who benefits? Those who must spend their lives on a treadmill to eke out an insufficient living? Or those who employ them? Get it?

Multiculturalism more the effect than the cause of atomization

Multiculturalism has brought us mixed results at best. Harvard's Robert Putnam and Monash University's Bob Birrell, among other academics, are right. Along with delectable food, entertaining music, and interesting people with fresh perspectives, cultural diversity weakens trust, solidarity and civic participation. No wonder Dr. William Rees has called for a more "integrative" model of multiculturalism that would foster the kind of societal consensus we need to face up to the daunting ecological challenges ahead. But whatever its vices or virtues, it must be seen, at least in Canada, as a symptom and not a cause. The cart, not the horse. A useful smokescreen for the corporate agenda. The game plan was always to displace an indigenous work force with a cheaper one, and to design laws that would make them feel more comfortable in the workforce and society at large---even if our legal traditions and rights were compromised in the bargain.

If our culture was that important to us, the way to defend it would have been to establish a tax regime that discourages "flipping" and real estate speculation, and in progressive labour laws, laws which would have robbed employers and their political handmaidens of the incentive to import a slave labour caste. As South African whites found, you can't have it both ways. You can't keep your culture safe behind gated communities but send out for cheap help from the untouchables. If you want local jobs to go local people, then pay more money for your home-delivered pizzas and TV repairs so that local people can make a reasonable living providing them. Otherwise, as they say on the eastside, “Shut--The--Fuck—Up”.

Vancouver left me with one overwhelming impression. That of a gateway city that showcases a sinister, time-honoured Canadian tradition. We have apparently effected a massive cultural transformation, but the diversity we behold is superficial. Beneath the rainbow of faces and the multitude of foreign tongues, there remains the same old culture of greed and exploitation. That is the common thread that runs through our colonial history. As Joel Grey sang in the hit musical “Cabaret”, money makes the world go around. Keep em’ busy competing for it, and the system can keep on runnin’ like the Energizer bunny in that TV battery commercial.

It must have been difficult to establish national solidarity in the Tower of Babel. No doubt tower dwellers wanted to connect with each other, but I guess somebody made too much money keeping them apart. And the rent was so high that at the end of their long day, they were too burned out working for it to attend any tenants’ rights meetings. I think the landlord called their predicament “cultural diversity”, didn’t he?

Tim Murray
May 9, 2010

'For many in this city that prides itself on its social contract, Bergman's horrifying death was the last straw. The government announced the opening of five emergency shelters, 14 new permanent public-housing developments and plans to purchase and revamp 25 inner-city hotels. The British Columbia parliament passed a law giving police more power to get endangered people into shelters.

But with the Olympic Games approaching, there were widespread predictions that the police, as is often the case in host cities, would round up the homeless in a final cosmetic hose-down before the dignitaries swept into town.

"I swear to you on my mother's grave, that is not going to happen," Lemcke pledged to an activist recently. "We will protect the rights of people down there, and the world will see what the world sees on the downtown Eastside. The world needs to know."'

What's interesting to me is that Vancouver's homeless problem is due to reasons similar to the US's:

Vancouver had little or no homelessness problem 15 years ago. But Canada, like the U.S., moved to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill in the 1980s -- and like the U.S., it provided few follow-up assistance programs. At the same time, the federal government got out of the business of building public housing, transferring responsibility to the provinces.

"People are kind of getting used to [homelessness], thinking, well, it's like prostitution or robbery, we're never going to be able to solve it," said Jill Davidson, the city's assistant housing director. "Well, we can solve it. Because we had it solved only 15 years ago."

That's an encouraging message, but it requires that we actually spend some money to make it happen. I've lived in two places where homelessness was an issue — Seoul, which didn't have many but where little was done to help, and Honolulu, where homelessness is pervasive, especially along the beaches and downtown — and it just seems like average citizens don't care about the people involved.' (Source of comments on homelessness and of photo of immigrants sleeping on church pews.)

Michael Lardelli, on Governance Committee of SPGN

Michael Lardelli, who is a senior lecturer in Genetics at the University of Adelaide, helped form the new Australian party, Stop Population Growth Now, and is on its governance committee.

Lardelli explains his motives for supporting this new party this way:

"My background is in activism over resource limitations, particularly oil. I have been interested in that since 2004. However, anyone who studies resource limits and becomes interested in broader sustainability issues eventually realises that the core issue in all these areas is population size. Increasing population size eradicates any savings made by individuals who may be trying to reduce their environmental impact, e.g. CO2 emissions."

Food security for Australia in doubt

"The thing that particularly worries me is food, since there is a lower limit on how much food one person needs and so a person can only reduce their food consumption so far.

The green revolution was, and is, only possible through the use of large inputs of oil so a declining trend in oil production - which began in 2008 - threatens our food security.

I recently looked at Australia's food production statistics and it is clear that if we double our population size we will not be able to feed ourselves in a drought year."

Australia already a net importer of vital foodstuffs

"We are already net importers of fruit and veg! Put that together with the declines in food production that will be forced upon us by declining oil production, phosphate production and even climate change and any increase in Australia's population begins to look like national suicide."

A father's duty to his children

"I have two young children and my duty as a parent is to maximize their chances of survival - that is why I was happy to help form SPGN (Stop Population Growth Now) when I was asked".

What is the Stop Population Growth Party on about?

Stop Population Growth Now, describes itself as "a body of Australians seeking to reduce Australia’s population growth to zero as a matter of urgency."

They say, "Government policy is adding almost another million to Australia’s population every three years. This is damaging the quality of life of all Australians and greatly reducing the prospects for our children.

This highest ever growth rate is a direct result of government policy.

Recent polls show that a majority of Australians do not support this government caused, rapid population growth. Most Australians believe that our population growth should be stopped while we work out how Australia can cope with changing climate, diminishing supplies of water and most non-renewable resources, city congestion, loss of arable land to city expansion and loss of Australia’s unique flora and fauna."

Their next statement, that Australians have no-one to vote for in the Federal Election later this year, needs updating, because the Stable Population Party of Australia is now well-established.

But, as SPGN says on its website, "Labor and the Coalition favour rapid population growth. The Greens are ambivalent on the issue."

Stop Population Growth Now, like the Stable Population Party of Australia, has announced its intention to run Senate candidates in every state, with this "single objective – to bring population growth down as rapidly as possible, by giving you the voter the right to vote on this most important issue."

Is two too many Population Parties for Australia?

Is it a good thing to have more than one party specifically canvassing votes against more population growth in Australia? Won't this dilute peoples' efforts?

I don't think so. I think it will raise the profile of the issue at the polling booths. If both parties are successful in getting candidates appointed, the variety should contribute to more sophisticated evolution of the related policies after the election.

It will also give a 'heads-up' to the Greens and other parties on this issue which affects every other policy in Australia.
Indeed, we could have more small population-focused-parties. Each could approach the population and environment field from a different angle, which may be what they intend to do. Business in New South Wales, for instance, and Oil Depletion in South Australia. Really, there are so many angles which can be commented on.

Other Australian political parties with small population policies

Note, however that the New Australia Party also exists - and is the only one in favour of a small population attempting to raise its profile at the moment in Victoria. Unlike both single-issue population parties, it provides the public with the ability to interact on-line to form and modify its policies. It deserves more support than it is getting.

We should also not forget that the Australia First Party has a small population policy as well, and, despite its embattled history, an appeal to the some of the most disenfranchised working class and rural sector, with quite effective dissemination via long-distance truckdrivers. I will shortly be writing about this party's policies related to population.

And the Animal Justice Party is no single issue party either. Its policies run deep and will soon be on-line, including the population policy. The Animal Justice Party's performance might just surprise the public, which has been accustomed by the mainstream press to the idea that 'most people' don't care much about how we treat farm animals and wildlife. In fact, from feedback I have received, it appears that nothing could be further than the truth.

The alert reader may see, as I do, the potential for a number of large groups in Australia which have been sidelined up until now although they actually carry the costs of population growth without the profits, to express themselves through these new parties.

It will be very interesting to see if all these new parties manage to get their quota of 500 people and, with these people and alternative media help, are able to keep their issues in the minds of the greater public and seriously contest the elections. A few years ago, with the stranglehold that the growth lobby has on our media and government, and hence the national and state elections, the potential for any alternative party not secretly backed by business or the other big parties, to get up, would have been much less.

An Environmental Sociologist's opinion

A great deal of political analysis and newsy comment could still be made on what drives these parties, what might split them, and about the people in them, but let's keep things simple for the moment.

My personal investment is to help them all to succeed because I agree with Michael Lardelli that Australia cannot continue to support its current population as fossil fuels decline, let alone grow its population. It is therefore imperative to aim to stop population growth as soon as possible, but also to reduce our intake of fuels and vital resources. In my opinion this can only be done by involving the greater public in the industrial issue of drastically reducing work and output, whilst sharing available paid work. If population growth slows, prices for land and every other thing will drop, making it eminently possible for any Australian to survive - perhaps better than they do now - on smaller incomes and less paid work. For more on this see Sheila Newman, (Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Edition, Pluto Press, UK, 2008 in the articles, "101 Views of Hubbert's Peak" and "France and Australia After Oil".

A graph from "Australian Population Scenarios in the context of oil decline and global warming" at http://www.crudeoilpeak.com shows that the bulge in the Australian population pyramid which growth economists say will cause a larger number of aging people than the economy can cope with, was obviously caused by high levels of post-war immigration. Dr Jane O'Sullivan has quantified the enormous cost in new infrastructure and maintenance of population growth.

This population pyramid, which appeared at http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/?p=1300 was made using ABS on-line population modeling software and purports to represent our population at 2007. [1]

Bulging Australian population pyramid

The graph shows that the bulge in the Australian population pyramid which growth economists say will cause a larger number of aging people than the economy can cope with, was obviously caused by high levels of post-war immigration. (The lighter coloured parts of the pyramid represent the overseas-born part of the Australian population.)

Without this high immigration, projections would show a much more moderate increase in the future proportion of aged to other cohorts in Australia's population. [a]

A growing population grows the problem: Dr Jane O'Sullivan

By continuing immigration at higher and higher levels our governments and the developer lobby will create a real monster of a problem.

University if Queensland, Agricultural Scientist, Dr Jane O'Sullivan has quantified the cost of constantly increasing infrastructure stock. She says:

"The point most overlooked about population growth is that it costs bucket-loads more than ageing, and many times more than the additional revenue from the extra people. You might think that, at 2 per cent growth, we need 2 per cent more infrastructure and services each year.

The problem is, to add 2 per cent to our infrastructure stock each year, we need more like 100 per cent more infrastructure construction activity that we'd need for a stable population. It works like this: if a cost-weighted average lifespan of infrastructure is around 50 years, we need to replace around 2 per cent of it each year to maintain current stocks. If we also have to grow by 2 per cent, that is twice the infrastructure burden.

The same multiplier principle applies to any durable asset. It turns out that the average lifespan of an asset is equal to the percentage increase in cost caused by each 1 per cent of growth. If buses last on average 15 years, we need to spend 15 per cent more on buses per 1 per cent of growth, just to maintain current service levels. If the average doctor or engineer works for 25 years, we need to graduate 25 per cent more per 1 per cent growth - at 2.1 per cent growth, that's over 50 per cent more graduates, and 65 per cent more enrolments per head of total current population.

Little wonder that the skilled migration program has only made the claims of skills shortages more strident.

The 2010 Intergenerational Report anticipates additional ageing-related costs of only 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2050, with population growth to 36 million.

Stabilising at 24 million would only increase this cost by around 0.8 per cent of GDP."Newcastle HeraldApril 28, 2010

Of course the Australian growth lobby knows this perfectly well and has ... um... engineered ... the situation. Australia, unlike European countries, pretends that this growth will create its own wealth, seeing population growth and demand for more infrastructure as an economic stimulus. In Europe it is rightly considered a cost.[2]

Notes

[a] [30-4-2010 this sentence was edited from one which said there would be no increase, which was overstating the situation.]

[1] I erroneously attributed the 'population pyramid' to the Productivity Commission, on 29-4-2010 when I first published this, but when I sought further details the next day, I found that it came from http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/?p=1300 My apologies.
[2] See Chapter Seven, notably the heading, "Reasons for Connections made to Housing and Demographics", in Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby and Its Absence.

Mother Nature doesn't give a crap about our moral imperatives. She doesn’t care if people we judge to be worthy (the poor, the persecuted, the people of colour, the handicapped, the fashionably oppressed) should be lifted on to our lifeboat, only if it is overloaded. And whether the passengers live together without class barriers or in feudal subjugation is of no concern to nature either. The laws of physics trump the laws of any Holy Text, ethical system or left-wing manifesto. If we want to survive, we will have to play by nature's rules, not ours.

It is amazing what Mother Nature doesn’t care about.

Her house rules are impartially enforced, indifferent to our protestations. And they were not designed with us in mind.

Her biophysical laws cannot be repealed by a democratic parliament or be subject to the whims of human autocrats.

She doesn’t care about our political arrangements. Or about how we treat the passengers in our lifeboat. Only that we have overloaded it.

Left and right dichotomies are irrelevant to her concerns. Mother Nature takes no notice of our class structure. We can run our vessel like a slave ship or we can eliminate all class and racial barriers on board. But whether we choose to be organized by socio-economic caste or egalitarian harmony we will remain accountable to her demands. No matter. Her ship’s manifest only records two facts. The number of passengers and where they are situated. If those of lesser means, in the name of justice, are permitted to shift to our side of the boat, she will capsize it without mercy.

Mother Nature is not a humanitarian. She does not accept Mother Theresa’s credentials. Judeo-Christian ethics and the rhetoric of the antique civil rights movement make no impression on her. Human rights, women’s rights, the rights of the disabled or the rights of the poor and the dispossessed are of little interest to her. Our petition to rescue drowning swimmers who are victimized by persecution, war or ecological disaster will not be received with sympathy.

Mother Nature does not make fine distinctions between legal and illegal, skilled or unskilled immigrants. She can’t distinguish immigrants from refugees, legitimate from illegitimate asylum-seekers, white from black or European from Asian or Hispanic migrants, or those who climb aboard via the airport from those who enter through the maternity ward. All human passengers have footprints whatever their origin, and no category of humanity earns an exemption from her law of Carrying Capacity. Some believe that Mother Nature can be fooled or appeased by technical improvements that grow a phantom capacity, but that capacity only enables the addition of more passengers. No technological con job can win us a permanent reprieve from her determination to adjust the number of passengers to the limited capacity of our boat.

Mother Nature might be characterized as a callous bitch, but she is more like a stubbornly neutral umpire. Scream at her with outrage, if you will, but when the Ump says we’re out, we’re out. By all means, quote from your Holy Text, but she will remain unmoved. The Bible, the Koran, The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital will fall on deaf ears. If there are too many passengers and not enough to go around, her ruling will be upheld.

Passionate, defiant, compliant, passive, devout or agnostic, we have no bargaining power with Mother Nature. We need her, but she doesn’t need us. We either get with her program, or we don’t get anywhere.

It is amazing what Mother Nature doesn’t care about.

Tim Murray
April 24, 2010

Why is it that Australia's unemployed in March 2010 just gone number 611,000, while thousands of unskilled jobs are being filled by new immigrants?

Walk around the centres of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney and get into a taxi and find invariably a new migrant at the wheel, born overseas, whose first language is not English, who has had to learn the city streets after driving the taxi. Meanwhile how many of our unemployed, Australian born living in cities, who grew up in the city and could drive a taxi if the opportrunity presented? Why does not Centrelink link up with the taxi industry and put priority on Australia's unemployed, before the jobs go to foreigners? When tourist want to get directions from a taxi driver in a city, someone who is born in the city will have more local knowledge than someone who has not.

Same goes for unskilled and semi-skilled government workers such as those employed by the railways, selling tickets, directing passengers, as guards, as linesmen. Why are these jobs dominated 100% by new migrants?

Is it because Federal and State governments in Australia have prejudiced rules to employ migrants first, because if they don't, they can be branded as discrminatory. That Australian-borns and Indigenous Australians are poorly represented in government unskilled and semi-skilled jobs is REVERSE DISCRIMINATION.

In NSW, government policy requires people who work for the NSW Government need to adhere to its principle of
Cultural Diversity, celebrating not Australian values, but different linguistic, religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds under the Principles of Multiculturalism Act 2000. Such diversity recognises linguistic and cultural assets as a 'valuable resource'.

English language, assimilation and cultural fit is out the door.
Employmers, vocational training institutions like TAFE and Centrelink seem to be poles apart not talking to each other. Australians can't find work, yet employers can't find workers. Liberal and Labor simpletons just take the easy quick fix solution - more migrants!.

Tony Abbott's kneejerk solution

Catholic Liberal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's latest kneejerk solution is to ban Australia's unemployed under the age of 30 access to welfare. Abbots wants under-30s to leave the community they grew up in and relocate to areas where employers need unskilled labour. Forget that the migrants have taken the local unskilled jobs.
Tony Abbott calls for debate on banning dole for under-30s

Abbott other kneejerk solution is to send Australia's youth to West Australian and Queensland mining and resources sector. This is the same industry sector that failed to train its workforce before the last resources boom and so had to go offshore for more migrants. Then when the boom ended, corporations like BHP Billiton sacked thousands and abandonned local communities dependent on it.

Remember the 6000 sacked by BHP Billiton a year ago at Ravesthorpe!

Criticism over Abbott's kneejerk solution by Australian Workers Union national secretary Paul Howes, is justified. “If (Abbott) genuinely thinks you are going to solve an economically crippling skills shortage by taking punitive measures against welfare recipients, he has clearly never lived in the real world,” Mr Howes said. “You can't just get any old Joe off the street and plonk them into a mine, and think that's going to mean they can work.”

The skills shortage in WA's resources sector is a direct result of short term profit taking by the mining companies failing to re-invest in skilling. It is a failure by both the companies and the WA and Queensland governments to adequately skills train between the resources booms.

Migration needs to be tied to Australia's carrying capacity. Part of that capacity is utilising our home grown unemployed first. I wager that of our current 611,000 unemployed, 300,000 could take on unskilled jobs while they seek the sought of work they want. That would be 300,000 less people on welfare, 300,000 less migrants, 300,000 more Australian happily contributing to the economy and to Australian society and 300,000 families of one sort or another not under stress. Consequential Australian social problems of homelessness, family breakdown, decline in physical and mental health, substance abuse, etc. would be in part addressed.

Migrants coming to Australia taking Australian jobs are at the same time abandoning their countries of origin and depriving their home countries of a workforce.

Rudd's penchant for a 'big Australia' is behind his absurd record immigration policy. Population growth and congestion is out of control and is the common denominator driving up Australian land prices, electricity, water, inflation, consumer demand, interest rates, and consequently the costs of living of ordinary Australians.

Our state and federal public infrastructure cannot cope - roads, public transport, health, education, housing, you name it!

Our state and federal public infrastructure cannot cope.
The cost of living for ordinary Australians is becoming desperate!

BIGGER ELECTRICITY BILLS

Today, Origin Energy chief executive, Grant King, warned the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia in Sydney that Electricity prices across Australia were likely to triple over the next 10 years.
He blamed the combination of the federal government's mandatory renewable-energy targets, energy policy uncertainty, higher electricity transmission and distribution costs, and higher fuel costs would drive the increase.

King attributed the rise in electricity demand to booming sales in energy-inefficient flat-screen televisions and air-conditioners. ['Energy prices to triple', The Australian April 14, 2010] This is clearly a consequence of new housing development driven by population growth laregley fueld by record immigration. And the growth lobby like the Urban Taskforce are lapping up the new cash!

Last month, that dodgy NSW Government euphemism 'The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART)' approved electricity price rises of up to 64% over the next three years, with "those living outside the main cities will bear the brunt of the increases."

'Country Energy, which provides all of rural NSW customers with their electricity, has been allowed to raise its prices by the steepest amount, with an increase of $918 if the scheme is introduced; otherwise, the rise will be $601.

'Overall, Energy Australia customers will see prices rise by a total of 46 per cent, for Integral Energy 60 per cent, and for Country Energy 64 per cent.

Welfare groups have warned that the price rises will force many low-income households into ''energy poverty'', and they will not be able to afford to pay their bills.'

[Brisbane Courier Mail, 'Households to feel pinch as price of power soars', 19th March 2010]

BIGGER WATER RATES

Across Australia, water rates are on the rise as each capital city spends big on desalination plants to cope with their swelling populations.

Last April (2009) it was reported by the Essential Services Commission that Melbourne households faced water price hikes of up to 84% over five years. The key drivers were claimed to be the global economy (standard excuse) as well as government not keeping water infrastructure up to demand and so deferring infrastructure works for years. [The Age (Melb), 21 Apr 2009]

Just two days ago, (12th April 2010), with Melbourne's extravagant new desal plant blowing out to cost a whopping $5.7 billion, Melbourne's water prices will further escalate to pay the bill and because of the extravagant dependency of desalination for electricity, which is also going up in price.

'Over the past five years the price of electricity has increased 13 per cent a year in Victoria - and in NSW prices have risen 28 per cent a year in each of the past two years.'

['Water plans drift behind a veil of secrecy', The Age April 12, 2010]

BIGGER HOUSING PRICES

In 2009 Australian capital city house prices rose by 12.1%. Meanwhile Australia's homeless stands at 16,000. Key drivers for house prices surging are the government’s first-home owners’ grant boost.
['Web alert - warning on 'crazy' house prices', Sydney Morning Herald, 16th February 2010]

Other drivers are the inflow of new immigrants seeking accommodation and foreign nationals permitted to invest in Australia's residential housing market.

BIGGER MORTAGE INTEREST RATES

Last December, interest rates were predicted to rise 1% during 2010. But the drivers were the surge of capital projects in the next few years and China growth.
['Business, brace for 1% rise in interest rates in 2010', Sydney Moring Herald, 24th December 2009]

This month, all the banks followed the Reserve Bank in raising their mortgage rates by 25 basis points, making this the 5th interest rate rise since October and has pushed up mortgage costs by a total of almost $250 a month.

Treasurer Swan said the rise was “a painful reminder” the economy was improving. How out of touch is Swan?

Economists warned there could be at least one more rate rise before the end of the year.

['CBA, ANZ, Westpac follow as Reserve Bank raises official cash rate to 4.25%', Herald Sun , 6th April 2010]

BIGGER GROCERIES BILLS

It was confirmed just last November that Australians "are paying the fastest-rising food prices of any major developed nation. The cost of feeding a family has shot up more than 40 per cent this decade, new OECD figures reveal.

Experts say the explanation for our pricey produce and soaring staples is not drought, currency movements or transport costs. University of NSW associate professor Frank Zumbo said comparing costs over 10 years eliminated such variables and exposed our "cosy" supermarket duopoly as the main reason.

[Daily Telegraph, 'Australia has fastest-rising food prices of any major developed nation', 9th November 2009]

BIGGER MEAT PRICES

Wholesale butcher Kevin Masterton says the days of expensive cuts at cheap prices are over for Australian meat lovers. He's predicted Australian meat prices will never be the same again.

"Everyone is predicting Lamb will be the first Australian meat that is unaffordable. Some of the predictions I've seen is that lamb racks and cutlets will be one hundred dollars a kilo by the middle of this decade," Kevin said.

And it's all because we've been spoiled for choice. The drought has forced farmers' hands - they've had to off-load cattle to stay afloat. "They see that they are going to make more money on the cattle so they hold onto them for longer. There is also quite a bit of export, the economy has started to turn so there is less cattle in the market," Kevin said.

And it's a similar story when it comes to lamb. There's been a nine per cent jump in retail sales and a 10 per cent rise in national expenditure on the meat.

And this year the nation's sheep flock is forecast to hit its lowest point since 1905. "And we have got massive exports to the middle east, so if you take those factors into account they've had a pretty detrimental impact on the stock," Kevin said.

"Lamb has probably had the most spectacular increase - we are probably talking four to five dollars a kilo for the lamb cuts."

['Meat prices on the rise', Today Tonight, 3rd March 2010]

So there is not enough capacity in our meat livestock industry to cope with demand, hence meat prices are going up.

BIGGER PETROL COSTS

"Crude oil prices have surged to 18-month highs on the weekend and have swept petrol prices higher.
Oil prices could go to $US95 a barrel, warns analysts. Domestically, a litre of unleaded petrol costs $1.29, up 0.3 cents.

'Oil, which has been trading at between $US75 and $US85 a barrel for months, now appears to be in a new range that could go up to $95, according to oil trader and analyst Stephen Schork.'

[Perth Sunday Times, 'Petrol prices set to rise, 6th April, 2010]

The trend suggests that Australian petrol prices could be nudging $2 a litre in two years time and this time it will stay there in line with international prices. Ain't globalisation and free trade great for locals!

BIGGER POORER AUSTRALIA

The compounding cost of living for ordinary Australians is becoming desperate!
What the economic data doesn't report is the social consequences - like the growing depression, family breakdowns, homelessness, substance abuse, suicides and domestic violence.
The long term impacts on children are devastating for not only the children but the future society they become adults in.

More people into less space driving up living costs, only delivers a poorer Australia.

The drivers of these costs must be addressed as a national priority.
The BIG elephant in the room is starkly Rudd's immigration out of control!
Rudd's red herring Population Minister is just that, an election red herring.

Rampant Rudd and his immigration wrath must be stopped!

It's about time! In the decades since Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke decided to impose "elite as opposed to popular views on immigration", ordinary Australians have been given little access to the mass media in order to be express their opposition to population growth.

On the rare occasions when immigration has been discussed on Australia Talks, conspicuously lacking from the panel have been knowledgeable and articulate opponents of population growth. Tonight, for a change, Mark O'Connor, co-author of "Overloading Australia" will be a panel guest on Australia Talks.

So, please listen and be sure to phone in to express your opposition to the Rudd Government's anti-democratic imposition record high immigration.

When: Tonight (Monday 12 April) after the 6:00PM news Phone: 1300 22 55 76

The details from the Australia Talks web site are as follows:

There's growing unease about Australia's rapidly rising population, with a forecast of 36 million people by 2050. The prime minister's responded by appointing the nation's first Population Minister. It's shaping up as a hot election year issue, with the Coalition calling for immigration cuts. So what numbers can the country sustain? Should we be aiming for a big Australia? How much does our economic growth depend on migration?

In 2002, Senior Constable McEnally, 26, was shot at Hillsdale in Sydney's east after pursuing four men in a stolen car with four loaded stolen guns. The stolen car was driven riven by Motekiai Taufahema, then 25. The car crashed and Sione Penisini shot Senior Constable McEnallay four times through the windscreen. Penisini had fired five times at Constable McEnallay from 10 metres away. McEnallay died in hospital from head and chest wounds soon afterwards.

Senior Constable McEnally

Sione Penisini, was sentenced to 36 years for the murder. The judge at the time described the murder as "a cowardly, senseless and unnecessary crime". Motekiai Taufahema, and his brother John, who was also in the stolen car together with two other men with four loaded stolen guns, were initially convicted of murder, but their convictions were overturned and they both pleaded guilty to manslaughter. They received the same sentence. The fourth man, Meli Lagi, is serving 10 years for firearms offences.’ All four men are Tongan nationals with criminal records.

Motekiai Taufahema's visa was cancelled in August last year and he was to be deported to Tonga once he completed his sentence, but he successfully appealed against the ruling. This month (April 2010) the Criminal Court of Appeal in the Federal Court has now upheld that decision, which means Motekiai Taufahema to stay in Australia.

Immigration Minister Chris Evans says he is considering another appeal and looking at what other action he can take under the Migration Act. "I have sought advice from my department to urgently determine whether there are any appeal prospects," Immigration and Citizenship Minister Chris Evans said in a statement.

"If matters for appeal are identified, I will appeal this decision to the Full Federal Court. If no appeal prospects are identified, then I will fully consider all options available to me under the Migration Act..."

"The manslaughter of a police officer in the line of duty is a most serious offence."

Senior Constable McEnally's father, after the initial sentencing had said, "They're a bunch of grubs," Mr McEnally said. "They took my son's life and they deserve life and I'm not happy with anything less." The dead policeman's fiancee, Amanda Mahon, said there should be a mandatory life sentence for anyone who killed a police officer.

Policeman delivering flowers to hospital where slain Senior Constable McEnallay died

"We loan our men and women out . . . to protect the Australian community and the only thing we ask for in return is if something happens to them then the repercussions be severe."

All four men are immigrants to Australia from Tonga. They have each been convicted of serious crimes in Australia, including the most serious of crimes - the murder of a police officer in the line of duty.

These men have demonstrated contempt for Australian values and laws. There is no reason why he should remain in Australia.

Australian laws need to be immediately changed to automatically deport back to their originating country any immigrant found guilty of a serious crime (indictable offence) in Australia. Then judges won't have an option to allow foreign criminals remain in Australia.

It is obscene and unjust that Australians should be forced to tolerate people from overseas who become serious criminals in Australia.

Bilateral Prisoner Swap

We should go further. Our gaols should not have to wear the cost burden of foreign criminals. Australia should establish bilateral agreements with all overseas countries that foreigners convicted of serious crimes get automatically deported to the origin to serve their sentence. Conversely, Australians overseas convicted of serious crimes are automatically deported back to Australia to serve their sentences. Quid pro quo.

This would mean Sione Penisini, Motekiai Taufahema, John Taufahema, and Meli Lagi get automatically deported to Tonga immediately to serve there respective gaol terms there and be permanently barred entry from Australia.

Scapelle Corby

Jock Palfreeman

Stern Hu

Bali Nine

Importantly, it would also mean that Australians in foreign gaols such as Schappell Corby in Indonesia, Jock Palfreeman in Bulgaria, Stern Hu in China, the Bali Nine in Indonesia [Andrew Chan, Si Yi Chen, Michael Czugaj, Renae Lawrence, Tach Duc Thanh Nguyen, Matthew Norman, Scott Rush, Martin Stephens and Myuran Sukumaran] if convicted, and other Australians gaoled overseas be immediately sent back to Australia to serve their respective sentences here.

West Australian, Holly Deane-Johns, convicted of heroine trafficking in Thailand in 2000 was sentenced to 31 years gaol, but subsequently transferred to Bandyup Women's Prison in Australia in late 2007, escaping the death sentence.

Holly-Deane-Johns

Australians in Australian prisons.
This is moral justice which I challenge anyone to dispute.

=============================================

References

‘Evans exploring options to deport police killer’, ABC 7th April 2010
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/07/2866673.htm?section=justin

Govt seeks advice after Taufahema ruling, The Age, 7th April 2010
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/govt-seeks-advice-after-taufahema-ruling-20100407-rs0g.html

‘The night Glenn McEnallay died’, 9th May 2006
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/garyhughes/index.php/theaustralian/comments/the_night_glenn_mcenallay_died/

‘Tributes for officer who defended city with his life’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4rd April 2003
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/04/03/1017206222051.html

‘Anger at police killer's term’, Malcolm Brown and AAP, 3-Oct, 2003
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/02/1064988346855.html?from=storyrhs

‘Australian gets 20 years for murder in Bulgaria’, Georgina Robinson, Ari Sharp [Sydney Morning Herald], 3rd December 3, 2009
http://www.smh.com.au/world/australian-gets-20-years-for-murder-in-bulgaria-20091203-k6p5.html

‘Schapelle Corby could be forced to move to remote East Java’, Herald Sun 5th April, 2010
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/schapelle-corby-could-be-forced-to-move-to-remote-east-java-jail/story-e6frf7jx-1225850017353

‘10 years for Stern Hu’, Stephen McDonell, ABC, 30th March, 2010
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/29/2859384.htm

‘Heroin addicts escape Thai death sentence’, by Mark Baker, The Age, 5th July 2003
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/07/04/1057179158696.html

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bali_Nine

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australians_imprisoned_or_executed_abroad

Today Treasurer Wayne Swan has tried to justify another rise in interest rates by claiming in true polly-speak that such an impost is a sign of a stronger Australian economy. Swan’s growth fettish belies the LibLab's stale 20th Century baby-boomer ideology. Last month Swan's fettish for strong economic growth and strong population growth for Australia was reaffirmed at the Population Summit in Brisbane held 30th March 2010.

But Swan's growth fettish and consequential rising costs of living do not augur well for most Australians with mortgages.

Swan on the issue of Australia’s current record population growth claims:

“a population cap would compound, not solve, the growth challenges Australia faces.”

“Capping growth over the next 40 years at 0.8 per cent instead of the 1.2 per cent projected would wipe 17 per cent off the nation's gross domestic product by 2050.”

“Restricting population growth in fast-growing southeast Queensland would result in regional product on a per capita basis dropping by 5 per cent.”

“Australia faced a steep decline in workforce participation due to ageing, which would hit growth and government revenue while dramatically pushing up health spending. Boosting productivity would be critical in coping with the ageing trend.”

Swan premised that economic and population growth can only be good for Australia and the task is for Australia to learn how to "grow smarter".

But Swan only sees the economic data yet has no broader social plan. Swan promises to protect national living standards and environmental sustainability, without saying how he can do this.

This is on the back of Prime Minister Rudd infamous October 2009 pronoucement:

"I actually believe in a big Australia I make no apology for that. I actually think it's good news that our population is growing."

It made Australians reel in fear.

On uttering that dire portent, Rudd cast the demise of Australian lifestyle, inviting hoards of legalised arrivals. And neither Rudd nor Swan offers any plans for coping with this enlarged population – no plans for sustainability, infrastructure and maintaining the Australian quality of life. Both are blinkered to the narrow economic interpretations and have lost sight of the social and environmental consequences of high population growth. Rudd’s response on the run is:

"That is why we're taking a leading position on climate change but also the long-term sustainability of the Murray-Darling and the proper provision of water supplies for the future. "This Government is building for the future - we call it nation-building for the future.”

What crap. Some future. Interests rates have just gone up again and are set to continue only exacerbating house unaffordability, the cost of living and degrading Australian living standards. Australian cities have run out of potable water, so billions in taxes are going into desalination plants. Utility charges are going up. Energy Australia is set to raise electricity prices by 60% over the next three years in order to fund Sydney’s massive electricity infrastructure to catch up with the growing urban sprawl. Roads are congested in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney. Public transport is old and overloaded.

Swan's and Rudd’s Hong Kong vision for Australia does a not sit well with most Australians. Neither Labor or Liberal have no mandate to impose a growth fettish on Australians. Most Australians already feel that our environment can not cope with a larger population. Treasury’s projection of a population of 35 million by 2050 is obscene.

Back in October 2009, even Federal Treasury head Ken Henry expressed concern that Australia would not be able to sustain a predicted 60 per cent growth in population over the next four decades.

Prosperity is not aggregate GDP figures. It is maintaining and improving the quality of life and standard of living per capita. Swan being a numbers man hasn’t worked out how to measure that so he ignores it. Rudd’s Labor Government has run out of ideas and ideology relevant to Australians.

Rudd’s initiating the role of Minister for Population this month doesn’t change his 'Big Australia' vision, but just wastes more taxpayer money to find a way to justify and spread the 35 million. hardly a priority, population features in Mr Burke's mixed bucked portfolio of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. his only mandate is to deliver some population strategy in 12 months, after the election. Clearly, this is purely electioneering appeasement to disaffected Labor voters. Rudd has responded tokenly to Greens leader, Senator Bob Brown’s proposal for a Senate inquiry into Australia's population. Rudd's population minister appointment effectively hijacks what ought to be an independent review process.

And NSW Labor puppet, Premier Keneally expectedly tows the Labor line: ''I believe Sydney can grow and can grow sustainably, economically and environmentally...Cities can either grow or they can shrink. Shrinking is not an option for Sydney.'' While NSW Liberal planning spokesman, Brad Hazzard, ducked the migration issue saying it was being discussed in the community as Sydney became more crowded.

The Liberal-National Coalition are little different in their ideological response. They listen to Howard’s old Productivity Commission which strangely enough advocates for more productivity and with that more population. The Opposition wants an independent specialist body to inquire into future policies dealing with Australia's population growth – just like the Productivity Commission. Otherwise these listen to self-serving growth fettish extremists the Urban Taskforce.

Not surprisingly, Urban Taskforce chief executive Aaron Gadiel argues for no cap on immigration and says:

"One of the reasons that we don't have the infrastructure that we all want and expect is that in many cases our population in our urban centres is just not large enough," he said. "The larger the population, the more the Government is getting the tax revenue in and has the labour force available to build up the infrastructure."

More people, more urban development, more profits for Urban Taskforce members.

Swan argues that countering pressures of immigration can be addressed by Rudd Labor Government’s education revolution, health reform, welfare reform and the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. How so? Population fueled mainly by immigration drives pressures on water scarcity, urban planning and infrastructure. Population growth is pushing up interest rates, making housing even more unaffordable for Australians. Swan makes no mention of addressing the direct cost of immigration – employment opportunities, housing affordability, cost of living, congestion, inadequate hospital beds, inadequate child care places, utility costs up – electricity set to rise by 60 % in NSW.

"We're determined to make sure that this government and subsequent governments stay dedicated to that task...if it doesn't, we'll all be poorer and we won't necessarily be socially cohesive or environmentally sustainable."

What a vague uncommitted statement!

Australia's Big Picture

According to former NSW Premier Bob Carr, I think we've got to recognise that our cities don't get better economically or in terms of liveability if we force feed population growth into them with this surging level of immigration, that when it comes to skills shortages for example, any new trades person brought into this country to fill a skills shortage also brings dependants. Nor does high immigration solve the problem of an aging population We've got to look at nurturing workers to stay in the workforce longer.

Australian businesman, Dick Smith, says Australia should cut population by slashing immigration and encouraging women to have only two babies. Mr Smith said Australia did not have enough water or food to support millions more people. It was crazy that seawater was being desalinated for drinking water to supply a booming population. "I feel they're going to spend most of their time working out how we can cope with 36 million, rather than looking at whether we really want 36 million."

But currently the facts are that Australia’s population growth rate (September 2009) according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics is 2.1%. The preliminary estimated resident population (ERP) of Australia at 30 September 2009 was 22,066,000 persons. This was an increase of 451,900 persons (2.1%) since 30 September 2008 and 110,400 persons since 30 June 2009.

Compounding at 2.1%, Australia’s population will not be 35 million by 2050, but 35 million by 2030, less than a generation away. [Refer table below]

Sep-08 21,614,100
Sep-09 22,066,000
Sep-10 22,529,000
Sep-11 23,002,000
Sep-12 23,485,000
Sep-13 23,978,000
Sep-14 24,482,000
Sep-15 24,996,000
Sep-16 25,521,000
Sep-17 26,057,000
Sep-18 26,604,000
Sep-19 27,163,000
Sep-20 27,733,000
Sep-21 28,315,000
Sep-22 28,910,000
Sep-23 29,517,000
Sep-24 30,137,000
Sep-25 30,770,000
Sep-26 31,416,000
Sep-27 32,076,000
Sep-28 32,750,000
Sep-29 33,438,000
Sep-30 34,140,000
Sep-31 34,859,000
Sep-32 35,591,000
Sep-33 36,338,000
Sep-34 37,101,000
Sep-35 37,880,000
Sep-36 38,675,000
Sep-37 39,487,000
Sep-38 40,316,000
Sep-39 41,163,000
Sep-40 42,027,000
Sep-41 42,910,000
Sep-42 43,811,000
Sep-43 44,731,000
Sep-44 45,670,000
Sep-45 46,629,000
Sep-46 47,608,000
Sep-47 48,608,000
Sep-48 49,629,000
Sep-49 50,671,000
Sep-50 51,735,000

MESSAGES:

This Rudd-Swan trend for Australia is:

1. 35 million by 2030, not by 2050
2. 50 million by 2050!
3. A million per year (1/4 of Melbourne every year)

Lib/Lab politics have run out of ideology relevant for Australia in the 21st Century. Both are stagnated in 20th Century ideals of economic rationalism, economic growth and globalisation. Neither have workable long term answers to Australia’s entrenched triple bottom line (TBL) dilemmas.

Three simple and effective decisions to stem Australia’s population blowout and give Australia room to explore capacity ready options are:

1. End the Baby Bonus

2. End the Subclass 457 – Business (Long Stay) Visa Scheme

3. Restrict all work visas to Employer Nomination Scheme Occupation List (ENSOL), which requires each applicant to be nominated by an Australian employer to fill a position in an occupation that appears in the ENSOL and for the applicant to demonstrate that they have the necessary skills (including conversational English skills).

But, if economic growth and population growth are causing unacceptable social costs, then what is the alternative?

Clive Hamilton in his 2003 book Growth Fetish argues that our politicans and media are smitten with growth and have an obsession with economic growth (growth fetishism) and the marketing society lie at the heart of our social ills. For decades our political leaders and opinion makers have touted higher incomes as the way to a better future. Economic growth means better lives for us all.

Hamilton points out that 'despite many years of sustained economic growth and increased personal incomes Australia has large social divisions and we don’t seem to be any happier. Economic growth and the marketing society have corrupted our social priorities and political structures, and have created a profound sense of alienation among young and old. lies at the heart of our current political, social and environmental ills - and offers a thought-provoking alternative.’

=======================================================

References:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/23/2721924.htm

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/wayne-swan-goes-for-growth-in-population-debate/story-e6frgczf-1225847691025

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/cap-no-solution-to-australias-population-challenge-swan-20100330-r994.html

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/cut-population-now-by-slashing-immigration-and-encouraging-women-to-have-only-two-babies-dick-smith/story-e6frf7l6-1225823124407

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/04/2863763.htm

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/connectasia/stories/201004/s2866051.htm

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/wayne-swan-down-on-growth-for-its-own-sake/story-e6frg6nf-1225825707741

http://www.familyassist.gov.au/Payments/familyassistance/baby_bonus/Pages/default.aspx

http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/index.php?page=growth_fetish

http://www.immi.gov.au/skilled/skilled-workers/sbs/how-the-visa-works.htm

Wayne Swann obfuscates

According to recent reports Wayne Swan ..."can't bring (him)self to agree with those who think we can solve all our problems by putting a freeze on national
population growth”. No Wayne, we certainly can't solve all our problems by reducing runaway population growth, but it sure would go a long way toward easing house prices, shortening hospital queues, preserving the environment and cutting our carbon footprints.

Who is this ‘We’?

A great many Australians these days would really like to know who exactly Mr Swan is referring to when he talks about "we" solving “our” problems. Is it the "working families" struggling in the outer suburbs to pay off hefty mortgages on second-rate housing stock on the fringes of our cities - or is it the vested corporate interests at the big end of town which possess an insatiable appetite for more growth, more markets and more people? Whose problems are you trying to solve Mr Swan?

Political addiction to population growth

The gap between the policies of the Liberal/Labor (Liboral?) party elites - that are politically addicted to massive population growth and mass-immigration - and the wishes of the electorate has never been greater. It’s a bipartisan problem. Tony Abbott has been whipping up mass hysteria about boat people lately, trying to make it an election issue. He's going to "close the borders" screamed the Herald Sun last week. But on the broader topic of mass-immigration, like the P.M. and Wayne Swan, Mr Abbot has also nailed his colours to the mast as a "big Australia" man whose "instinct" is to bring in "as many people as possible".

Who benefits and who loses by population growth?

Cheerleaders for the growthist lobby in the media have been doing their level best to scare the bejesus out of the public by raving on about retiring baby boomers and even raising the prospect of an armed invasion should we dare to consider putting the brakes on. The problem is no-one seems to have any real insight into where all this growth is heading for our country as well as the thorny question of who benefits and who loses from it? Who gets the profits and who gets to pay? How does the average citizen benefit when GDP per capita declines through massive population growth? Exactly what are the long-term implications for the environment and the famed liveability of our cities of this new "mega-trend"?

Rudd like a deer caught in headlights on population numbers

Despite the creation of a new population ministry, Labor has not had a great deal to say on these questions so far other than "growth is good". Mr Rudd hasn't even had an opinion this year. He appeared like a deer caught in the headlights recently when Kerry O’Brien confronted him on the 7:30 report - which is a bit strange considering that he "made no apology" last year for his support for “a big Australia”.

These questions are being ignored by our leaders other than a very vague undertaking to perhaps grow somewhat “differently" than before - presumably by stacking people 50 stories up in ugly high rises or transforming our urban areas into Los Angeles-style megalopolises with double-decker freeways and ghettoes of haves (those who bought houses before the great population explosion) and the less-fortunate have-nots that didn’t.

Some commentators in the media are suggesting that Rudd has "gone cold" on a big Australia this year. But what is far more likely is that he is simply being a very clever politician – like his predecessor John Howard - and is saying nothing publicly. Behind closed doors, however, he and his minions are champing at the bit to raise the volume as high as they can get way with without provoking too great a backlash from so-called working families whose marginal seats Labor took back from “Howard’s battlers” at the last election.

Expect Spin

To keep population growth ticking along at 2.1% per annum and maintaining a docile and electorate Rudd will try to do what politicians do best - bombard us with a mountain of meaningless words on things like the "programmatic specificity" of his new population ministry - but without of course actually doing anything.

One thing is certain, if the present growth trajectory is going to be maintained by Canberra indefinitely, the volume of complaints rising from the public is going to grow incredibly loud. When it takes the average person more than a lifetime to pay off a mortgage on an average house and when commuters have to spend half their lives stuck on clogged freeways or dysfunctional public transport systems, the politicians that continue to push growthist polices are going to eventually pay a heavy price at the ballot box.

Stable Population Party of Australia - a new alternative

Let's hope the newly formed Stable Population Party of Australia can capture many of the votes of the people that are most badly impacted by our government’s mad growth-at–all-costs agenda. We desperately need to lobby and apply pressure on our elected leaders to change their current policies. This is going to require constant media campaigns to get the public's attention as well as a small army of committed activists to get the message out.

Growth Lobby vs The People

The public needs to be made aware that there is an alternative to growth for growth's sake and that there is an alternative to the "Liboral Party” and their bipartisan and undemocratic policies which are failing to maintain a sustainable population. Make no mistake; the growth lobby is a formidable opponent with enormous financial resources on its side as well as the backing of both major parties and large sectors of the media. Only a very vigorous and determined grass-roots campaign the likes of which we haven’t seen before in Australia is going to have any chance at success at slowing down this juggernaut.

NOTES

7 April title was changed to better reflect newsworthy content

(Illustration: For more on Colonel Blimp see "Notes" [1])

Original title was: "Mr Salt and Mr Murdoch team up again to can Australians". See also: "Bernard Salt and Murdoch press cook up recipe for invasion" of 2 May 09.

Into the Salty abyss

According to yet another article in Mr Murdoch's Australian newspaper by self-styled demographer, Bernard Salt,

Australia "quivered when a passing Japanese submarine lobbed shells into the eastern suburbs of Sydney in May 1942: property prices plummeted."

You can find the article, "Invasion victory ensured by complacency" in the business and property section in The Australian. A sort of where to buy and invade section, I guess. Here Salt advertises Australia as an easy target for any enemies. Pretending that he is writing for a mythical Peoples' Army in Bernardistan, he plots entry via the Kimberleys.

Why Salt's antics here are not seen as treacherous and inciting invasion would be a mystery to anyone seriously subscribing to the Axis of Evil myth. More sophisticated readers may wonder, however, if the property development industry is so worried by the Australian public's louder and louder calls for population stabilisation, that they must have decided to ask Mr Murdoch and Mr Salt to try provoke a full-on invasion.

Mr Salt probably realises that conducting a military invasion of Australia (rather than the economic immigration one) is not as easy as his imaginary character pretends. What may still be possible, however, is to misinform elderly Australians (members of the property lobby and readers of The Australian, for instance) via one of our only two national newspapers, and panic them into calling for a bigger population. Either strategy could work and, without an invasion - of immigrants or armed forces - the Colonel Blimps (and Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swann) of the Property and Development Lobby are doomed. A welcome extinction, in the view of many ecologists, which would prevent so many sad ones.

Australia Overloaded author, Mark O'Connor wrote recently in response to Bernard's attitude which seems to be that Australians are complacent cowards and the country needs more of them:

"If the Australians of our fathers' or grandfathers' generation had been as faint hearted as Mr Salt, back when our population was only a third of what it is today, Australia might now be a province of Japan."

(O'Connor was responding to an article, "Australia told to grow or risk invasion", in the Canberra Times, 31/3/2010, p. 6 which was reporting on what seem like Bernard Salt's attempts to commercialise fear and ignorance in yet another forum.)

James Sinnamon commented on the facts:

In fact, Australia achieved self-reliance in 1942 and stood a very good chance of being able to defeat a Japanese invasion. That is why the Japanese Army in March 1942 vetoed the Japanese Navy's plan to invade.

The reason why the Japanese Army vetoed the Navy's invasion plans is explained in detail by Andrew T Ross in Armed and Ready - The Industrial Development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945 Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, on pages 408-418:

By June 1942, the earliest date an invasion force could have been assembled, Australia would have 8 fully equipped divisions in the field as well as an air force capable of denying the Japanese total air supremacy. To win, they would have had to capture a deep water harbour in order to enforce a blockade to prevent Australia being able the resupply itself with some of the very few materials with which we were not self-sufficient (including petroleum). The northernmost deep water harbour was Newcastle.

Mr Sinnamon, who obviously has no serious investments in housing or infrastructure or bank shares, continued:

During the Second World War Australia was one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, a technological edge we have largely lost since then thanks to Australia having allowed its manufacturing sector to be destroyed as mandated by free market orthodoxy.

Of Australia's contribution to the Second World War, US President Truman said to the US Congress in a report on Lend Lease (including on Australia's reverse Lend Lease to the US during much of the Pacific War) on 27 December 1946:

"On balance, the contribution made by Australia, a country having 7 millions, approximately equalled that of United States." (Andrew T. Ross, Armed and Ready: the industrial development and defence of Australia, 1900-1945, Turton & Armstrong, Sydney, 1995, p 427)

Sinnamon asks,

Why would Bernard Salt wish to deny this, as well as this country's impressive military achievements, by focusing on only two episodes in the war?

In the case of the bombing of Darwin, the attacking Japanese force exceeded that which attacked Pearl Harbour, so I would think that the panicked response by some Australians was understandable.

(See also "The myth of the Howard Government's Defence Competence" of 21 November 2007 at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6665)

Commercialising treachery

Well, I guess it doesn't matter to Mr Salt's objectives whether his statements are accurate or fair. The aim of the article seems to be to generate enough fear to overcome Australians' democratic desire for a small and stable population. This means we can expect many more articles like this one, sigh.

And the battle to invade and subdue Australia is half-won anyway. As Bernard Salt knows and Greg Woods writes, we are already well on the way to being a nation of disorganised captives to propaganda and consumerism.

So why would having a lot more of that kind of Australian serve to defend us against the tens of millions in some Bernardistan?

What The Australian wouldn't print

As Greg Wood writes:

Pray tell Mr. Salt, how would even tenfold more Australians, wedged into the alienating fringe of suburbia and the high-rise catacombs of your ambitions, and beguiled into apathy by myriad imported electronic eclectica, be of any practical assistance against this massed force from your imagination? As an audience to watch the news-feeds and up the ratings of the conflict perhaps?

Your narrow and convenient account of WW2 Australian response to Japanese attack is simply bad history. In fact the response was broadly self-sacrificing and heroic. That earlier time exhibited remarkable social identity and spirit, which acted as the glue that draws together the resistance your argument so disingenuously questions. That character is now largely lost as recent decades have seen genuine neighbourhoods sacrificed as commodities for trade in the game of property speculation and growth-for-profit that you advocate.

And the futility of your proposition sucks one’s breath out. Why bother to invade Australia when it is already for sale world-wide on the internet to the highest bidder with the strongest exchange rate? N.B. 80% of Australians (and growing) need not apply – insufficient funds!

Well, that's right, Greg. And the Property marketers of the Growth Lobby want more customers with ready cash. For some reason they think that the Peoples Army might have the ready. (After all, armies are where a lot of foreign aid ends up and big spending goes on.) So Bernard is getting the message to them, via Mr Murdoch's Australian that it would be a doddle to invade Australia. While they're perusing our topology on GoogleEarth, they can also have a look at property on Mr Murdoch's www.realestate.com.au

But Greg continues, referring to the treacherous conduct of The Australian as a 'community sell-out' in printing an article that purports to give fail-safe directions to invade your country:

Harking back to WW2 and what it truly does take to secure freedom, a community sell-out of this magnitude would have earned a bullet in the back of the head from the French Resistance. Or does your curious brand of history see them as an extremist terrorist group?

However, if you peruse the emailed responses to Salt's article, it really isn't so easy to invade Australia. Perhaps, in fact, Mr Salt was just using the Peoples' Army as a kind of code for the elderly tax-payer army that supplements the Growth Lobby's continued purchase of power in this country.

At any rate, here are some of the best of the responses in The Australian:

ID Langford Posted at 6:13 AM Today

Bernard, you are entirely out to lunch... Consider the SE Asian archipelago that you navigated down to get here...you don't think we will see you coming? Consider the vast interior of the Australian landmass that you will need to penetrate in order to project military force into our decisive areas...does it remind you of the German attempt to conquer the Soviet Union in WW2? Or Napoleon's attempt a century earlier?? Consider the logistics involved in forcing entry onto Australia and then sustaining it...consider the wet season which prohibits movement in northern Australia for much of the year...go read some the Defence of Australia foundational documents that are out there. Most of us are complacent about history; some of us however, are students of history and understand the efforts required to lodge and deny access to an area the size of the Kimberley would be a truly monumental task. It took over 205 German Divisions to invade the Soviet Union and even this massive war machine failed. Have a real think about it...who can even closely imitate this force structure today??

Jason Ransome of Basel, Switzerland Posted at 7:29 AM Today

Fantastic article! But did you take into account our anzus treaty with America. Let's not forget Australia is a huge country, you can start from the west and move east but our army will come from behind and cut your supply routes every time, so you better bring enough personal to protect those supply routes. If it was so simple to invade Australia then it would of been tried by more than just the Japanese Good luck with your invasion, your going to need it

I like this one - short and to the point:

Mr Squiggle of Melbourne Posted at 9:58 AM Today

What an odious little article this is. China's population is 1.3bn. Indonesia's is 231m. Even if we increased our population size four-fold tomorrow, we would still be strategically outnumbered. Just let it go Bernard, we'll never create national security by ramping up our population. The starting gap is too large.

neil of melb Posted at 11:05 AM Today

The problem with invading Australia is purely logistical, How may countries have the capability of transporting 150,000 soldiers, equipment and ongoing supplies over 1000's of km of ocean? The only countries that could conceivably do it are the USA because of their military power and Indonesia because of their proximity. But Indonesia does not have the capability to destroy our air force or stop it being reinforced from allies. They don't have the capacity to land 10's of thousands of paratroopers. We would have control of the skies and the resulting carnage inflicted on a marine invasion would catastrophic. Military strategists run simulations on these scenarios constantly, this is why we are spending billions on long distance radar, aircraft and submarines rather than a huge army. A war would be fought in the Pacific or Indian oceans or Timor sea, not on Australian soil.

Rhetorical Question to the Elites who make money out of the rest of us through war and housing games

Is The Australian in fact un-Australian? Didn't the diggers die to preserve free speech? How come only Mr Salt and his doyen get to say whatever they like?

NOTES

[1] Colonel Blimp was a cartoon character created by Sir David Low (1891-1963), a New Zealand political cartoonist and caricaturist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom for many years. Low was a self-taught cartoonist. Born in New Zealand, he worked in his native country before migrating to Sydney, Australia in 1911, and ultimately to London (1919), where he made his career and earned fame for his Colonel Blimp depictions and his merciless satirising the personalities and policies of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and other leaders of his times. Source, Wikipedia

See also: "Bernard Salt and Murdoch press cook up recipe for invasion" of 2 May 09, "Madang landowners fight ecologically devastating Chinese mining invasion" of 1 Apr 10.

Decades overdue, but, nevertheless, welcome, the Greens are to introduce into the Senate a motion calling for the establishment of an independent National Inquiry into Australia's Population to 2050.

Set population at infrastructure, environment capacity through national inquiry

Media release of 14 March 2010

On Monday the Greens will move a motion calling on the Government to establish an independent National Inquiry into Australia's Population to 2050.

“Australia’s population should be determined by the capacity of our environment and our infrastructure,” said Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown.

“Australia cannot support an increase in population to 35 million by 2050.

“Immigration should not be stopped.

"In fact Australia should increase its humanitarian immigration program, but we need to reduce our skilled migration program and balance that reduction by investing in skills training for Australians.

“National population policy is the responsibility of government; it should be responsive to national and global factors.

“Global population is expected to grow from 6.8 billion people now to 9.2 billion by 2050 and Australia should be taking a lead in finding global solutions.

“That should include increasing Australia's overseas aid budget to 0.7% GDP now with more funding for literacy and reproduction health programs for women and girls.”

Media contact: Erin Farley 0438 376 082

Erin Farley
Media Adviser
Senator Bob Brown | Leader of the Australian Greens
Suite SG-112 Parliament House, Canberra ACT
P: 02 6277 3577 | M: 0438 376 082| F: 02 6277 3185

Editorial comment: If this represents a final departure by the Greens from years of avoidance of this most critical of issues, occasionally interspersed with seemingly tokenistic short-lived pronouncements against population growth, then we welcome it, but we will believe it when we see it.

What you can do: contact your Senators (Qld, NSW, ACT, Vic, Tas, SA, WA, NT) and ask that they support this motion. Please let us know of any responses or lack of. Join, campaign and vote for, a party opposed to population growth (see below). Put pro-growth parties last on your ballot form.

See also: "Greens call for population inquiry" of 14 Mar 10 on ABC news Online, Greens' Senate media page, "Are the Greens a real alternative?" of 9 Mar 10, the Stable Population Party of Australia, the New Australia Party and the Animal Justice Party.

Please attend public forums against population growth, featuring Kelvin Thomson, Mark O'Connor and others. Brisbane: 8:30AM - 12:30PM, Saturday 13 March, Sunshine Coast: 2:00PM-4:30PM, Sunday 14 March.(See article "Sunshine Coast environmentalists condemn sham population debate" for more details.)

In the debate over the The South East Queensland Regional Plan in 2009-2031 on 11 February 2010 Liberal National Party MLA Glen Elmes_#main-fn1">1 warned how the vast discretionary powers, given to the Minister for Infrastructure and Planning, Stirling Hinchliffe, with his past history as a property development industry insider, would add to the consequences of SEQ's already shambolic urban planning and environmental management and runaway population growth.

The speech is effective. However, it has shortcomings. The speech appears to accept that continued population growth, even if at a lower rate, is actually necessary and desirable, just as long as it is properly planned and the necessary infrastructure provided beforehand. It also appears to avoid confronting those directly responsible for the current rate of population growth that it otherwise makes abundantly clear is excessive. Those directly responsible are, of course, the Rudd Government with its record high immigration program, that is given every encouragement by the Queensland Government. It is possible to draw the implication from the speech that the harm caused by rapid population growth could possibly be mitigated to an acceptable degree by the adoption of measures such as decentralisation._#main-fn2">2 and infilling._#main-fn3">3

I learned of this speech from the following comment (see also #appendix1">) made in response to the article, "It's time to fight Bligh's growth" by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily of 6 Mar 10:

Vanga and happychappy1 may care to go to Hansard Thursday 11 Feb and read Glen Elmes' stirring speech to parliament condemning the government's population strategy for the Coast. At least Elmesy is doing his bit.

The speech, below, is from the Queensland State Parliamentary Hansard of Hansard of 12Feb 10, linked to from Hansard page. I have added subheadings. - JS

See also: "SEQ Regional Plan a travesty against the people of South East Queensland" of 9 May 09 by Dr Jane O'Sullivan, "The downward spiral of hasty population growth" of 8 Mar 10 on Online Opinion by Dr Jane O'Sullivan.

Mr ELMES (Noosa--LNP) (9.45 pm): ...

Queensland Government's habitual disregard of resident's wishes

I am privileged to rise to speak again on behalf of my electorate of Noosa in this critical debate about our future. My community always worries when Labor starts to plan on our behalf. The forced council amalgamation process of 2006 and 2007 was hallmarked by stripping Noosa and the Queensland constituency of the right to a binding vote on council amalgamations as enshrined in state law. Do you know why, Mr Deputy Speaker? It was because the Labor government knew that a vote would be defeated not by a small margin but overwhelmingly.

We on this side of the House support the planning processes which would, in normal circumstances, lead to the South East Queensland Regional Plan 2009-2031, but these are not normal circumstances. We know that all of the submissions in the world make no difference to this Labor government's approach to consultation. We know that all the wisdom subscribed by the Sunshine Coast Regional Council; the highly respected Sunshine Coast Environment Council; the influential OSCAR, which stands for Organisation Sunshine Coast Associations of Residents; the forensic Development Watch; the EDV Residents Group; as well as the wise council from the Noosa Parks Association, the Noosa Residents and Ratepayers Association and of course the Friends of Noosa, to mention but a few, simply fail to be taken into account by this minister and this Labor government.

How could we expect anything to be different? With a Labor government now more dependent for its political survival on donations from the property development industry than from its traditional labour trade union base and with a minister captive to that same industry for whom he was a consultant and advocate before coming into this place, how could we expect other than what we have got? But the minister monsters any notion of impartiality through the concept of investigation areas and sleight of hand expansions of the urban footprint to appease his constituent urban development lobby.

Reckless disregard of established planning principles

The Sunshine Coast Regional Council opposed the 1,408-hectare Caloundra South extension investigation area on the basis of the loss of the interurban break and the nutrient and recreational use impacts on the Pumicestone Passage. Others opposed other inclusions into the urban footprint as well, but still on he ploughs. But everyone was unanimous in their chorus for the permanent protection of the interurban break between the Moreton Bay area and the Sunshine Coast, for it to be set in concrete, to become an article of faith. This interurban break is prone to flooding.

There simply must be a ban on the continued development of flood prone or flood plain land. The current practice of raising the level of flood plain land above the flood level for development purposes simply makes flooding elsewhere more likely and more severe. It is a 'beggar my neighbour' policy. On the Sunshine Coast we do not want to see the incremental stripping away of the interurban breaks, as has occurred between Brisbane and the Gold Coast which is an interurban break in name only. I strongly oppose this minister having the power to gazette new growth areas without public consultation and the process for declarations to occur.

These regulations will permit a wide range of urban style tourist, recreation, sporting, hospitality and commercial developments to occur outside the urban footprint with limited code and impact assessment requirements and little guidance for local government. Further, I am also totally opposed to the proposed discretion for the minister to declare urban and future growth areas as a master plan area. Given the current minister's strong links to the property development industry, I am greatly alarmed by this proposed power, unfettered by any guidelines or ability to be challenged. This has been fostered by changing the definitions in the dictionary. Long-held definitions have turned turtle. What was forbidden is now at the bidding of the minister. Everyone has to go back to school and learn a new language.

My constituency and their advocacy groups requested the state support regional and local planning based on sustainable carrying capacity which also considers and accepts character and amenity. The Sunshine Coast Regional Council has a powerful electoral mandate for such planning and should be permitted to fulfil that mandate.

Queensland Government accomodates, rather than plans population growth

The South East Queensland Regional Plan proposes 156,000 extra dwellings by 2031, a 39 per cent increase over the 397,000 of 2006. The plan envisages 497,000 people crammed into a sardine city by 2031, 68 per cent more than the 295,000 of 2006. The place we call home and love so much will be loved to death by such an onslaught. The Sunshine Coast Regional Council sought assurance that dwelling allocations be qualified by assessment of development planning constraints--constraints extended by the Sunshine Coast Environment Council and others, all to no avail.

The growth is uneven. Although the South-East Queensland population growth is 1.57 million, Brisbane will grow by some 39 per cent, the Gold Coast will grow by 68 per cent and the heaviest impact will be borne by the Sunshine Coast, with a 76 per cent growth in population. Analysis of state and regional population progressions to 2031 and 2050 clearly shows that these are not sustainable in ecological, economic, financial or social terms. With the population doubling every 25 years and with two-thirds of the population in South-East Queensland, one-third in regional coastal areas and only one per cent west of the ranges, South-East Queensland will have a population equal to the present total state population by 2031 and 20 per cent of that population will be over the age of 65. The state already spends twice as much per capita on infrastructure as the other states and is facing mounting budget deficits and a state debt with a lowered credit rating. It just does not add up.

Here is a case for a state and regional population and settlement policy and strategy._#main-fn4">4 Analysis of the drivers of population growth, which is natural increase, net interstate migration and net international migration, shows that the state has a number of policy instruments at its disposal to deliver a population and growth rate which is determined to be sustainable for the region and for the state overall. Managing international migration to Queensland is obvious, given this has been double the rate of interstate migration in the most recent decade.

The South East Queensland Regional Plan simply accepts population growth as a fact to be accommodated rather than managed. Strategies and then policies need to be developed and implemented by which growth is limited to no more than the sustainable carrying capacity of the Sunshine Coast. A key factor of sustainability in my view is provision of acceptable infrastructure proceeding or in conjunction with appropriate development. I believe that the current government policy encourages this excessive population growth, and therefore policy change can reduce it.

For example, concessional stamp duty for first home buyers in Queensland is a significant incentive for Victorian and New South Wales property owners to relocate to Queensland, particularly in retirement, rather than to relocate within their own state. Limiting the concession to first home buyers generally rather than first home buyers in Queensland, as now, would be a good first step in limiting growth and would send a clear message of intent that population growth for Queensland is not limitless. It should be noted here that the Sunshine Coast Regional Council was elected almost two years ago with an overwhelming mandate from electors to preserve their quality of life, to nurture the area's unique communities, to manage population growth and development and to make the region the most sustainable in Australia. The electors who live on the Sunshine Coast have sent this very clear message which should be informing planning and planning instruments such as the South East Queensland Regional Plan that replicating the Gold Coast on the Sunshine Coast is not acceptable to us.

There is here potential for a clear identification of community areas in which modelling of desirable future living could be trialled. I envisage the greater Noosa area as one which could be home to communities capable of ready adaption to important change. Booking the ClimateSmart Home Service--which is a state government initiative and which I wholly approve of--managing our carbon footprint, insulating our homes, installing hot-water systems and solar power generation, composting and recycling more of our waste, installing greywater systems and harvesting rainwater et cetera are a few examples of some of the myriad ways in which a small engaged community might model solutions to climate change and sustainability. These solutions might then be rolled out across the state when it is clear which approaches work best and how they might be implemented.

We residents of the Sunshine Coast advocate a much less intensive residential development for our area than the currently accepted urban norm of large estate development which requires water and energy to be captured or generated remotely and delivered to these developments and from which waste water and waste is transported to a remote site for treatment or disposal. The current urban model is ultimately unsustainable and undesirable. Greater Noosa, with recognition from UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Program, is, I submit, ideally and best placed to model a sustainable future.

Queensland Government spends on infrastructure for population growth on maxed out bankcard

The truly monstrous failure of the Labor government has been in the provision of infrastructure. With our bankcard maxed out, the capacity for future generations to work through the economic catastrophe facing the state--home-grown by sheer economic incompetence--is hamstrung. Both the plan and the South-East Queensland infrastructure program fail to commit to the provision of the necessary infrastructure to support proposed increases in dwellings and sustainable development. The teaching hospital for the University of the Sunshine Coast--a truly fantastic win-win concept for health services in my region, for infrastructure provision and for education as a hub for economic development--has been put off and put back until it is almost out of sight and out of mind. Why? Because the Labor government has given up even the faintest hope of ever winning a seat on the Sunshine Coast so those electors do not matter anymore to Labor. The Queenslanders in this region of the south-east know who they cannot count on. Redress the wrong, address increases in public and active transport spending, and bring forward as a matter of urgency the coast section of CAMCOS and CoastConnect.

Effects of poor planning on Sunshine Coast

Many rural communities are home to those engaged in lower paid employment who are compelled to travel to work, often shiftwork, by private car. Alternative transport modes must be made available for these workers. It is not acceptable that bulk public transport solutions be provided only in the most heavily populated areas which are already advantaged by a wider range of services under competitive provision.

There are other infrastructure failures which I will only touch on. Education has failed. Schools are being built under a public-private partnership in my region. I am attending the opening of Peregian Springs tomorrow morning at 9.30, which in time will really max out the already maxed out bankcard. Health services fail every day. This is not the fault of the health professionals who struggle to meet the needs of those for whom they care; there are just too many of them to care for.

Then there is water. What do Sunshine Coast residents see? They see paddock after paddock of enormous black pipes just waiting to be laid to suck the lifeblood from the region. Water will leave from where it was harvested via one-way pumps through the infamous water grid, off to Brisbane never to be seen again and for which the reward of recompense has been harvested by this broke Labor government also.

To most constituents, 'infill development' are dirty words but not everyone agrees. Displaying great courage and foresight, the Sunshine Coast Environment Council, for example, has proposed to focus on infill development to take advantage of existing infrastructure and services and the achievement of a more compact urban form incorporating sustainability principles. But this demands that location, scale and design must be sympathetic to the surrounding area and to community aspirations. In short, the local community needs to be engaged in the local solution._#main-fn5">5

The Labor government's approach to planning did not even start from an informed position. There was no review of the performance of the previous plan despite the fact that the 2008 State of the region report showed declining trends in almost all sustainability indicators, most noticeably biodiversity and livability indicators, and many of the plans and strategies that the plan requires for implementation are still incomplete and not integrated. While growth, transport and climate change are acknowledged, no robust solutions are offered. It is almost as if they have conceded that they will not be around long enough to address these problems of their own making, but they do not effectively address or provide solutions to these issues. Finalisation of this plan should await a fundamental review of the carrying capacity of the region. The dreadful lag in infrastructure and services has caught up with even the existing population, and effective performance monitoring, review, resourcing and accountability structures are incorporated.

The South East Queensland Regional Plan will be informed by, and is subservient to, the Integrated Planning Act 1997 and the Sustainable Planning Act 2009. Accordingly, it is of particular concern that the act does not include a prohibition on development applications which conflict with local planning schemes. This deficiency requires any local council to assess an application despite the conflict. Consideration of such applications makes it very clear to the local community that their faith in the local planning scheme, developed following prolonged community consultation, is misplaced. It also highlights for them the significant waste of local rate revenues applied by council to the assessment process and the dilemma which councils face in defending their decision in the Planning and Environment Court should a developer appeal against a refusal. It is essential that this wasteful, resource intensive and unnecessary activity is made redundant by appropriate amendment to the act.

Failure to protect wildlife, agricultural land

While we humans can speak for ourselves, it is also incumbent to protect those who cannot defend themselves, and I speak particularly of the koala--our native icon--threatened with extinction by development, by this Labor government and by this plan in particular. The koala is a key indicator for biodiversity. They will be a lost indicator at the present rate as community groups struggle to offset the failures of this Labor government. The mapping program is inadequate, incomplete and slow, while another aspect of growth is seen with this minister--that is, the growth in loopholes to aid and abet the developer constituency to find legal ways to destroy koala habitat with impunity.

Another aspect that has been largely overlooked is the impact on food production from development. Productive land agricultural pursuits, particularly those close to major urban centres, need to be preserved. This is another failure of the Traveston Crossing Dam--that less than optimum water storage location which sought to flood farm land and deprive Brisbane of a source of food. Let us hope that the remedial work to repair the damage done to the Mary Valley, primarily by the Premier in this case, will focus on developing this food bowl and repairing the other major consequence, which is social dislocation.

There is strong objection to the amendment proposed to the regional landscape and rural production areas, which has the effect of expanding the urban footprint and redefining activities which were previously urban. These areas should be afforded the highest level of protection possible so that food production for South-East Queensland's increasing population can be secured and, simultaneously, natural conservation areas protected.

Reject Queensland Government's "Sardine City" vision for Sunshine Coast

For the Sunshine Coast, we all hope for the sustenance of it being a community of communities. We do not want a sardine city. We want the places in which we live, work, play and grow our families to retain their uniqueness and their individuality. We want them to be the places in communities which attracted us to them in the first place. We do not want to morph into obscurity. We do not want to be harmonised. We want progress without oblivion.

The vision for the future of South-East Queensland and the principles that underpin the plan are generally consistent with those supported and endorsed by Sunshine Coast constituents. However, one notes with concern that the plan and its regulated regulatory provisions have significant flaws which remain to be addressed. The major concerns remain the weak basis in the plan for determining how growth can be managed and the potential inconsistencies that arise between desired outcomes, the lack of infrastructure planning to underpin development and the powers to the minister, who always seems ready to do a stirling job on behalf of his developer mates. It does not bode well for a sustainable future for the Sunshine Coast or anywhere in South-East Queensland.

#appendix1" id="#appendix1">Appendix: Divided opinions about Sunshine Coast Members of State Parliament

The following are comments in response to the article "It's time to fight Bligh's growth" by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily of 6 Mar 10.

Posted by vanga from Caloundra, Queensland, 06 March 2010 7:17 a.m.

yet another story bemoaning the imposition of 100K more people on our life styles and still no word from the liberal nationals

Will the libnats ban any greenfield development in south Caloundra?

Will the libnats go with the council on the maximum number of people for sippy downs and maroochydore urban infil?

Hello? Is there anybody out there?

McCardle, Elmes, Wellington, Dickson, Simpson, Powell and the other one I couldnt find - whats your thoughts? A lot of coast residents want to know if you are going to dare to be different or are we stuck with what labour are pushing on us because you want the same or even worse - more people?

Some answers libants - you cant just sit back and whinge about everything the government does - let us know if you will be any different

Posted by happychappy1 from Maroochydore, Queensland, 06 March 2010 7:41 a.m.

No, no, no, no, no. This govt has to be kicked out before our lifestyles are totally ruined. Please LNP, give us your views?

Posted by vanga from Caloundra, Queensland, 06 March 2010 7:43 a.m.

the emails are flooding in

Glen Elmes- not his responsibility - sent my email to Dave Gibson of the Gympie

Powell - and Dickson not in their electorate so they arent interested - suggested I contact Marc McCardle

Peter Wellington - good onya - a politician with an opinoin - dead set against the proposals

Posted by vanga from Caloundra, Queensland 06 March 2010 9 a.m.

happychappy - lnp views as emailed to me

Elmes - not his responsibility - sent my query to the member for Gympie because that member is the shadow minister - so elmes has no opinon

Peter wellington - against the proposals - was on ABC talking about it

Power and Dickson - its not their electorate so of no interest, told me to talk to Marc McCardle
Mccardel and simpson - no response yet

can someone tell the 7 memebrs of the state parliament they are members for the Sunshine Coast as well as their own fiefdoms?

Maybe if they actually spoke with each other they could present a united from for the coast

Posted by carrot from Maroochydore, Queensland 06 March 2010 9:51 a.m.

Vanga and happychappy1 may care to go to Hansard Thursday 11 Feb and read Glen Elmes' stirring speech to parliament condemning the government's population strategy for the Coast. At least Elmesy is doing his bit.

The SCRC (Sunshine Coast Regional Council) has already shot themselves in the foot by caving in immediately to Caloundra South. That set a precedent that informs the state government exactly how spineless they are.

Posted by tonyryan from Maroochydore Bc, Queensland 06 March 2010 1:17 p.m.

This is still a discussion in a bubble.

The predetermining issues are: 'population' and 'rights of the people'.

First POPULATION. Increase is NOT inevitable.

In fact natural Australian population growth went into reverse two decades after we installed statutory livable age pensions in 1946.

The current increase is primarily caused by three million migrants and refugees. Do we have to take them in? No. Australia is a desert continent and we have already reached our optimum sustainable population.

No foreign power can tell us what to do.

The newcomers are straining our water catchments; our rural food-growing zones through enforced urban sprawl; our culture; our national sovereignty and our social integrity.

And to say we must give way to seachangers is nonsense. All human communities in history have reserved the right to repel invaders in order to protect their homes, their incomes and their way of life.

Ignoring official lies, unemployment on the Sunshine Coast is 23% and newcomers compete for the few jobs going. In a sense, they import poverty.

And RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE?

During the past three decades there has been a media-driven viewpoint that we elect representatives to rule over us. This is dictatorial nonsense.

Democracy was clearly defined by the greatest minds in history... Thucydides of ancient Greece, the Irish Monks, Thomas Paine of 'The Rights of Man' fame, Lord Acton... but most lyrically by Abraham Lincoln: "Government of the people, by the people and for the people".

Abe overstated the definition because already, enemies of democracy were subverting the meaning.

In a democracy, councillors, MLAs and MHRs are our elected servants, there for one single purpose, to install the product of electoral consensus.... or in Constitutional terms... the will of the people.

Wellington and Blumell excepted, the rest of our grubby politicians are exchanging election campaign funding for development favours.

This is obviously true of tyrant Bligh and Andrews, but us equally true of the LNP. This is why they are silent.

If you want to save the Sunshine Coast, you will have to do what people have done since time immemorial; confront the politicians en masse.

They will back down, believe me.

Posted by shellsay from Maroochydore, Queensland 06 March 2010 1:46 p.m.

What is so arrogant about the Bligh/Hinchcliff army is that they have totally and utterly disregarded the S/C community and SCRC rights to have an opinion. The whole process of altering the maximum population number of nearly 16,000 set by council, to now become the minimum is outrageous, how can this just happen? Of course you can't stop population growth, but you should be able to stipulate a lot lower figure. And how can all this be approved by these loonies when no effort towards sustainable planning has been taken into consideration, we are talking flood plain land here, has anyone seen the amount of water that is lying on there at the moment. Why arent we utilising further regional areas for development, why does it have to be here, the infrastructure that is in place now can't cope. It is up to the S/C communities to stop this decision now, instead of just blogging about it let's all do something. Developers like Stocklands are way to powerful and have destroyed enough of the coast, they are not ratepayers and don't have a right to an opinion. Send a submission into council, to take a stand on this through the reinstatement of their structure plan, which can be viewed on their web: www.sunshinecoast.qld.gov.au. Sunshine Coast residents have a right to be heard, Bligh/Hinchcliff dont live here we do.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ In spite of having made this speech, opinion about LNP member Glen Elmes is not unanimously favourable amongst Sunshine Coast residents opposed to population growth as can be seen #appendix1">below from comments in response to the article "It's time to fight Bligh's growth" by Bill Hoffman in the Sunshine Coast Daily of 6 Mar 10, where I learnt of this speech.

In the past the LNP has been correctly regarded as more the party of big business than the Labor Party. However, that reality appears to have been largely inverted in Queensland in recent years. An example which suggests this is the disturbing fact that on 2 June 2009, only two members of the Parliamentary Labor caucus were prepared to vote, even inside caucus, where they are all supposedly free to speak and vote as their consciences dicate, against privatisation. In contrast, the the LNP opposes privatisation and that opposition appears to be, in large part, genuine. They have repeatedly voted against privatisation and, on one occasion, LNP leader John-Paul Langbroek called on the State Governmet to put privatisation to the people in a referendum. Of course, the ultimate test for Parties such as the LNP is what they do upon winning government and not what some of their members are prepared to say whilst in opposition.

Glen Elmes' seat of Noosa was previously held by Cate Molloy, who was expelled from the Labor Party for her principled stand of opposition to the Bligh Government's environmentally and socially reckless plans to dam the Mary Valley at Traveston. Whilst we urged a vote for Cate Molloy in both the 2006 and 2009 state elections, this speech demonstrates that some considerable good has resulted from that loss.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑, #main-fn4" id="main-fn4">4. #main-fn4-txt">↑ This has raised decentralisation as a possible solution to overcrowding of the major urban areas. Noosa Shire Mayor Bob Abbot proposed decentralisation at the Debate at the Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane on Monday 22 February. His argument was that if our Governments had not allowed the infrastructure that serviced Inland Queensland in the firs half of the twentieth century to have been neglected in the second half of the 20th century then there would be plenty of desirable alternative locations for people to live outside the major urban regions. An argument put against this view is that, as a result of mechanisation, there was no longer as great a need for the larger rural workforces that existed back then. Also the lack of fertility and water have defeated past attempts to settle outback regions of the country, most famously the soldier settlers who were given plots of land in outback Victoria after the First World War.

Nevertheless, I believe that it is appropriate to carefully examine the capacity of some currently sparsely settled regions to support greater populations. Some factors which could bend the odds more in our favour are (1) The potential of Natural Sequence Farming as well as Permaculture techniques to restore fertility the land, (2) the capacity of the Internet to allow much intellectual work to be perfomed remotely, (3) Cheaper building techniques as described by US architect Michael Reynolds in his video Garbage Warrior.

If it were to be found that some of these regions may be able to sustainably support substantially larger human populations, then decentralisation should be adopted, but only as a solution to relieve the overcrowding of Australia's existing urban areas, rather than as an excuse to furhter increase Australia's population.

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. #main-fn3-txt">↑, #main-fn5" id="main-fn5">5. #main-fn5-txt">↑ In fact, we would tend to agree that 'infill development' is dirty. In theory infill development could relieve some of the demand for land, but it is not environmentally cost-free. The financial and energy costs of building and operating multi0story dwellings and obtaining food, water and other necssities from elsewhere needs to be taken into account. In practice, it is also very difficult to infull without sacrificing ever more of the remnants of vegetation in city areas. In a context of population stability, some 'infill' development may prove to be a means to relieve the demand for bushland clearing, but, in the current environment of runaway population growth it has just become another means for developers to profit by degrading the quality of life of existing community.

Introduction from an Australian Perspective

The combination of economic 'reforms', globalisation and high immigration have dramatically worsened circumstances for working Australian in recent years. However, the situation is vastly worse in the United States. David Seminara's exhaustively researched article describes the effect of the H2-B visa system for unskilled non-agricutural temporary workers. As described below, the H2-B scheme, as explained is a temporary work scheme for non-agricultural unskilled workers. The corresponding scheme for temporary agricultural workers is the H2-A scheme. In Australia, a roughly equivalent scheme is the Pacific Island Guest Worker Scheme. Australia does not (yet) have such a direct equivalent for non-agricultural workers, nevertheless, the general conclusions about the effects of one aspect of the high rate of immigration into the US remain highly relevant to the consideration of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's plans to dramatically increase Australia's population through immigration.

This article describes the abuses by unscrupulous US employers, of the H2-B temporary visa scheme. It allows US employers to to employ 'guest workers' prepared to work for as little as (in US dollars) $6.85, $7.20 and $7.38 per hour. Even in the midst of the current recession, employers continue to insist upon importing more H2-B workers. Consequently, unskilled jobs, offering princely sums such as $15 per hour, are increasingly rare. One High school janitor's job advertised in March 2009 received 700 applications.

The article demolishes many of the usual justifications, similar to those offered in Australia, for immigrant labour.

Kevin Rudd has refused to offer to the Australian people any coherent and logical justification for his program of high immigration, which exceeds even the record high levels deceptively imposed by the previous Howard Government. - JS, 22 Feb 10.

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Dirty Work: In-Sourcing American Jobs with H-2B Guestworkers

By David Seminara
February 2010
Backgrounders and Reports

Original article, by David Seminera, published in February 2010 by the US Center for Immigration Studies. Also published there as a pdf file (400K).See also: Will Rudd Government's high immigration program turn Australia into Argentina? of 19 Jul 08.

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CIS Fellow David Seminara is a Chicago-based writer and was a tenured member of the U.S. Foreign Service from 2002-2007.

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A prior version of this article was published on the CIS website. The current version, which supersedes earlier versions, includes revisions that take account of information subsequently supplied to the author.

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Americans don't want to mow your lawn. They don't want to serve you your lobster roll sandwich during your summer holiday in Maine. They won't drive the trucks that bring food to the grocery store you shop in, or chop down the trees that produce the paper you use, or perform at the circus you attend every summer. You'll also need the helping hand of a "temporary, seasonal" guestworker to help you get on the chair lift in Vail, and to learn how to ski or snowboard. Nor will Americans guard your swim club's pool, shovel the snow in your driveway, operate the rides at the amusement park you take your kids to, tidy up the hotel room you sleep in, or process the seafood you eat. Americans can't even be counted on to coach sports, or work construction jobs. American workers have grown soft, young people don't want to work, and the unemployed don't want to do much of anything strenuous these days.

 

These are the kind of flawed assumptions that have led to the creation and rapid growth of the H-2B visa program, which has resulted in more half a million jobs being filled by foreign guestworkers over the last five years, rather than Americans and immigrants already in the United States.

Despite the significant impact that the H-2B visa program has on American workers, the program receives scant media coverage compared to other guestworker categories. Issues surrounding the issuance of H-1B visas, for example, tend to receive far more media scrutiny because the beneficiaries and the victims are highly educated and often fall within the same social circles as journalists, and the topic of higher-paying skilled jobs is perceived to be more relevant to the kind of readership and viewership that advertisers desire. As the global recession continues to take its toll on the American economy, this is an opportune time to re-examine the H-2B program and to evaluate whether these jobs could be filled with people already in the United States. The goal of this report is to shed light on the poor conditions that H-2B guestworkers often toil in; to expose the damage that this program does to the most vulnerable sector of American workers: the poorly educated, students, minorities, and legal immigrants; to examine the recruiters who find workers and the employers who hire them; and to scrutinize the government's role in sanctioning and managing the H-2B bureaucracy.

#006633" size="4">Key Points

• The popularity of the H-2B program for temporary, seasonal, non-agricultural guestworkers has soared from just 15,706 visas issued in 1997 to an all-time high of 129,547 in 2007.
• The Save Our Small and Seasonal Business Act (SOSSBA) passed by Congress in 2005 provided an exemption for returning H-2B workers so that they would not count toward the annual 66,000 cap on H-2B visas. The SOSSBA was a windfall for H-2B employers, but Congress failed to renew the legislation in 2008. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce lists expanding the H-2B program as one of its "Policy Priorities for 2009."
• Despite the global economic crisis, demand for H-2B guestworkers remains strong, even in areas with high unemployment rates. American companies filed petitions to request nearly 300,000 H-2B workers in FY 2008.#1">¹
• Use of the H-2B program has morphed from its original intent to help employers that need seasonal and/or temporary workers. The majority of the program's current users are neither small nor seasonal employers, but rather mid- to large-sized companies and recruiters that petition for H-2Bs to work for 10 months out of the year, year after year.
• Many of the businesses filing H-2B petitions for foreign workers are "body shops" that have no actual "seasonal or temporary" need for labor. Body shops can petition for large numbers of workers and then essentially sell them off to companies that either could not get their own H-2B workers or did not know how to do so. Given the fact that H-2B has an annual numerical cap, critics of body shops argue that they "hoard" workers and then drive up the price for everyone else.
• Despite credible allegations and even convictions for fraud and abuse of both H-2B workers and the program in general, neither the Department of Labor (DOL) nor the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ever barred a U.S. company from filing H-2B petitions. Some repeat offenders continue to have their petitions approved to this day.
• U.S. H-2B employers and the U.S. recruiters they hire often partner with foreign recruiters, and then deny knowledge of the foreign recruiters' tactics when fraud and abuse are alleged. U.S. courts have not shown a willingness to try cases of abuse when the violations occur outside the United States, even if the case involves a job being performed in the United States.
• While many H-2B jobs offer low wages of less than $10 per hour, a substantial number of H-2B visas go to more skilled workers who earn up to $40 per hour. Industries that are particularly heavy users of the H-2B program include landscaping, forestry, hotels and restaurants, amusement parks and leisure facilities, and seafood processors.
• Employers value H-2B workers because their legal status in the United States is tied to their employment and because they often have extended families in their home countries depending on their wages, making them loyal and motivated workers. Racial discrimination may also induce U.S. employers to petition for H-2B workers rather than employ black American workers.
• Hourly compensation for U.S. workers has stagnated since the H-2B program began to expand in 2002, and economists have found no evidence of a labor shortage in the occupational groups that constitute the bulk of H-2B employment.#2">²
• H-2B employers are required to advertise job vacancies prior to opening them up to H-2B guestworkers, but the ads more frequently resemble legal notices than real enticements and are often specifically designed to attract as little attention as possible.

#006633" size="4">#H2-B-basics" id="H2-B-basics">H-2B Basics

The H-2B nonimmigrant visa classification applies to foreign nationals seeking to perform non-agricultural labor or services of a "temporary nature" in the United States, but the term "temporary" has come to be essentially meaningless in the H-2B context.

Some key basics regarding H-2B visas:

• The H-2B visa was created in 1986, as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which split the H guestworker program into an H-2A visa for agricultural guestworkers, and an H-2B visa for non-agricultural guestworkers.
• U.S. firms filing H-2B petitions must establish that their need for the services or labor is "temporary," regardless of how long that is.
• The petitioner's need is considered "temporary" if it is a "one-time occurrence, a seasonal, peak load, or intermittent need."
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) more specifically defines temporary as "generally limited to one year or less," but allows H-2B workers' visas to be extended for an uninterrupted stay -- either for the same or a different employer -- of up to three consecutive years. After three years in the United States, H-2B visa holders must reside outside of the United States for 90 days. If they spend less than 18 consecutive months in the United States, they only need to depart for 45 days to reset the clock to zero and return as an H-2B. If they were in the United States for more than 18 months, but less than three years, they need to reside outside the United States for 60 days before returning on an H-2B visa. These regulations were loosened under the George W. Bush Administration to allow H-2B employers to retain "seasonal" workers for longer periods of time.
• Congress has established an annual cap of 66,000 H-2B visas for each year, half of which become available on April 1, and the other half on October 1. SOSSBA allowed for "returning" H-2B workers to obtain H-2R visas that would not count against the cap. This act, which had nearly 150 co-sponsors in the House, pushed the total number of H-2B/H-2R's to an all-time high of 129,547 in 2007 (see Figure 1). This legislation was allowed to expire on September 30, 2007, to the great consternation of business interests that continue to lobby for its renewal.

• Prospective employers of H-2B workers must first obtain certification from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) that 1) there are not sufficient U.S. workers who are able, willing, qualified, and available to do the temporary work; and 2) the employment of H-2B aliens will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers. (New DOL regulations may alter or end this requirement.)
• Once the employer has obtained an approved temporary labor certification, the employer may file a Form I-129, "Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker," with USCIS to classify the individual as an H-2B worker. Once the petition is approved, the worker may apply for an H-2B visa at a U.S. embassy or consulate abroad. Unlike H-1B visa applicants, H-2B visa applicants -- who are often unemployed in their home countries -- must overcome section 214 (b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which requires that applicants prove they intend to return home after their visas expire.
• Employers are required to pay employees the prevailing wage (as set by the various state workforce agencies for each occupation and locality) and provide housing -- though they are allowed to charge workers for it. H-2B workers are tied to the employer that files the petition for them; if a worker fails to turn up for work on five consecutive days, the employer is required to report the delinquency to the Department of Homeland Security.
• DHS, in concurrence with the State Department, determines which countries are eligible to participate in the H-2B program, based on how cooperative each country is on deportation and other consular issues, as well as "how important the country is to the operation of the H-2B program."#3">³ In 2009, citizens of the following countries are eligible to participate in the H-2B program: Argentina, Australia, Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Moldova, New Zealand, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

#006633" size="4">Employers: We Want Our H-2Bs

A wide variety of U.S. employers rely on H-2B labor as an integral part of their labor force. Sectors of the American economy most dependent on H-2B workers include landscaping, forestry, hotels and tourism, seafood processing, restaurants, amusement parks, and construction. Popular websites like www.myvisajobs.com provide an inside glimpse at the types of companies that are importing H-2B workers and the specific jobs and wages they are securing. While many of the job openings listed on the site are what one might consider classic unskilled labor, some clearly are not. For example, the site lists approved H-2B petitions for professional coaches and athletes with employers like the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, which pay H-2B visa beneficiaries up to $6,500 per month.

In trying to assess how reliant some U.S. firms are on H-2B visa labor, it's useful to examine the outcry when Congress failed in 2008 to renew SOSSBA. Although H-2B visas are rarely covered in the mainstream media, most of the articles on the topic in the last year have been sympathetic to businesses' desire for more H-2B labor, and feature quotes from aggrieved business owners and their advocates complaining about the failure to renew SOSSBA and the perceived shortage of seasonal workers. A typically sympathetic piece in the Baltimore Sun carried the sub-heading, "Congressional Dispute on Visas Puts Shore Businesses in a Bind."#4">⁴ A similar story was published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch under the headline, "Visa Program Not Delivering As Many Imported Workers," making the "workers" sound like a commodity no different from soy beans or cocoa.#5">⁵

Trade journals are even more brazen in their cheerleading for renewal of SOSSBA. One of the more blatant examples of this phenomenon is a March 13, 2008, article in the Nation's Restaurant News with the headline, "Debate Over H-2B Visa Cap Threatens Serious Shortage of Seasonal Workers," which appeared directly below another front-page headline warning, "Cost-Wary Restaurants Lay Off Large Numbers."#6">⁶ Apparently the editor of this publication saw no contradiction in these two juxtaposed articles.

Landscape Management covered the failure to renew the SOSSBA extensively, and in January 2008, ran a special section under the banner headline, "Crisis Planning," with an article titled, "What Now? Smart Strategies to Survive and Perhaps Even Prosper in Spite of the Delay or Loss of H-2B Workers," amidst the backdrop photo of a large group of worried-looking Mexicans in cowboy and baseball hats.#7">⁷ The report contains a list of suggestions on "Living Without H-2B Workers," which recommends that companies do a better job of training their employees to improve productivity and reduce turnover, cut out unprofitable jobs and problem customers, extend the hours of current employees who want overtime, mechanize to improve efficiency, consider raising prices, and "get the help wanted word out."

In the segment about potentially raising prices, the author states that "few of the small owner/operators in your market use H-2B workers, so they'll see your scaling back as an opportunity to pick up some of your business." Indeed, I spoke to smaller landscaping companies who resent their larger competitors that use H-2B labor. Don Mullanack from All American Lawn Services in Vero Beach, Fla., who does not use H-2Bs, told me that he "hoped that they shut down the H-2B program and that all those companies that rely on it go out of business." The section on "Living Without H-2Bs" concludes with a question and a warning: "How can you make your job descriptions attractive to them [unemployed Americans]? Chances are you'll have to pay them more than you are used to paying."

#006633" size="4">Beholden to Special Interests

The April 16, 2008, congressional testimony provided by Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) is typical of the kind of doom and gloom prophecies voiced by business owners who want more H-2B workers. "Without a returning worker exemption this year businesses in my district will be forced to close and my community will suffer …. Stimulating growth and returning our country to prosperity cannot occur without delivering such relief to America's small businesses …. We cannot leave small businesses who want to do the right thing with the unacceptable choice of going out of business or hiring illegal workers." Rep. Bishop is certainly not the only champion of the H-2B Program. No member of Congress has been a more vocal champion for H-2B employers than Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski.

Sen. Mikulski has long been a champion for the business interests of large H-2B employers; particularly Maryland-based seafood and landscaping concerns. She authored an op-ed for the influential Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill in February 2008 titled "Saving our Small, Seasonal Businesses Means Fighting to Preserve H-2B Visas."#8">⁸ The piece is typical of her efforts to paint H-2B employers as embattled small businesspeople who want desperately to hire Americans but simply cannot find any willing to work. Mikulski's advocacy on behalf of H-2B employers in her state has earned her the unwavering support of major H-2B employers and advocacy groups (see Table 5).

We examine Sen. Mikulski's recent campaign contributions here because she has been the public face and most vocal cheerleader for the H-2B program, but, in fairness, she is far from being the only politician feeding at the H-2B employer trough. There's plenty of blame to go around, as evidenced by the current bipartisan push to renew SOSSBA, which currently has 37 co-sponsors in the Senate, 21 Democrats and 16 Republicans.#9">⁹ The House has a similar bill introduced by Rep. Frank Kratovil Jr. (D-Md.), which currently has 24 co-sponsors, including 12 Democrats and 12 Republicans.#10">¹⁰

#006633" size="4">Parting Gifts from George W. Bush

George W. Bush was a vocal advocate for guestworker programs. In 2004, Bush proposed a new guestworker program that, had it been enacted, would have tripled the number of visas issued to seasonal workers. On January 18, 2009, his administration published new regulations that significantly reduced oversight of the H-2B application process and extended the definition of "temporary" in the H-2B context from 10 months to up to three years. The move would also replace the need for employers to obtain H-2B labor certification, with an "attestation" that qualified U.S. workers could not be found. Associate General Counsel of the AFL-CIO, Lynne Rhinehart, gave congressional testimony regarding the changes and neatly summed up many of the problems, not only of Bush's regulatory changes, but of the H-2B program in general:

"Under the new rules, employers experiencing a long-term need for a larger workforce could completely avoid the demands of the domestic labor market by serially employing H-2B workers to meet this long-term need. This would drag down wages and working conditions for workers in the industry or region as a whole. The combination of self-attestation, the elimination of the state workforce agencies, and the broadened definition of "temporary" will further depress wages in the industries in which the H-2B program operates, to the detriment of U.S. workers. And, because there is an endless supply of citizens of foreign countries willing to work in the United States … employers have little or no economic incentive to meet the economic demands of U.S. workers seeking a better wage."#11">¹¹

As we go to press, it is not yet clear whether President Obama will repeal Bush's changes to the H-2B program, but the issue certainly presents him with an opportunity to side with the interests of American workers over the interests of big business.

#006633" size="4">Mom & Pops They Are Not

Advocates of raising the cap on H-2B visas frequently invoke the notion that the primary beneficiaries of the H-2B visa program are small, mom & pop-type businesses. In reality, it is usually cost prohibitive for small businesses to hire an immigration attorney to help them navigate the dizzying bureaucracy that goes with trying to obtain a DOL labor certification and ultimately importing and housing H-2B workers.#12">¹² The bulk of approved H-2B petitions go to medium- and large-size businesses that import hundreds, if not thousands, of workers each year, like Six Flags; major hotel chains, including Marriott, Ritz Carlton, and Westin; and large landscaping companies like the Brickman Group.

The president of the Brickman Group, Mark Hjelle, is also on the board of directors of Save Small Business (SSB),#13">¹³ a lobbying group that calls itself "a grassroots educational coalition" whose mission is to increase the H-2B labor pool by renewing SOSSBA. SSB's website contains an FAQ on H-2Bs intended to dispel "myths" about the program. One of the so-called myths is that "People on welfare should be taking all of these jobs." The site claims that this is not feasible because welfare recipients lack the skills to perform H-2B jobs and do not live where the jobs are located (no mention of the fact that H-2B visa holders obviously don't live near the jobs either). An example cited is lifeguard jobs, "a lifeguard job requires that the applicant can swim. Not all welfare recipients can swim." This "grassroots" coalition to save "small business" appears to be run by medium- and large-sized companies that are major users of the H-2B program. Examining SSB's board members reveals the kind of companies that have a vested interest in the expansion of the H-2B program.

The president of the luxury 385-room Grand Hotel in Mackinac Island, Mich., is also a member of the SSB board. The hotel boasts a 500,000-gallon pool and the world's longest front porch. In 2008, The Grand received DOL labor certification to in-source 369 jobs with H-2B labor, including 25 wine stewards, 20 groundskeepers, 70 housekeepers, 20 chefs, 24 bellhops, 94 waiters, 114 kitchen helpers, and two stable attendants.#14">¹⁴ Michigan currently has a 15 percent unemployment rate, but if the Grand is in dire need of workers, you wouldn't know it from their homepage. The career opportunities link is buried in small print at the bottom of the page. I filled out an online application in April 2009, which essentially just asked for my name, phone number, e-mail, and address, but was never contacted about a job opening. I followed up with a generic e-mail asking about job opportunities (using another name) and was told by someone in HR that there were no jobs available. I was not asked for a resume or any questions about what type of job I was looking for. The Grand's website has a generic job opportunities page making it appear as though they are hiring.#15">¹⁵

The vice president of SSB, Jack Brooks, is the president of J.M. Clayton Seafood and told the Wall Street Journal in 2009 that he typically imports about a dozen seasonal guestworkers per year, and claimed that he was trying to find Americans to fill job vacancies.#16">¹⁶ In fact, the company requested and received DOL approval for 150 H-2B workers in FY 2007, and received approval for 149 H-2Bs in 2008, after requesting 150.#17">¹⁷

I asked Mr. Brooks in April 2009 why they did not list any job opportunities on the company website and he said, "I never thought of it, but that's a good idea, maybe I'll do it." Brooks went on to boast that his company had recently held a "job fair" to try to recruit American workers. I asked him where he held the event, naively expecting him to name a major town or city near the company's base in Cambridge, Md. "Hooper's Island," he responded. The U.S. Census Bureau recorded only 441 inhabitants on Hooper's Island, so it would seem to be a curious choice for a job fair. "You gotta recruit where the jobs are!" Brooks claimed. As of September 2009, there are still no jobs advertised on the company website. I e-mailed the company to inquire about job opportunities and never received a response.

Another SSB board member is Elizabeth Whitley, the chairman of Más (Mid-Atlantic Solutions) Labor, which describes itself as "the number-one for-profit service provider of H-2 services." As part of their "basic package," Más Labor offers "up to 10 Mexican workers" for $4,100-$5,300, delivery included. Más Labor represents a variety of big businesses -- in 2008, Más Labor was listed as the agent on 482 different labor certification requests petitioning for a whopping 12,393 jobs (some are listed under Más Labor, some are listed as Elizabeth Whitley, some as Elizabeth D. Whitely, and others Elizabeth Whitley/Más Labor).

With the national unemployment rate now topping 10 percent, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce listed "expanding temporary immigration programs like the H-2B visa" as one of its "Policy Priorities for 2009."#18">¹⁸ Another organization that has been a vocal advocate of expanding the H-2B program is the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (EWIC), whose website claims that it is a coalition of groups "concerned with the shortage of lesser skilled and unskilled (‘essential worker') labor." While there is no explanation on the website of why unskilled workers are more "essential" than others, or why they believe there is a "shortage" of such workers, there is a list of the coalition's members.

A quick scan of the EWIC membership list#19">¹⁹ reveals a wide variety of special interest groups that share one common bond: a vested interest in the widest possible pool of hourly wage labor. EWIC and SSB are by no means the only groups advocating for an increase in H-2B visas -- a basic Google search reveals a whole host of other like-minded advocacy groups including the Federation of Employers and Workers of America, the H-2B Workforce Coalition, and Immigration Works among many others. The Federation of Employers and Workers of America was listed as the petitioner's agent for 404 different H-2B labor certification requests in 2008, representing 12,559 jobs in-sourced to H-2B guestworkers.

#006633" size="4">Why Employers Prefer Guestworkers

The popularity of the H-2B program can be charted in the meteoric growth of the program (see table 1) from a mere 62 visas issued in the program's first year in 1987, to 15,706 issuances in 1997, to a whopping 129,547 in 2007.#20">²⁰ It should be noted that the yearly figures do not accurately reflect the total number of H-2B workers in the United States at any given time because workers are eligible to extend their visas for stays of up to three years and the numbers only reflect actual visa issuances by the State Department, not renewals or adjustment of visa status cases approved by the DHS/United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). But why aren't Americans hired for the jobs that H-2B workers fill? I've spoken to numerous employers that use H-2B labor in some of the sectors of our economy that rely most heavily on seasonal guestworkers, including landscaping companies, seafood processors, ski resorts, and hotels. Below are some of the most commonly cited reasons why U.S. employers use H-2B guestworkers.

Dirty Work. Many employers are convinced that Americans no longer have the stomach for doing dirty, repetitive, or physically taxing work in difficult conditions. Business owners often claim that they've tried increasing wages and benefits to attract American workers, but that Americans simply do not want to take difficult jobs. These notions are contradicted by evidence that when companies offer attractive wages and benefits, they generally have little trouble finding American workers to do jobs in difficult fields like garbage collection, custodial work, and dishwashing.

For example, the Associated Press reported in March 2009, that the Edison Junior High School in Massilon, Ohio, received 700 applications for a janitorial job that offered a $15 per hour salary, plus benefits.#21">²¹ DOL approved hundreds of H-2B labor certification requests for FY 2008 jobs in the Canton-Massilon area, which has an 12 percent unemployment rate. SSB board member Más Labor filed many of these petitions for landscaping companies all within an hour of the Canton-Massilon region.

A few of the examples were: Rice's Nursery in North Canton (27 workers for nine-month contract work at $6.85 per hour), Turfscape Co. in Twinsburg (65 workers for 10-month contract work, at $7.20), and Todd's Enviroscapes in Louisville, (44 workers, nine-month contracts, $7.38). The Federation of Employers and Workers also helped in-source 37 jobs in nearby Akron for R.B. Stout, Inc. The point here is that this is a part of the country that has plenty of Americans looking for work and willing to do difficult jobs. The only catch is that they want to make enough money to actually be able to support their families.

Americans Won't Move for Seasonal Work. Seasonal destinations that have a high cost of living like Cape Cod or Vail do not have wide pools of labor looking for seasonal hourly wage work, and so employers in these areas obviously need to recruit from outside their immediate area. The problem is that the Department of Labor only requires that employers recruit from within "normal commuting distance" of the actual job the employer seeks to fill. This means that if I own a business on Mackinac Island, Mich., I only need to make efforts to advertise and recruit locally, and not in say Grand Rapids or Detroit, where there would obviously be a much larger pool of unemployed applicants looking for hourly wage jobs. It requires a leap of faith to understand that if a ski resort in Breckenridge, Colo., for example, cannot fill its seasonal jobs locally, then the next logical step would be to recruit workers from Europe, rather than Denver. H-2B employers invariably claim that they do try to recruit from areas outside their immediate zip code, but that Americans won't move for seasonal work. Americans actually change their place of residence more frequently than almost any country in the world, and workers go where the best paying jobs are. Seasonal businesses in Alaska, for example, have long been able to attract workers from the lower 48 states, simply by offering attractive wages and affordable housing.

Racial/Ethnic Stereotypes and Discrimination. Black workers frequently compete for the kinds of hourly wage jobs that H-2B workers occupy. While there is no way to quantify the precise role that racial discrimination has played in the displacement of black workers in common H-2B occupations, there is strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that some employers would prefer to hire foreign H-2B labor because they harbor prejudices about black workers. I've heard from numerous H-2B employers that they use Mexican laborers because they perceive them as more highly motivated, less likely to make demands for raises, take sick days, or ask for improvements in working conditions compared to the kinds of workers these employers would have to hire if there were no H-2B program.?

Given that the minimum wage in Mexico is about $4 per day, its easy to see how Mexican H-2B workers would value a $7 per hour, no-benefits job more than an American worker who might view the same opportunity as a dead-end job to be endured rather than valued. Mexican H-2B workers often come to the United States bearing the burden of large, extended families counting on them to send money back to Mexico, and thus they have extra motivation to "stick out" a tough and thankless job. Additionally, most H-2B workers arrive in the United States without families, so they are free of the kind of baggage that American workers have with respect to family obligations and commitments. They are in the country solely to work, and are single minded about making and saving as much money as they can. As we will explore later in this report, many H-2Bs from around the world have the added burden of trying to earn enough to pay back the large sums of money they pay headhunters in their home countries to arrange H-2B jobs for them.

Websites like www.latinlabor.com, www.mexican-workers.com, www.mexicanlabor.com, and www.maslabor.com play upon the positive stereotypes of the reliable Mexican worker. These are not just staffing agencies providing help to employers that need workers, but rather legal American companies that are actually selling Mexican workers as a commodity to businesses that want to employ them. It wouldn't be legal for American companies to only consider job applicants from just one ethnic group, but staffing services can market workers from one country, Mexico in this case, with impunity. For example, www.mexican-workers.com has a section on its website entitled, "Mexican Workers -- The Obvious Choice"#22">²² which extols the virtues of Mexican H-2B workers as "happy agreeable people," with a "strong work ethic" that are often "under-employed."

Carol Swain, professor of law at Vanderbilt University and the editor of the book Debating Immigration, told me "African American workers can be perceived as being too demanding, employers like the idea of being able to import more docile workers and some black leaders have expressed a reluctance to criticize another downtrodden group." Swain, an expert on immigration and its impact on black Americans, cited a Northwestern University study authored by Devah Pager#23">²³ that reported that whites with felony convictions were significantly more likely to get job callbacks than similarly qualified blacks with no criminal records. Obviously Latinos face workplace discrimination as well, but discrimination against black workers appears to be more pronounced.

Few, if any, of the major users of the H-2B program make any concerted effort to recruit in high unemployment, inner-city neighborhoods, or to advertise vacancies in publications and media outlets that reach the black demographic. I asked several different H-2B employers that complained to me of a shortage of workers about their efforts to recruit black workers and was frequently met with incomprehension. One crab processor in eastern Maryland scoffed at my suggestion that he consider recruiting in inner-city neighborhoods in nearby Baltimore. "Why would I recruit all the way over there?" he asked as though I were talking about another planet.

Students Aren't Available. American high school and college students have long been a sensible fit for seasonal employers that need summer help, but seasonal employers increasingly prefer the flexibility and commitment of H-2B workers over students who often have to abandon their jobs before Labor Day weekend to return to school. Many seasonal summer businesses are open during the shoulder seasons in April-May, and September-October, and students cannot always commit to working during these time periods.

Hiring Americans = Raising Prices. Business owners often claim that they'd like to raise workers' hourly wages and offer them benefit packages, but that if they did, they'd have to raise their prices as well. They argue that consumers ultimately benefit from the lower prices they are able to offer as a result of the labor savings they reap by in-sourcing H-2B labor. The connection between employee wages and consumer prices is beyond the scope of this report, but suffice it to say that the low wages = low prices theory has some holes in it. While the formula may seem logical, the reality is that: 1) businesses do not automatically pass on their labor savings to the customer -- generally businesses are only going to charge as much as they can for their product or service, and will pass on labor savings to the customer only if they absolutely have to, and 2) employee wages are typically not the biggest factor in the pricing for most products or services.

#006633" size="4">Help (Not Wanted)

One of the many bureaucratic requirements of the H-2B program is that would-be H-2B employers need to demonstrate that they have made efforts to fill the jobs locally. The specific advertising requirement demands that prospective H-2B employers place two help wanted ads in the highest circulation daily newspaper in their area. The ads themselves are a prime example of what a charade the entire H-2B process is. First, the ads are nearly always run at the "wrong" time of year. Employers may not file for H-2B workers more than 120 days before the job actually starts, and because of the amount of bureaucracy involved and the numerical shortage of visas, companies need to start the H-2B process as early as they can. So jobs need to be advertised usually about four months before they are actually available. A ski resort that wants workers in November might be running ads in July and a crab processor that wants workers for the spring would be advertising in November. Obviously, very few people looking for seasonal, hourly wage jobs have the luxury of waiting four months or more to begin work.

Compliance ads themselves are easily distinguishable from normal recruitment ads -- many of them are written by immigration attorneys or consultants to ensure legal compliance. Most look like legal notices, in that there is no boldface text, no italics, no thick borders around the ads to make them stand out, and they are filled with needlessly long job descriptions that make the jobs sound as unappealing as possible. The ads may as well say, "please do not apply for this job."

Typically compliance ads require respondents to travel to a state workforce agency to "register there for a referral" rather than directly to an employer. The ads do not list a website where applicants could find out more information about the application process and basic information like the hours that the career center is open. While it's easy to understand why DOL doesn't trust employers to screen applicants themselves, what kind of seasonal job applicant wants to have to travel to a job center, in the hopes of registering for a referral for a job that begins in several months?

Compliance ads all tend to be clustered together at the same time of year. For example, in late October, if you get out your magnifying glass and look hard enough in the help wanted section of your local newspaper, you will probably see a maze of compliance ads for landscaping jobs. A good example of this is the Sunday, October 26, 2008, help wanted section of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, which contains compliance ads from 27 different landscaping companies. Remarkably, all 27 ads are almost exactly the same, even though they are from distinct companies, indeed competitors, ostensibly trying to recruit from the same pool of labor. All of the ads advertise "temporary" work from February 15 to December 15 at $8.65 per hour. Not a single one of the 27 ads makes any attempt to differentiate itself by offering different wages or benefits or working conditions. If you wanted workers to respond to your specific ad, knowing that many of your competitors will also be advertising, wouldn't you want to try to mention something about your company? There is no information in any of the ads that would entice workers -- none of the companies say anything about themselves or why anyone should want to work for them.

Additionally, compliance ads often end up in publications whose readership is a poor match for the kinds of jobs on offer. For example, J.M. Clayton Seafood in Cambridge, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, is required to advertise the job vacancies they have each year in a newspaper called the Easton Star Democrat, the largest daily newspaper in the immediate area with a very modest circulation of 16,752. There is nothing wrong with advertising in small newspapers, but the era of searching for jobs in newspapers is all but over and the DOL does not require jobs to be advertised online. Trying to reach young workers, legal immigrants, minorities, and other potential seasonal workers through the help wanted section of a local newspaper simply makes no sense.

Recruitment advertising sales reps were very candid in describing the farce that is H-2B compliance advertising. I asked one recruitment advertising director at a major daily newspaper in the Northeast if H-2B employers cared whether they received a response to their ads. "They don't want a response at all -- and many of them are quite blunt about telling us that," she said, before going on to describe how some employers would demand that the job openings be removed from the newspaper's website. "We run their ad in the paper, and then it goes on our website for free, but there is no requirement for them to advertise on the Internet, so they ask us to take it off our site." Other sales reps described H-2B compliance advertisers wanting to run their ads during the week rather than on Sundays, when more people read the help wanted section.

I asked Jack Brooks, president of J.M Clayton Seafood, about his recruitment advertising expenditures. After a lengthy preamble about how difficult it is to find workers, he acknowledged that the last time his company placed a help-wanted ad was simply to meet the compliance requirement in November 2008 in the Easton Star Democrat, for jobs that were to begin Spring 2009. So despite Brooks' moaning to members of the media about how hard it is to find workers, the bottom line is that he devoted no budget whatsoever to advertising vacancies for the six months prior to when the work was to begin.

Advertising H-2B job vacancies Is essentially a formality. The reality of the complex H-2B process is that most employers need a lawyer or consultant to assist them, and once they've committed to trying to in-source H-2Bs, they've already gone past the point of trying to recruit local workers to fill the jobs. Employers obviously want to gain DOL labor certification that there aren't local workers to fill the H-2B jobs, so they actually have a vested interest in ensuring that there is no response to the ads that they place. Once a business has decided to utilize H-2B labor to fill vacancies, and has taken steps to make that happen, any local job applicants that express an interest in the vacancies are essentially just getting in the way.

Suspicious Petitions: Carrollton, Ky. A former colleague who worked at a very busy H-2B processing consulate south of the border recently told me about his post's efforts to investigate suspicious H-2B petitions they received from a number of companies located in Carrollton, Ky. (population 800), about an hour outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. Carrollton sits within Carroll County, which has a staggering 13 percent unemployment rate.

A company called Refractory Services had petitioned for 80 "janitors" to work from October 1, 2008, to July 31, 2009 at the Kentucky steel mill of North American Stainless ("NAS"). NAS is part of the Acerinox Group, the third-largest steel conglomerate in the world. According to the consulate, Refractory Services claimed that the janitors were needed to clean the NAS factory "during the slow season when the factory was not producing steel." The consulate delved into the case and discovered that the owner of Refractory Services had also petitioned under the name Harris Contractors for an additional 45 "laborers" to work from February 1 through November 30, 2008. (I subsequently discovered that the same person ran a third temporary labor service in Carrollton, a company called Carrollton Mill Services, which petitioned for 80 "production helpers" during the period January 1 through October 30, 2008.)

All of these petitions had been certified by the Department of Labor, which requires that the jobs have been advertised in local newspapers. Nevertheless, the officer's suspicions were aroused by the filing of multiple petitions in an area of high unemployment and by the seeming discrepancy between the 10-month duration of the temporary employment period and the claim that these workers were mainly needed during the mill's non-producing period. He contacted the Carroll County Chamber of Commerce to learn more about the purported seasonality of NAS's business and the purported unavailability of U.S. workers in a region with high unemployment.

The official, written response from the local chamber was blunt and surprising, especially considering that chamber of commerce people are nearly always cheerleaders for business interests, even when they collide with the interests of American workers. "My understanding is that NAS is a year-round producing mill," the Chamber wrote. "I contacted a local employment agency that indicated they have 154 people (presumably Americans) available to do light industrial contracting such as you have indicated. It appears to me that we have available American workers to fill any positions [the labor contractors] may have."

My own research backed up the consulate's own initial findings. According to NAS, there are no "non-producing" periods at the mill, although there can be times during the year when lesser production takes place. Although Refractory Services claimed that the janitors were needed during the slow period, NAS stated that the slow period was August and September, which is not the period covered by the petition. Concerning the local employment picture, a Chamber of Commerce employee told me over the phone: "We have way too many unemployed people here." I asked her if those people would be willing to do tough jobs for $7 per hour. "Absolutely," she answered, "we're not that lazy that we won't do tough jobs here!"

I do not know the final outcome of the consular investigation, but the initial investigation found evidence, supported by my own research, that Refractory Services misrepresented the duration and seasonality of NAS's needs for extra janitors, and that, notwithstanding the Department of Labor certification, there may be plenty of Americans in Carroll County looking for the jobs being filled by foreign H-2B workers.

Sadly, it is easier to find examples of abuse in the H-2B program than examples of government vigor in rooting out abuse. It's safe to say that this consulate's response to apparent abuses was the exception and not the rule. It is not the State Department's job to re-adjudicate H-2B petitions, and most consular posts and officers simply haven't the time or resources to investigate every doubt they may have about a Department of Labor certification. It should also be noted that neither DHS nor the DOL has any budget earmarked to combat abuse of the H-2B program. The Carrollton petitions just happened to arouse the suspicion of a particular consular officer, who made the time to investigate.

#006633" size="4">The "Great Recession" and the Impact of H-2Bs on American Workers

In 2008, some 2.6 million American jobs disappeared, in the most precipitous annual decline since World War II. Yet on July 29, 2008, USCIS announced that the H-2B cap for the first half of fiscal 2009 had been reached. According to the American Hotel and Lodging Association this is the earliest the H-2B cap has been reached since the inception of the program.#24">²⁴ Reports also indicate that the cap for the second half of FY 2009 was reached very quickly, with all petitions dated after January 8, 2009, being denied. These indicators demonstrate that even with the American unemployment rate topping double digits, and with nearly 16 million Americans looking for work, the demand for H-2B workers shows no signs of slowing down. Indeed, during a recession companies are looking to cut costs and may view the H-2B program as a good way to weather tough economic times.

Perhaps even more startling than the consistent demand for H-2B workers despite the recession, is the fact that some employers in particularly high unemployment areas like Bakersfield, Calif., Bend, Ore., Ocean City, N.J., and Vero Beach, Fla., continue to use, and in some cases, have actually increased their H-2B workforce despite local area unemployment rates of over 10 percent. Below is a sampling of H-2B employment certification requests that were approved by the DOL in FY 2008 despite very high local unemployment rates.

• John's Island Club, Vero Beach, Fla., 15 percent unemployment rate: Received approval for 125 "dining room attendants" to be paid $7 per hour for work August 1, 2008, to May 31, 2009. Records indicate that John's petitioned for "only" 100 dining room attendants in 2007.
• Dandy Souvenirs, Fresno, Calif., 15 percent unemployment rate: Petitioned and received DOL certification for 45 amusement park workers to work all four seasons, January 18 to November 12, 2008, at $7.74 per hour.
• Mamma Marinez Concessions, Bakersfield, Calif., 14 percent unemployment rate: Petitioned for 30 amusement park workers and was approved for 29 in June 2008, making $8.14 per hour for a contract from August 14, 2008, to April 21, 2009.
• Nor-Cal Pump & Well Service, Yuba City, Calif., 17 percent unemployment rate: Petitioned for six well drill operators and was approved for April 1 to October 31, 2008, at $23.85 per hour.
• 7th Mountain Resort (owned by Premium Resorts International), Bend, Ore., 14 percent unemployment rate: Petitioned for 15 housekeepers and 10 dining room attendants and was approved for April 1 to November 30, 2008, at $8.25 and $8.04 per hour.
• Hammock Dunes Club, Palm Coast, Fla., 16 percent unemployment rate: Petitioned for 19 landscapers/laborers and was approved for 17, for April 1 to December 31, 2008, at $7.76 per hour.
• Worldwide Entertainment, Las Vegas, Nev., 13 percent unemployment rate: Petitioned for 100 dancers at $14 per hour, but was denied. Apparently someone at the Department of Labor understood that there are at least 100 Americans willing to dance in Las Vegas for $14 per hour.

An examination of the first quarter 2009 unemployment rates for subsets of the American population most often in competition for common H-2B jobs (teenagers, students, immigrants, minorities, and those with less than a high school diploma) reveals that these segments of our society are already in dire straits when it comes to finding work. Consider the following unemployment rates for groups that frequently compete for H-2B jobs: immigrants, 10 percent; workers with less than a high school diploma, 17 percent; teens 16 to 17, 22 percent; black teens, 41 percent. Also consider the substantial percentage of persons aged 18-65 who are not currently in the workforce, either because they have given up looking for jobs, or by choice: just 33 percent of African-Americans with less than a high school diploma are in the labor force; just 18 percent of all teens 16 to 17 are in the labor force; and just 42 percent of natives with less than a high school diploma are in the labor force.#25">²⁵ The current 24 percent unemployment rate for teenagers is the highest figure on record.

The impact of the H-2B program on unemployed Americans is obvious, but what effect has the program had on Americans employed in industries that make heavy use of H-2B labor? Despite gains in productivity, wages for Americans have fallen relative to inflation since 2002, during a time of rapid growth of the H-2B program. Researchers from the Economic Policy Institute examined seven of the most common H-2B occupations and found that real wages in common H-2B occupations have been flat over the last seven years, unemployment in the H-2B sectors has been high relative to other sectors of the American economy, and that there is no evidence that the United States has a labor shortage in the most common H-2B occupations.#26">²⁶ I compared the median wages of several common H-2B occupations in 2003 versus 2008, using Department of Labor data, and found that in each case wage increases had failed to keep up with inflation. For example, the median hourly wage for housekeepers in 2003 was $8.06, and had climbed to only $9.13 by 2008. Dishwashers had progressed only from $7.27 to $8.19, hotel desk clerks from $8.43 to $9.37, and amusement park attendants from $7.35 to $8.40.

What cannot be measured statistically is how fast wages might have risen had there been fewer numbers of H-2B workers in the United States, and what negative effect H-2B workers have on the benefit packages of Americans working in fields with large numbers of H-2B workers. For example, the Institute for Women's Policy Research estimates that 85 percent of food service industry employees receive no paid sick leave whatsoever.#27">²⁷ Of course, eliminating the H-2B program isn't suddenly going to magically produce paid sick leave and health benefits for American workers who don't have them, but the more employers have to compete to attract staff, the better benefits they will be forced to offer.

Resorting to a guestworker program to address alleged "shortages" of workers in specific occupations and regions eliminates the possibility that the market will correct the "shortage." For example, if there aren't enough workers willing to take $8 per hour, no-benefit, slaughterhouse jobs in North Dakota, then the slaughterhouses need to self-correct the problem by offering higher wages and some benefits in order to attract workers from stagnant or contracting industries. If, instead of increasing wages and benefits, the slaughterhouses resort to the wide-scale use of guestworkers and keep the wages and benefits the same, the problem/shortage will persist and the market cannot self correct. Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute elaborated on this issue in April 2008 while testifying before Congress on the issue of seasonal work visas: "To jam market signals by resorting to a visa program for special types of workers has the potential to prevent the optimal allocation of labor, leading to market distortions. One such distortion is the dampening of wage gains."#28">²⁸

Aside from the negative effects the H-2B program may have on wages, unemployment, and benefit packages for American workers, we also need to consider the intangible consequences of the program on our social fabric. Anyone who's ever taken a sociology course can tell you that employment is a good thing for a person's well being. Work teaches us to be responsible and keeps us out of trouble. When teenagers cannot find that first job, they miss out on a crucial rite of passage to adulthood. When students cannot find summer jobs, they have a more difficult time paying for college. When workers of all kinds fail to find work, they burden already strapped social service agencies, and are more likely to become substance abusers or engage in criminal activity. None of these factors will show up on the Department of Labor's website, but there are clearly negative social consequences to in-sourcing jobs that would otherwise go to Americans.

#006633" size="4">Bargain Labor, High Prices

Perhaps you acknowledge that the in-sourcing of H-2B labor is detrimental to American workers, but you believe that we all benefit from the lower prices that the employers pass onto consumers. An examination of the Department of Labor FY 2008 Foreign Labor Certification Data Center#29">²⁹ reveals that many H-2B employers aren't low-cost competitors, but rather companies that charge very high prices for their products and services, calling into serious doubt the notion that employers pass on their H-2B labor savings to consumers. In fact, upscale hotels appeared to be heavier users of the H-2B program than budget hotels. For example, I could find no youth hostels, and only one Motel Six and one Super 8, both in Wyoming, that used H-2Bs in 2008. These hotels petitioned for only 16 workers, whereas there were dozens of Marriott and Ritz Carlton locations that petitioned for well over 1,000 workers in FY 2008. Obviously budget hotels need fewer workers, but every hotel needs at least some staff. Below are examples of major H-2B hotel and resort employers and the prices they charge their guests.

The Four Seasons Hotel, Jackson Hole, Wyo. In 2007, it successfully petitioned the DOL for 118 H-2B workers, including clerks, kitchen workers, and housekeepers for the period December 1, 2007, to April 9, 2008; then the following season, they petitioned for an additional 118 workers to do the same jobs for the period May 1, 2008, to October 28, 2008, effectively providing them with year-round "seasonal" coverage encompassing 49 weeks of the year. Only a resort called the Four Seasons could consider that seasonal work. Although the Four Seasons pays relatively well, with H-2B salaries ranging from $11 to $15 per hour, the cost of living in and around Jackson Hole is quite high, and summer room rates start at $695 per night for a standard room, and $2,250 for a suite.

The Biltmore, Asheville, N.C. In 2008, the Biltmore earned DOL certification to import 157 guestworkers, including cooks, housekeepers, dining room attendants, and kitchen helpers for four-season work from April 1, 2008, to January 16, 2009. All were to be paid between $6.28 and $8.50 per hour. The Biltmore is the largest privately owned estate in America with 250 rooms. If you'd like to visit, admission tickets range from $39 (low season) to $55. If you manage a nice-sized hedge fund and want to stay at the four-star adjacent Inn on Biltmore Estate this summer, room rates start at $619 per night, and the best suites start at $4,000 per night.

The Westin La Cantera Resort, San Antonio, Texas. Petitioned for 100 housekeepers in 2007 for four-season work from January 18 to November 30, but was approved for only 50 to be paid $6.75 per hour. In 2008, the resort was again approved for 50 housekeepers for the same dates, and gave them all a very stingy three-cent raise, bringing them up to $6.78 per hour. La Cantera was also approved for an additional 25 kitchen helpers for the same dates, to be paid $6.75. Presumably, if they were asked back for this year, they may have been eligible for the same three-cent per hour raise that the housekeepers got. Standard rooms at the resort will set you back at least $259 per night.

Park Hyatt Beaver Creek Resort and Spa, Beaver Creek, Colo. Certified by the DOL to in-source 70 jobs to H-2Bs in 2008, for four-season work from June 15, 2008, to April 15, 2009. Positions filled included 15 kitchen helpers and 25 housekeepers paid $10.50 per hour and 25 waiters/waitresses paid $9.21 per hour. Room rates for weekends in January go for $495 and up.

Ritz Carlton, New Orleans, La. In 2007, The New Orleans Ritz attempted to in-source 345 four-season jobs, paying between $5.92 and $9.75 per hour with H-2B labor for the period October 1 to June 30, but was denied DOL certification. The hotel tried again in 2008, and won DOL certification for the same dates, this time for 195 jobs, paying between $6.15 and $13.50 per hour.

Nantucket Island Resorts, Nantucket, Mass. This conglomerate of six small resorts won DOL certification for 298 workers in both 2007 and 2008, for the period March 15 to December 15, paying H-2B workers between $8 and $12 per hour. Rooms for summer weekends start at $1,000 per night.

Luxury Hotels and Resorts. This company owns several high-end resorts around the country, and succeeded in earning certification to in-source 424 four-season jobs with overlapping petitions to ensure year-round H-2B labor coverage. Most of the jobs paid less than $10 per hour, including some as low as $6.79 per hour. Needless to say, none of the resorts in this group appear to be passing their H-2B labor savings on to their customers.

#006633" size="4">Americans Don't Want These Jobs?

The common stereotype about H-2B jobs is that they are the kind of backbreaking, low-paying, unskilled jobs that no red-blooded American would ever want. True, a majority of H-2B jobs are blue-collar and pay around $10 per hour, and some are tedious, labor-intensive, dangerous, or all of the above. Yet there are also a significant number of H-2B jobs that pay well, and others that are actually quite good jobs. Below are some examples of jobs that received DOL labor certification to be made available to foreign H-2B workers for FY 2008.

• An immigration attorney named Kendra Kembel appears to specialize in the placement of high priced soccer coaches and sports instructors. Kembel won DOL labor certification to place 60 "head coaches," 90 "professional scouts," and "90 sports instructors" for the United Soccer Academy, based in New Jersey, for four-season work from February 4 to November 19, 2008, at a rate of $21 per hour. Kembel also won DOL approval for U.K. Elite Soccer Inc. in Cedar Knolls, N.J., to import 100 "sports instructors" for four-season work from February 11 to November 19, 2008, at a pay rate of $20 per hour.
• The A-Team Connection, earned DOL labor certification to in-source 139 petroleum engineers in Baton Rouge, La., for four-season work from October 1, 2008, to August 1, 2009, at a pay rate of $27.40 per hour.
• The Aspen Ski Company earned DOL certification to in-source 184 ski instructors with H-2B visas for three-season jobs from October 1, 2008, to April 30, 2009, at pay grades between $28.55 and $34.45 per hour.
• Henkels & McCoy Inc. of Blue Bell, Pa., earned DOL certification to in-source 75 electrician jobs in Missouri that paid $32.38 per hour for four-season work from April 1, 2008, to February 1, 2009.
• Thiro USA, Inc., based in Newington, Conn., successfully petitioned DOL to in-source 50 line erector jobs, 113 line installer jobs, and 75 line repairer jobs at pay rates of $37.56 to $38.41 per hour. The petitions were overlapping, ensuring that Thiro had H-2B labor for four-season work with varying contract dates, including November 26, 2007, to July 26, 2008; March 14, 2008, to December 22, 2008; May 29 to February 28, 2009; and July 27, 2008, to May 27, 2009.
• America's Energy Company in Geismar, La., petitioned for 64 civil engineers, and won certification for 63, for four-season work from January 15 to November 15, 2008, at a pay rate of $26.43 per hour.
• The Irby Construction Company in Jackson, Mo., earned certification for 100 line installers for four-season work from April 1, 2008, to January 31, 2009 at a pay rate of $24.50 per hour.
• Professional Respiratory Care Services, Inc., in Phoenix, Ariz., won certification to in-source 50 respiratory therapist jobs paying $24 per hour, for four-season labor, from October 10, 2008, to July 1, 2009.
• Workforce Plus, an immigration/recruitment agency in Baton Rouge, La., earned certification to in-source 100 "structural steel worker" positions with H-2B labor. The jobs were for four-season work, from January 20 to November 20, 2008, and paid $24 per hour.
• R.F. in Mt. Arlington, N.J., was approved to in-source 39 construction jobs paying $22.45 per hour for four-season work from March 5 to December 5, 2008.
• Mickey's Trucking Express, Inc., in Brookfield, Ill., won approval to import 40 tractor-trailer drivers at a pay rate of $20.46 per hour for four-season work from October 15, 2007, to May 31, 2008. The following year, the prevailing wage was reduced for tractor-trailer drivers in Illinois, and Mickey's accordingly brought in 39 new drivers and paid them the new prevailing wage of $14.31 per hour for four-season jobs from October 1, 2008, to May 31, 2009. (State labor departments often receive pressure from big business to revise, i.e. lower, prevailing wage determinations, and this is probably what happened here.)

#006633" size="4">Finding Amigos: U.S. Recruiters

Many H-2B employers contract out their H-2B hiring efforts to U.S. recruiting companies that either recruit foreign nationals themselves or, more commonly, partner with recruiters in foreign countries to find workers. Some employers choose to contract out the entire recruitment process to companies like MJC Labor Solutions and Amigos Labor Solutions, which advertise themselves as "one-stop shops" that will handle everything from recruitment to navigating the legal process to actually bringing the workers to the U.S. worksite.

Some recruiters, often referred to as "body shops," take matters one step further by actually petitioning directly for workers and then farming them out to other companies. These firms often charge end users up to double the hourly wage that they actually pay workers. For example, the website of MJC Labor Solutions says that, "on average, a laborer costs $16 per hour … this wage rate includes the worker's compensation, tax matches, a payroll service fee, and a MJC Labor Solutions service fee." MJC mostly places landscapers who are paid around $8 per hour depending on their location.

A perusal of the Department of Labor's Foreign Labor Certification Data Center reveals that many of the businesses filing H-2B petitions for foreign workers are body shops that have no actual "seasonal or temporary" need for labor. Companies like Seasonal Labor Solutions, Seasonal Employee Concepts, and Seasonal Resource Services can petition for large numbers of workers and then essentially sell them off to companies that either could not get their own H-2B workers or did not know how to do so. Given the fact that the H-2B has an annual numerical cap, critics of body shops argue that they "hoard" workers and then drive up the price for everyone else. Bob Wingfield of Amigos Labor Solutions, which will file petitions in an employer's name, but does not petition for workers directly, told that me body shops who petition directly are "screwing up the whole process for everyone." Wingfield indicated that he didn't think petitioning directly was "kosher," but said that if "everyone else keeps doing it, I may have to consider it myself."

A recent cable drafted by the American consulate in Monterrey, Mexico, one of the largest H-2B processing posts in the world, entitled "Misrepresentations by Staffing Agencies under the H-2B Temporary Worker Program," sheds light on the problem. The consulate in Monterrey identified a "growing trend in which staffing agencies are petitioning for increasing numbers of H-2B temporary worker visas for needs that are neither temporary nor seasonal, but year-round."The cable states that "since February 1, 2009, post [Monterrey] has found more than 60 cases in which H-2B petitions had to be sent back to USCIS with requests for revocation." The cable also mentions staffing agencies petitioning for general laborers with low prevailing wages, and then farming those workers out to perform more specialized types of jobs, and called the agencies' job descriptions and locations submitted in their petitions, "at best informed guesses." Although the DOL requires agencies to specify the work locations where H-2B labor will be performed, Monterrey has found that numerous approved petitions do not contain specific information on where the actual H-2B work will be performed or for whom. The cable contains examples of fraud perpetrated by staffing agencies like GB Capital in St. Charles, Mo., and Workforce Plus in Baton Rouge, La., and concludes that staffing fraud "dilutes the benefits of the H-2B program for both H-2B employers and their beneficiaries and disadvantages U.S. workers who might want to compete for these jobs."

I spoke with Carl Hemphill, the founder of MJC Labor Solutions, and he was very defensive about petitioning directly for workers. "It's called sub-contracting, and it's completely legal," he said. Hemphill runs a website called www.latinlabor.com that has a "labor feasibility calculator" that I used in March 2009. The "calculator" allows you to enter in the number of workers you want, and, in my case, it computed that I could bring in Mexican workers for $2.95 per hour. Presumably this is the cost above and beyond what I'd pay the workers, but it wasn't clear from the website. Hemphill told me that he was "angry" at the government for "letting in so many illegals," and then denying employers the right to bring enough workers in legally. He also acknowledged that it's "impossible" to predict exactly how many workers he'll be able to place four or five months before the season begins, and that sometimes companies back out of agreements to place the workers he petitions for. This means that a body shop can petition for, say, 200 laborers, but might only be able to find jobs for a percentage of them. With the economy souring, the possibility of surplus H-2B workers is no longer far-fetched. Trying to convince H-2B recruiters that Americans will do some or even most of the jobs currently being done by foreign H-2B workers, however, may be a lost cause.

In June 2007, the Washington Post published a glowing article called "A Guestworker Program that Does Well by Migrants" about the H-2B program, but with a central focus on LLS (Latin Labor Solutions) International, a U.S. H-2B recruiter.#30">³⁰ The article is essentially a lengthy advertisement for LLS, which calls itself one of the largest "movers of H-2B workers" in the United States, touting both the company, and the larger H-2B program as inherently fair. A look at the LLS website provides an interesting glimpse into how U.S. recruiters market the H-2B program to U.S. employers. The site's FAQ page has two particularly revealing entries:

Q: I have workers who currently work for me. I know these workers are probably in the United States illegally, can I use the H-2B program in order to legalize them?

A: Workers must prove they have been living in Mexico for 12 to 18 months consecutively before they are eligible for a work visa. In addition they might also be requested to prove ties and solvency in Mexico.

Note that the answer isn't a flat-out "no," and that LLS doesn't state that the law requires H-2Bs to prove ties to Mexico.

Q: Can a worker that I sponsor for a visa work for another company?

A: The worker can only work for the employer who was authorized. If a worker decides to work for another company, he or she risks the opportunity of ever receiving a U.S. work visa and, if caught by authorities, could be deported.

So the bottom line message to employers here is: don't worry, your workers can't quit on you, even if they want to.

All of the H-2B recruiters I spoke to have convinced themselves that Americans simply do not want to guard pools, mow lawns, wash dishes, or perform any number of other duties that manual labor occupations require. "Oh, sure, they might try it," Bob Wingfield of Amigos Labor Solutions told me, speaking of landscaping jobs, "but by the second or third day behind the machine they'll quit." Wingfield is not alone in this opinion, despite the fact that Americans are already doing almost every type of H-2B job imaginable. I asked another H-2B recruiter, who did not want me to use his name, about some of the high wage jobs that were going to H-2B workers. "Americans don't like soccer!" he snapped, when I asked him about the 240 coaches, scouts, and instructors being imported from abroad and paid $21 per hour by the American Soccer Academy in New Jersey. "If Americans don't like soccer, why is there a need for 240 coaches, scouts and instructors?" I asked. "Damned if I know," he said.

#006633" size="4">A Different Way

Even in an industry like landscaping, which may rely on H-2B workers more than any other, you can still find Americans toiling away anonymously behind lawn mowers and hedge clippers in many American towns and cities. This spring, I met a crew of Americans working for a landscaping company called All American Lawn Services, Inc., in Denver, Colo., who found my interest in their company, and the fact that they were Americans willing to mow lawns, peculiar to say the least. I was out for a walk in the city's Washington Park neighborhood and just happened to bump into them as they were leaving a job. They were all in their early to mid-twenties, and to them, there was nothing unusual, demeaning, or shameful about their work, and rightfully so.

I tried to find this company on the Internet and was surprised to learn that there are actually numerous landscaping countries all around the United States with names like All American Landscaping or All American Lawn Services in places like Oklahoma City; Fair Lawn, N.J.; Vero Beach, Fla.; Gilbert, Ariz.; Nebraska City; and in the suburbs of Chicago. Of the numerous landscaping countries around America using some variation on the "All American" name, I could find only one in the Department of Labor's H-2B database -- a company called All American Maintenance in Colorado Springs that earned DOL certification to in-source 30 landscaping jobs to H-2Bs in 2008. Of course, having a patriotic sounding business name can also be a smokescreen, as appears to be the case with a recruiting agency that absurdly calls itself U.S. Americans, Inc. U.S. Americans, Inc., according to the DOL Foreign Labor Certification database for FY 2008, served as the agent for 173 H-2B petitions, and won DOL approval to in-source 1,367 American jobs to H-2B guestworkers in 2008.

I spoke to employees and managers at a few of the All American landscapers and heard a completely different picture from that painted by the recruiters and other landscaping companies that were heavy users of the H-2B program. Don Mullanack from All American Lawn Services in Vero Beach, Fla., told me that in 22 years he had never needed to in-source jobs to H-2Bs. While many of his competitors hire illegals or use H-2B labor, Don hires Americans: white Americans, black Americans, Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans -- Americans all the same. "I can't compete on price with those companies," he said, referring to those that use H-2Bs and/or illegals, "but I get business based on providing good service, and people like to do business with a company that hires Americans," he said, adding that "we've got too many unemployed people -- we've got to put them to work, before looking for people outside the country." Don pays his workers $12 per hour, and usually has a list of Americans 15-20 deep waiting to work for him. "A man cannot support his family on $7 or $8 an hour, its hard enough at $12," he said.

#006633" size="4">Foreign Recruiters

Despite convincing evidence that the presence of H-2B workers in the United States has a negative impact on U.S. workers, it's important to acknowledge that the vast majority of H-2B guestworkers are basically good people who are in the United States to work and save money to improve the lives of their families at home. As a consular officer serving at American embassies overseas, I've interviewed numerous H-2B visa applicants and I met several more in researching this report. While I do not buy the notion that H-2Bs are a "last resort" for employers that cannot find workers, it is also clear that an H-2B worker from a developing country is obviously going to perceive a $7 per hour job at a hotel or on a construction site as a better career opportunity than an American born and raised in the United States will. That does not necessarily mean that Americans cannot or will not do the job, it just means they may not bring the same kind of enthusiasm and obedience to their employers as H-2B workers who are contractually tied to their employers for their legal status in the United States. An American in a lower-wage hourly job knows that his income puts him in the low end of the socioeconomic status spectrum; whereas the wages many H-2B workers earn puts them near the top of the wage-earning spectrum in their home countries, and they can return home like conquering heroes, highly valued in their extended families and wider communities, and often prized as prime marriage candidates.

Recruiting H-2B workers in their home countries is big business and it's a buyers market for brokers looking to secure workers, as there is never a shortage of people looking to work in the United States. In my experience as a consular officer, I noticed that no matter what country you go to, there is always a brisk trade in hearsay and misinformation regarding American visas. Visa applicants are often more likely to formulate viewpoints on U.S. visa laws and regulations from shady middlemen or random people than from the relevant U.S. embassy website. Many H-2B visa applicants know almost nothing about the jobs they will be doing in the United States, let alone U.S. visa laws. This lack of knowledge and the desperation of many visa applicants creates a fertile ground for unscrupulous recruiters who can smell opportunity more acutely than a vulture can smell a fresh carcass.

Recruiters entice their prey with often exaggerated claims of what they can earn in the United States and how life will be there, and then once the recruit is hooked, they demand whatever price they think they can command, sometimes "only" $1,500, but occasionally up to $20,000. Recruiters want to provide employers with workers who will complete their full tours of duty, so they often require workers to leave collateral, sometimes in the form of a deed to a house or car. In some cases, this collateral is to ensure that the worker completes his contract, while in others, it's because the worker still has to pay the broker its finder's fee. H-2B program regulations state that petitions will be denied if the petitioner "knows or reasonably should know that the beneficiary has paid or agreed to pay any facilitator, recruiter, or similar employment service as a condition of obtaining an H-2B offer." However, this provision can be overcome if the employer repays the fee or notifies USCIS within two working days of finding out about the payments. Practically, very few H-2B workers ever recover the recruiting fees they've paid to headhunters in their home countries, and most companies get away with pleading ignorance.

In order to understand how foreign recruiters can get away with such abuses, one needs to fully digest how desperate people in the developing world are to have an opportunity to work in the United States. Enter the phrase "work in the USA" into Google and you'll see 148 million results. Talk to any American who has spent time living in a developing country with high unemployment and low wages, and ask them how often they were asked about how to get a visa to work in the United States. As Americans, we tend to forget how badly others want to live here; recruiters, on the other hand, see the desperation every day and they use it to squeeze migrants for as much as they can get.

#006633" size="4">Guestworker or Intending Immigrant?

Unlike skilled H-1B applicants, H-2B applicants have to prove to a U.S. consular officer during the context of a visa interview that they have a residence abroad that they intend to return to. Section 214(b) of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act states "every alien shall be presumed to be an immigrant until he establishes to the satisfaction of the consular officer, at the time of application for admission, that he is entitled to a nonimmigrant status." This section of the law gives consular officers at U.S. embassies and consulates wide latitude to refuse any applicant who cannot overcome the presumption that he intends to immigrate. The law places the burden of proof squarely on applicants, meaning that they are guilty of being intending immigrants until they can prove their innocence. Given the fact that most H-2B applicants are unemployed in their home countries, and generally have very little savings or career prospects at home, one would think that it would be very difficult for H-2B applicants to get their visas.

The reality in the field, however, is that very few H-2B visa applicants are refused as intending immigrants. I explored the issue of high visa issuance rates in a CIS Backgrounder called "No Coyote Needed."#31">³¹ Although that report dealt primarily with tourist visa issuance, the same principles apply to H-2B visa applicants. Applicants are given the benefit of the doubt as workers who are at least trying to "do it the right way" (as opposed to illegals), and posts are often too inundated with applicants to have time to investigate suspect applicants and petitioners, let alone deal with the avalanche of pressure and complaints that inevitably accompany visa refusals.

The State Department does not release refusal rates for H-2B visas, or even break down how many were issued by country, but consular officers from busy H-2B posts have told me that the vast majority of H-2B visa applications are approved. Mexico, which is far and away the largest source of H-2B labor, likely has one of the highest H-2B issuance rates, probably ranging between 85-90 percent, whereas posts significantly further from the United States might issue visas to somewhere between 70-80 percent of H-2B applicants.

The primary reason for this disparity is that it costs Mexican workers far less to get to work sites in the United States than it would for workers in Asia or Europe, who often pay much higher finder's and transport fees to their recruiters. In essence, it's simply more plausible and economically viable for Mexican workers to come to the United States for seasonal work than it is for say, Ukrainians, who, having invested far more and traveled further, might be more inclined to overstay their visas. At least this is the popular wisdom in State Department circles. Sadly, we have no way of quantifying how significant the H-2B overstay problem is because DHS still has no reliable entry/exit tracking system. Anecdotal evidence, however, indicates that the H-2B overstay problem is significant, and will become worse as H-2B workers begin to realize that without the exemption for returning (H-2R) workers, they are much less likely to be able to return to the United States to work year after year. Many H-2B employers also have presented the returning worker exemption debate as forcing them to choose between hiring illegals or going out of business. No one should be surprised if companies that cannot bring their H-2Bs back legally encourage them to overstay their visas, or apply for visitor's visas and then hire them back to work for them "off the books."

#006633" size="4">Abuse of H-2B Workers

It's extremely difficult to estimate how prevalent employer abuse of H-2B workers is, but there have been enough disturbing incidents involving major H-2B employers to conclude that abuse is a significant problem that the U.S. government has not addressed in any comprehensive fashion. Abuse can take many forms -- and ranges from minor violations, such as shortchanging employees on their hours or overcharging them for their accommodations, to far more serious violations that border on human trafficking and indentured servitude.

Make no mistake -- most H-2B employers are not abusing their employees, and many of the H-2B workers that I have interviewed have nothing but good things to say about their work experiences in the United States. Still, the persistence of reports of abuse, and the fact that so little has been done to address the issue is cause for serious concern. To date, neither the Department of Labor, nor the Department of Homeland Security has ever barred any U.S. company or recruiter from filing H-2B petitions, and indeed some abusers continue to have their H-2B petitions approved to this day. Clearly a significant part of the problem is that H-2B workers arrive in the United States in a very vulnerable position due to the following factors: many speak little or no English, they arrive in the United States deeply in debt after having paid off a recruiter to get the job in their home country, their legal status is tied to their U.S. employer, they hold few legal rights, and they often have left behind collateral (deed to a house or car title for example) with their recruiter to ensure that they will complete their contract. The examples of abuse allegations that follow afford us a glimpse into the kinds of exploitation that H-2B workers can be subject to.

Signal Corporation, Mobile, Ala. Hundreds of skilled, Indian pipe fitters and welders allegedly paid their life's savings to recruiters that promised them high-paying jobs and green cards in the United States, only to find themselves working in gulag-like labor camps where they were subject to abuse and threats by their American employer. The workers are now part of a class action lawsuit against the company and the Justice Department has opened an investigation, but the U.S.-based recruiter involved in the case, Global Resources, still had hundreds of H-2B petitions approved by the DOL in FY 2008, as did Signal's immigration attorney, Malvern Burnett. Executives from Signal remain politically engaged, making Fall 2008 campaign contributions to Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).

Eller and Sons Trees, Franklin, Ga. Some 3,000 forestry workers have joined a class action suit alleging that they've been cheated out of wages and were paid less than the minimum wage with no overtime pay.#32">³² The workers have already won a summary judgment decision that the company violated their rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Protection Act.#33">³³ Nonetheless, Eller and Sons remains one of the country's largest users of the H-2B program, with the DOL certifying some 865 H-2B worker labor certifications in FY 2008.

Alpha Services, Hickory, Miss. Settled a lawsuit with a group of 500 H-2B forestry workers who alleged that Alpha Services failed to pay them prevailing wages and overtime.#34">³⁴ The DOL approved labor certification requests for Alpha Services to import 270 H-2B workers in FY 2008; as of May 2009, the company listed no jobs available on its website.

Shores and Ruark Seafood, Urbanna, Va. This company was fined twice by the DOL for failing to pay its H-2B workers the minimum wage. A group of 51 H-2B workers sued the company for back pay and won a $150,000 settlement.#35">³⁵ Nonetheless, DOL approved labor certifications for the company to employ 55 H-2B fish bin tender workers from September 1, 2008, to June 30, 2009, at exactly the prevailing wage of $6.55 per hour. Shores and Ruark's petition was submitted by SSB board member, Más Labor.

Brickman Group, Gaithersburg, Md. In 2008, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia ruled that Brickman had to pay back wages to more than 100 H-2B employees for making visa, broker, and transportation deductions from their paychecks that brought their wages below the minimum wage. Brickman continues to have their petition requests approved by the DOL to this day.

#006633" size="4">Conclusion

The debate over H-2B visas is complex, and those on the polar opposite ends of it are both right and both wrong. Critics of the program often fail to acknowledge that: 1) it can be difficult (though not impossible) for American employers, especially truly seasonal ones, to recruit competent, reliable American staff, even during a recession; 2) some, though definitely not all, of the available American labor pool lacks the kind of motivation, skills, dedication, and flexibility that foreign H-2B labor can offer; 3) most H-2B workers and employers are good, honest people trying to make a living for their families and, while some employers are definitely guilty of abusing their workers, most are not; 4) H-2B workers and employers are at least part of the legal economy, contributing to our tax base, in stark contrast to illegal workers and those who employ them; 5) when Americans who aren't students take truly seasonal jobs, they sometimes cannot find work the rest of the year and end up using unemployment compensation and other public services; and 6) if the H-2B program were abolished, some businesses would struggle to compete, and some might go out of business.

On the other side of the debate, supporters of the H-2B program often refuse to accept that: 1) one of the primary reasons why H-2B employers have a hard time finding American staff is not because Americans don't want to work, but because Americans cannot support their families on low-wage, no-benefit jobs; 2) despite the fact that many (though not all) H-2B jobs offer low wages, and no benefits, many of these jobs could still be filled with legal American workers; 3) jobs that last nine or 10 months each year are not "seasonal;" 4) H-2Bs likely consume more in social services than they contribute in taxes, particularly because most receive no health care coverage from their employers; 5) H-2B employers' advertising and recruitment efforts in the United States are often pro-forma -- too many employers assume that it's impossible to get American workers and don't really devote serious resources to trying; and 6) the H-2B program is particularly detrimental to less-educated Americans, minorities, and students, some of the most vulnerable segments of our economy.

While there are valid points on both sides of this debate, this report has focused more on the problems with the H-2B program, rather than the positive aspects of it, not because I want to tarnish the image of H-2B workers or those who employ them, but because the program, as it is currently operating, is rife with fraud and abuse that diminishes the entire system's integrity. My hope is that by pointing out all of the problems, we might be able to replace the current system with one that benefits truly seasonal employers, and does a much better job of ensuring that unemployed American workers don't lose out on jobs they would take and employed Americans do not have their wages depressed by guestworkers.

The present system is dominated by medium and large companies -- many of whom are masquerading as seasonal employers -- and recruiters who use their knowledge of the system to squeeze smaller companies that would like to use the system, but don't have the resources or inside knowledge on how to secure H-2Bs. Very few truly small, or truly seasonal employers can afford to use the lawyers and recruiters needed to navigate the current needlessly complex H-2B program. While President Obama and nearly every other American politician is quick to denounce companies that outsource American jobs, few politicians are willing to denounce companies that in-source American jobs here at home with foreign labor. Acknowledging the problems associated with in-sourcing American jobs at home with guestworkers does not mean "scapegoating" foreign workers -- it simply means bringing an important debate out into the open for examination. It's time to get serious about trying to repair our broken guestworker system, and if we are not prepared to devote the resources necessary to restoring some integrity to the program, it should be ended. If the H-2B program is to continue, the following policy recommendations would help restore some measure of fairness to a system tarnished by fraud and abuse.

#006633" size="4">Policy Recommendations

• Deny all H-2B petitions from recruiters and staffing agencies that do not directly employ H-2B workers. These middlemen have no need for seasonal labor and simply use their knowledge of the system to hoard labor, thereby driving up the cost and making it more difficult for legitimate seasonal employers to secure workers.
• Don't allow companies that employ at least 50 workers to petition for H-2B workers that would exceed 25 percent of their total workforce. For example, petitioner with 1,000 full- and/or part-time employees should petition for no more than 250 H-2Bs per fiscal year.
• Streamline and simplify the entire H-2B filing process so that smaller employers that do not have immigration attorneys can navigate the process themselves. A brief glance at the DOL's outline#36">³⁶ reveals how needlessly complex the entire process is.
• Restore the "seasonal" concept of the H-2B visa by reducing the maximum initial petition validity from 10 to six months; employers that need workers during all four seasons are not truly seasonal.
• Reinforce the "seasonal" nature of the program further by barring companies that file "overlapping" petitions that effectively give them year-round "seasonal" workers.
• Restore the "temporary" nature of the H-2B visa by discontinuing visa extensions, which currently allow visa holders to remain in the United States for up to three consecutive years. H-2B employers that have permanent staffing "shortages" need to develop long-term plans to correct their problem, rather than permanently relying on importing foreign guestworkers.
• Prevent companies that have laid off U.S. workers in one fiscal year from filing any H-2B petitions the following fiscal year.
• Refuse H-2B petitions to place workers in high-unemployment regions of the United States.
• Devote significantly more resources to scrutinizing labor certification petitions to combat fraud.
• Devote significantly more resources to regulating H-2B employers' treatment of guestworkers to ensure that they are being paid the wage guaranteed on the petition, and that the employer is following all other program regulations.
• Require the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security to perform a comprehensive analysis of the prior year's database of H-2B petitions to spot irregularities and fraud and prevent abusers of the program from using it again the following year.
• Inform H-2B visa holders of their rights and provide a user-friendly way for them to report any malfeasance on the part of the employer to the Department of Labor, while reassuring the guestworkers that their names will not be forwarded to the employer if they file a complaint.
• Permanently bar all companies that file fraudulent petitions or abuse the rules of the program or the workers themselves from using the H-2B program. This would include companies that are sued in U.S. courts by their H-2B employees for violations of the H-2B program's terms, if the employer is found liable.
• Completely overhaul the local recruitment/advertising requirements of the program to make it easier for Americans to find jobs that otherwise would go to H-2B workers, with the following steps: 1) use the government's own website, www.usajobs.com, or the DOL website to advertise jobs that employers want to open up to H-2Bs. If a sufficient number of Americans apply for these jobs, the labor certification should be denied; 2) publicize this website, and these job opportunities at unemployment offices and on the various state websites where Americans file online unemployment claims; 3) rather than requiring employers to run two "compliance" ads in a local newspaper, require companies to provide evidence that they devoted at least $100 in paid recruitment advertising per employee that they are petitioning for. An employer that wants to in-source 100 jobs, would need to present evidence of a $10,000 ad campaign devoted to recruiting American workers.
• Provide federal and state incentives and logistical support to private H-2B recruitment agencies to help them refocus their businesses from finding workers in high-unemployment foreign countries, to high unemployment towns and cities in the United States. State workforce agencies also need to help private seasonal businesses form recruiting partnerships with firms from different industries in other parts of the country. For example, ski resorts in the Rockies and New England and snowbird retreats in Arizona and Florida should be partnering with amusement park operators and lifeguard agencies in the Northeast and upper Midwest to recruit American workers willing to divide their time between seasonal employers.

---

#006633" size="4">End Notes

¹ Department of Labor Foreign Labor Certification Data Center Online Wage Laboratory, FY 2008 and FY 2007, H2-B Program Data, http://www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH2B.aspx.

² Ross Eisenbrey, vice president, Economic Policy Institute, FDCH congressional testimony, April 16, 2008 on seasonal worker visas, http://www.epi.org/page/-/old/webfeatures/viewpoints/20080416-eisenbrey-....

³ http://www.uscis.gov/files/nativedocuments/h2a_h2b_eligible_countries.pdf.

⁴ Matthew Hay Brown, "In Visa Dispute, Businesses Face Summer Worker Gap," Baltimore Sun, March 24, 2008, http://www.ewic.org//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=48.

⁵ Tim Logan, "Visa Program not Delivering as Many Imported Workers," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 17, 2008, http://www.h2bworkforcecoalition.com/pdf/news/MO-Visa_program_not_delive....

⁶ Paul Frumkin, "Debate Over H-2B Visa Cap Threatens Serious Shortage of Seasonal Workers," Nation's Restaurant News, March 17, 2008, http://www.h2bworkforcecoalition.com/pdf/news/NA-Debate_over_H-2B_visa_c....

⁷ Charles Simon, "What Now? Smart Strategies to Survive and Perhaps Even Prosper in Spite of the Delay or Loss of H-2B Workers," Landscape Management, January 2008, http://www.landscapemanagement.net/landscape/Cover+Story/Cover-Story-Wha....

⁸ Sen.Barbara Mikulski, "Saving Our Small, Seasonal Businesses Means Fighting to Preserve H-2B Visas," The Hill, February 13, 2008, http://thehill.com/op-eds/saving-our-small-seasonal-businesses-means-fig....

⁹ Library of Congress Thomas, S338, @P" title="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:SN00388:@@@P">http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:SN00388:@@@P.

¹⁰ Ibid., @P" title="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:HR01934:@@@P">http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:HR01934:@@@P.

¹¹ Lynn Rhinehart, associate general counsel, AFL-CIO, congressional testimony before the Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, U.S. House of Representatives, February 4, 2009, http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Rhinehart090204.pdf.

¹² See DOL guidelines on this incredibly complex process at http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/h-2b.cfm.

¹³ http://www.savesmallbusiness.org/.

¹⁴ Department of Labor Foreign Labor Certification Data Center Online Wage Laboratory, FY 2008, H2-B Program Data, http://www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH2B.aspx.

¹⁵ http://www.grandhotel.com/employment.html.

¹⁶ S. Mitra Kalita, "U.S. Deters Hiring of Foreigners as Joblessness Grows," Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123810912615352681.html.

¹⁷ Department of Labor Foreign Labor Certification Data Center Online Wage Laboratory, FY 2008 and FY 2007, H2-B Program Data, http://www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH2B.aspx.

¹⁸ U.S. Chamber of Commerce Policy Priorities for 2009, http://www.uschamber.com/NR/rdonlyres/ewcf77gtns56wqcumec2j52edwrtcmsbx2....

¹⁹ http://www.ewic.org//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=48.

²⁰ Includes H-2R visas during 2005-7 period when "returning" H-2B workers did not count against annual cap. Figures also include H-2B renewals.

²¹ Associated Press, "School Gets 700 Applicants for Janitorial Job," March 7, 2009, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29574766/.

²² http://www.mexican-workers.com/mexican-workers.htm.

²³ Devah Pager, "The Mark of a Criminal Record," American Journal of Sociology, March 2003, http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/publications/papers/2003/pagerajs.pdf.

²⁴ "H-2B Cap Reached for First Half of FY 2009," American Hotel and Lodging Association website, July 30, 2008, http://www.ahla.com/advisory.aspx?id=23054.

²⁵ Steven Camarota and Karen Jensenius, "Trends in Immigrant and Native Employment," Center for Immigration Studies Backgrounder, April 2009, http://cis.org/FirstQuarter2009Unemployment.

²⁶ Ross Eisenbrey, vice president, Economic Policy Institute, congressional testimony, April 16, 2008, http://www.epi.org/page/-/old/webfeatures/viewpoints/20080416-eisenbrey-....

²⁷ Adrienne Hill, "Swine Flu, Sick Days, and Food Service," Chicago Public Radio, May 5, 2009, http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=33962.

²⁸ Congressional Testimony, Ross Eisenbrey, vice president, Economic Policy Institute, April 16, 2008, http://www.epi.org/page/-/old/webfeatures/viewpoints/20080416-eisenbrey-....

²⁹ http://www.flcdatacenter.com/CaseH2B.aspx.

³⁰ Krissah Williams, "A Guestworker Program that Does Right by Migrants," The Washington Post, June 26, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/25/AR200706....

³¹ http://www.cis.org/articles/2008/back208.html.

³² Laura Parker, "Guestworkers Sue Companies Over Pay," USA Today, November 15, 2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-11-14-guest-workers_x.htm.

³³ De-Leon-Granados v. Eller and Sons Inc., 497 F. 3d 1214 (11th Cir. 2007).

³⁴ Melissa McGrath, "Coeur d'Alene Firm Settles Labor Lawsuit," Idaho Statesman, November 16, 2006.

³⁵ Lawrence Latane III, "Fifty One Workers Will Be Paid Back Wages," Richmond Times Dispatch, July 10, 1999.

³⁶ http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/h-2b.cfm.

Michael Danby is chairman of Federal Parliament's joint committee on migration. It is very disappointing, therefore, that in recent newspaper articles he expresses support for Australia having a population of 35 million by 2050. He says he is optimistic that we can cope with this huge increase by better planning, traffic management and water and energy conservation policies, and that he has good "vibes" about population growth being good for the economy. But he and the Rudd Government need to come up with far more convincing arguments to allay the concerns of the many sceptics who question the alleged benefits of population growth, and who believe that politicians are mere puppets of the business lobby on whom they depend for financial support.

The optimistic belief that environmental concerns can be mitigated by good management is at odds with our appalling record in traffic management, town planning, decentralisation, and environmental management and pricing. Add the current climate change debacle and the record is complete. What evidence is there to suggest that our socio-political-administrative skills have improved to the extent that we can do better in future?

Concerns about an ageing population need to be assessed in the light of historical trends. Birth rates and death rates have been in long-term decline for the last 150 years or more, but any potential burden of an ageing population this might have created has been offset by income growth. The recently released intergenerational report also projects that per capita incomes will continue to improve for another forty years (by an average 1.5% p.a. in real GDP compared with 1.9% over the last 40 years), despite an ageing population. Knee-jerk reactions to boost the birth rate or immigration numbers are clearly unwarranted.

Income growth has also prevented a run-away decline in housing affordability, as population growth pushes up land prices and housing costs. But if we could achieve population stability, house price inflation would be restrained and housing affordability would steadily improve, with profound benefits for low-income earners now priced out of the housing market and trapped in a vicious circle of rental dependency. A similar equity effect was obtained from the 2006 Productivity Commission study, which estimated that the main beneficiaries of skilled immigration were the owners of capital, but at the expense of the losers - wage earners. Why a Labor government would allow and even pursue a result so detrimental to its mainstream constituents defies belief.

Danby refers to an Access Economics study which estimated the positive effect of immigration on taxation revenue. The Productivity Commission study also found that skilled immigration increases taxation revenue, but that increase, together with the gains in property income, were outweighed by the loss in wages referred to above, resulting in a loss in resident per capita income overall. If environmental losses could have been measured and factored in, the results would have been even worse.

The argument that immigration is needed to overcome skills shortages is one of the great beat-ups in the immigration debate, designed to cover up our failings in education and manpower planning and provide a convenient excuse for businesses to take advantage of cheap imported labour. And how, in all conscience, can we aspire to helping poorer countries while depriving them of skilled labour they so desperately need? Where is the morality?

Politicians need to rely less on "vibes" and more on basic economic and environmental principles. Many believe that Australia's population has already exceeded optimum size, after which "diminishing returns" set in with declining productivity growth, welfare losses and environmental deterioration. These take many forms; for example, the enhanced costs of desalination plants, rail tunnels, high rise buildings and other infrastructure developments needed to cater for a growing population. Deteriorating parks and gardens due to water restrictions represent welfare losses, as do greater travelling times and outer urban isolation as cities spread out horizontally. Logging in water catchment areas, species extinction and land degradation are just a few of the many irreversible symptoms of a worsening environment resulting from human habitation. These cannot simply be avoided by good management, as Danby would have us believe.

Increased population has a "wealth diluting" effect, of both capital and natural wealth. This shows up in many ways, such as smaller sized building blocks induced by higher land prices, water shortages as our scarce water reserves have to be shared by an increasing number of consumers, and reduced family inheritances if family size increases (which, paradoxically, increases the burden of an ageing population!). Even attendance at major sporting events can require intense competition for tickets and limited space. Higher prices might bring markets into equilibrium, but the poorer among us miss out. What is Danby's solution to that?
Proponents who say that growth should be left to market forces must face up to the reality that many market imperfections cannot be effectively corrected by regulation. In particular, many "market externalities" (so basic to environmental understanding) cannot be effectively internalised, such as the disamenities inflicted on neighbourhoods by medium density housing development.

Kevin Rudd (ABC 1, 28/1) now adds "national economic security" as an objective of a larger population. Are we to believe that degradation and depletion of our natural resources is the way to achieve economic security? The population debate obviously has a long way to go.

Mark O'Connor's comments are in italics, in the form of a running commentary through Bernard Salt's article.

In "Inconvenient truth on ageing" (4 Feb 2010, The Australian), Bernard Salt, who markets his version of demography to business for profit, writes,

"WAYNE Swan clearly missed a great opportunity earlier this week with the release of the third Intergenerational Report. He referred to the report by the bureaucratic abbreviation 3IGR4, but if the Treasurer really wanted to appear "with it" he should have christened it the iGen 3.0 Report.

The Intergenerational Report is, of course, the government's key reference document canvassing policy options for managing the ageing of Australia's population."

O'CONNOR: Well at least, that’s Salt’s journalistic slant on it. He wants to see the report as about Gens X and Y and the boomers.

SALT: "-- the problem being that from 2011 onwards more baby boomers exit than Generation Ys enter the workforce."

O'CONNOR: This is a claim he keeps making, but like the basis for his claim to be a "demographer" it comes without explanation. He doesn't say whose projection he is using that shows this will begin to be the case from 2011. (Are we meant to take it on his own authority?) I note that a Google search reveals numerous demographers saying that in the USA Generation Y is bigger than the baby boomer generation, and I can't as yet find any saying the reverse for Australia. But ask Bob Birrell or Katharine Betts.

Since presumably the reverse has been the case up till 2011, I would suspect that the imbalance in 2011 will be, even on his preferred projection, very small. And probably it will not increase very fast either -- otherwise he would have laid stress on that. In short, I suspect this is a weak statistic.

SALT: "The issue is not just the number of baby boomers looking for an aged pension; it's the loss of this cohort's contribution to the tax base."

O'CONNOR: Well, by definition retirees tend to retire from higher salaries than young persons joining the workforce are on, but so what?

SALT: "The favoured solution so far to managing this matter has been to grow the worker base, and in this regard ... "

O'CONNOR: I’d have to check if that (wanting to collect more tax) was in fact Rudd’s stated reason back then. He has since offered other excuses, even defence.

SALT: "Kevin Rudd was emphatic on the ABC's 7.30 Report last October when he stated he believed in a bigger Australia, and further that he made no apology for that view. The Prime Minister's comments have sparked furious debate about the sustainability and advisability of future growth."

O'CONNOR: Yes, perhaps Salt has been feeling the heat on those interactive blogs and online letters that now follow the publication of an article. He used not to have to worry about people raising awkward debates re sustainability, water, food, etc because, at least in the Murdocch Press, there was no counter view.

Mark O'Connor is the author, with Bill Lines, of Overloading Australia, of which a new edition has just been launched. The book is about how Australia is suffering from overpopulation. Mark O'Connor will be one of three people putting the environmental case for a small population in a debate with some die-hard growthists at the next Property Council Conference.

The Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns

Despite our best efforts, there are persistent and common misunderstandings about the rudiments of overshoot and sustainability. Four come to mind:
1. The exponential function. Albert Bartlett is right about that. I can't get people alarmed by lets say, a 2-3% annual growth rate. Like the magic of compound interest, your town can double in population in a mere generation at this deceptively incremental pace.

2. Efficiency paradoxes. People don't understand that efficiencies, outside the context of a steady state economy, by making things cheaper only provoke more consumption and growth. (eg. Jevons Paradox, Khazoom-Brooks postulate).

3. Social justice doesn't solve resource shortages . The integrity of the lifeboat is more important than how the passengers treat each other. Food can be shared equitably between passengers, but if there are too many passengers, the boat will sink. The law of gravity doesn't care about social justice, human rights or human political arrangements. Moral laws, whether handed down by Stephen Lewis, Dr. William Rees or Moses, are trumped by bio-physical laws. Socialists, liberals, federal Greens, clergymen and humanitarians simply don't get it. There ain't enough to go around, however justly and efficiently things are managed or distributed. And economists of course, are equally delusional, if not mad for believing that with some technological 'fix' we can 'grow' the limits.

4. Limiting factors. The weakest link in the chain can bring a society to its knees. It can have everything in abundance, but a shortage in just one critical area can prove its undoing. This to me is the source of this current fashion of assigning "sustainability" to a series of sectors thought to enjoy some independence from others. It is this misconception which I find most pernicious.

Buzzwords

Like the word “green”, “sustainable” or “sustainability” has become the buzzword of the millennia. Corporations and governments of the left or right feel compelled to dress up the most ecologically invasive development proposal or economic activity with assurances that it is “sustainable”. Employed as an adjective it coats the unpalatable with the sweet syrup of delectability rendering the bitter pill of upheaval and damage neutral in flavour. Growth not couched in green psychobabble went down like Buckley’s Mixture, but “sustainable growth”, “sustainable tourism” and “sustainable agriculture” on the other hand tastes like sugary cough syrup. Such is the Newspeak of contemporary growthism, the vocabulary of deceit that promises a new kind of capitalism, capitalism in a green velvet glove, business as usual with apparent sensitivity to environmental concerns that will nevertheless satisfy the shareholders.

Trade-offs or the Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns

But even the compromise suggested by oxymoronic terminology does not apparently suffice to satisfy the corporate agenda. As can be witnessed in the tourist industry, economic considerations have achieved a delusional parity in a “holistic” paradigm that sees “environmental” sustainability balanced off against “economic” and “cultural” sustainability. In this three-legged stool model of viability, environmental issues must compete with other “sustainability” concerns on a level playing field with other equally valid objectives so as to achieve the optimal “trade-offs”. This misconception may be termed “The Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns”. It is the assumption that would, if applied to the human physiognomy, rate the heart as an organ of equal importance to every other organ of the body when in fact, as we know, a patient can survive with one lung, or one kidney , or a colonoscopy, or brain impairment, but when his heart stops all of these important but ancillary parts die with the patient. The economy is a subsidiary part of society. It is, as former World Bank economist Herman Daly described it, “a fully owned branch plant of the environment. “ We make our living in an economy, but we live in a biosphere.

Environmental externalisation doesn't change Mother Nature's rules

Case in point. Newfoundland politicians were warned that the cod fishery was not sustainable, but they replied that without the cod fishery, Newfoundland’s economy was not sustainable, so the fishermen of Newfoundland continued to fish. Nature replied that what the economy of Newfoundland required was irrelevant, and so refused to yield more cod. In any such contest, nature’s agenda prevails. Similarly politicians and developers want the city of Phoenix, already at 3 million people, to grow even further. Mother Nature’s City Council, however, has set limits to the volume of water available in aquifers. One day folks in Phoenix, together with 15 million other refugees in America’s south east, will discover that any economy without water is not sustainable. The needs and wants of an economy cannot trespass carrying capacity. Nature imposes boundaries. Without clean air, productive soils, replenished aquifers---without biodiversity services---any economy will collapse. And once the environment is trashed, try milking your “robust” economy for tax revenues to buy another one. Yet that is what corporate and government green wash implies. Former social democratic Premier of British Columbia, Mike Harcourt, crystallized this confusion with a classic line of obsolete reasoning, “To have a healthy environment we need a healthy economy.” He does not seem to understand that the environment was doing quite well before human activity arrived to “manage” it. His underlying assumption seems to be that the environment is an externality, a desirable luxury that we can only “afford” once we have achieved economic “prosperity”. This reasoning is equivalent to saying that yes, while it is desirable that I have a triple bypass operation, I must postpone the operation until I can afford it by continuing to work overtime at my strenuous job.

Environmental passengers

Imagine if the officers on board the sinking Titanic claimed that the cabins on the third deck were sustainable because each had a barrel of water, ten sacks of beans, a compost, renewable energy and a water-tight door. Trouble is, they would not be sustainable 5 miles underwater. Every cabin was rendered unsustainable when the Titanic itself was unsustainable after the collision. Similarly, the space shuttle Challenger could have been said to have a sustainable oxygen supply, a sustainable food supply, a sustainable waste disposal system, and a sustainable crew compartment. But one "O" ring was the limiting factor that made the Challenger unsustainable. All the other "sustainable" aspects on that space ship were rendered unsustainable by the explosion that blew the crew compartment away, eventually crashing it into the sea. Until it hit the water, apart from the loss of air pressure, the crew survived in a 'sustainable' compartment. Our economy and our culture are like that crew compartment. They are completely dependent on the health of the environment. Without the estimated $33 trillion in free biodiversity services, we're toast. Trash the environment if you like but the so-called 'prosperity' you achieve won't buy you a new one.

Misunderstanding the structure of the real world

We still believe that we can negotiate with nature on our own terms. We can pursue business-as-usual just by genuflecting to trendy green shibboleths. Government and corporate communiqués are now laced with green-growthist double-talk. Try this from a discussion paper from the Planning Department of a typical Canadian city. Note how it attempts to appease environmental concerns with trendyisms while remaining faithful to the political mandate to keep growing as usual: “Several growth allocation/land use scenarios will...be developed and tested for impacts on various sustainability criteria (financial, environmental, social and cultural).” In other words, there are several criteria for sustainability, and the environment is just one of them. So Mother Nature, stand back. Get to the back of the line and wait your turn until cultural and economic needs have been satisfied.

Hair splitting

Of course, what exactly constitutes “sustainability” is a matter of some debate among ecologists. As one wildlife biologist commented in response to this critique, “Because natural systems are always changing or ‘dynamic’ there seems to be some disturbing latitude in what we consider a sustained ecosystem. What degree of impairment can a system tolerate before it loses the very characteristics that ‘define’ it? The term ‘integrity’ often emerges in these discussions with predictable results. It is much easier to define what constitutes unsustainable or an irreversible change in the system. A boreal forest without fire disturbance is no longer "sustainable"? Or, can forestry be made to replace this disturbance? At what point do we no longer have a boreal forest? This does not at all detract from your argument that clearly shows that without a sustainable natural environment, all other constructs of "sustainability" are meaningless.” A dead planet indeed can achieve an equilibrium, but it cannot sustain life. And this may come as a shock to economists and nationalists alike, but human economic activity, culture, language and customs cannot exist without living human beings.

Sustainability doesn't come in different brands

Even those organizations committed to imposing limits have succumbed to this flawed understanding. An emerging immigration reform organization declares, as one of its aims, “To promote the creation of a sustainable Canada through urgently needed reform of immigration policies that are in the national interest.” Well and good. But then one opinion has it that this proposal “has some merit because it implies sustainability across a number of areas---cultural and institutional as well as environmental.” But mass immigration is not, as Samuel Gompers characterized it, fundamentally a labour issue, nor is it a cultural one. It is not about how many people our economy requires or how many people our culture can assimilate but how many people our environment can sustain. Contemporary culture as we know it cannot survive an ecological meltdown. The nation itself would not endure. When the water you drink is polluted or inaccessible, when the farmland needed to provide food to Canadians after international trade collapses with stratospheric fuel costs, when our exhausted soils starved of fossil-fuel based fertilizers cannot yield crops, when our forests are mowed down and the air unfit to breath, the fact that a lot people in the neighbourhood are wearing strange clothing or speaking in foreign tongues will be of little importance. Cultural “sustainability” in this context will be a mirage. There is ultimately only one “sustainability”. The sustainability of the whole, not its constituent parts.

Tim Murray
February 4/2010

One of the most important principles internationally when referring to greenhouse gas reduction schemes it that the polluter pays. This means that national targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions should be based on the historical contribution of each nation to global emissions.

A most important factor is the levels of emissions per capita. Australia has the highest greenhouse gas emissions per person at 26.7 tonnes per annum and this it twice the average level for all other industrialised countries and 25% higher that per person in the USA (21.2tonnes).

It is obvious that Australia's population growth policies have a enormous impact on our greenhouse gas emissions. Our immigration rate is the major contributing factor of our population growth and thus the biggest contributor to increasing our greenhouse gas emissions, and not "natural" growth. Immigrants coming here therefore adopt our consumption habits and lifestyles, thereby increasing their emissions, and our overall output.

If Australia decides to increase our population rapidly, to 50 million by 2060 or more, then energy-related emission would grow to around 600 parts per million CO2, or about double 1990 levels! (Population Policy and Environmental Degradation Sources and Trends in Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Clive Hamilton and Hal Turton, Monash University)

People are not pollution -- Why climate activists should not support limits on immigration.
People are not "pollution" and neither is CO2, but both can cause problems from excess quantities!
Recently, as concern about greenhouse gas emissions and global warming increasing, the anti-immigrant argument has taken on a new form. Now the argument is: immigrants should be kept out because our way of life is a threat to the world’s environment.

According to the article: To calculate “per capita emissions”, we simply divide a country’s total greenhouse gas emissions by its total population. This provides a useful baseline for comparing countries of different sizes – but it tells us nothing at all about the emissions that can actually be attributed to individuals. In fact, most emissions are caused by industrial and other processes over which individuals have no control. In Canada, for example, no change in the number of immigrants will have any effect on the oil extraction industry at the Alberta Tar Sands, described by George Monbiot as “the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions”.

Monbiot site on Canada

However, Australians have made effort to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, but unless our numbers are limited the gross output will continue to rise. Industry and technology cause anthropogenic emissions, and a higher population increase the demand for larger markets and increased production. More population naturally equates to a demand for more jobs, and thus more industries and more plundering of finite natural resources! Excessive exports are due to human greed and worship of growth.

The Government accepted the findings of Professor Garnaut that a fair and effective global agreement centred on stabilising long-term atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases was at or below 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent is in Australia’s national interests. However, the Australian National Greenhouse Accounts released in June 2009 showed emissions rose by an estimated 553 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or 1.1 per cent, in 2008. According to Climate Group, (Jan 2008) compared with 2000 levels, emissions from energy-use were significantly higher across all states, collectively up 19 per cent.

The Greenhouse Indicator Annual Report, released by the Climate Group, measures emissions created by electricity and petrol use across the eastern states. The report shows overall emissions were 5.3 million tonnes lower in 2009 than in the previous year. The base line should be 2000 (Copenhagen) or 1990 levels (Kyoto) , not 2008! So we are reducing our increase?

Australia has declared it will not go beyond a 5 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 without guaranteed action by major emitters including the US, China and India. Little hope anyway of going beyond 5 %! By 2020 the Federal Government wants to cut emissions by 5 to 25 per cent. At our present rate of population growth, our numbers are likely to be well over 25 million by then!

THE United States (Jan 29th) officially stated a goal to cut carbon emissions by 17 per cent by 2020 off 2005 levels, in a submission to the United Nations as part of last month's Copenhagen meeting.

Our 5% is looking a little short now that the US have challenged it!
Kevin Rudd's drive for a "big Australia" and his efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emission are totally at odds, and are completely contradictory and hypocritical to addressing climate change, what he previously called the "greatest moral challenge of our time"!

Let’s talk about the national anthem: We do not have boundless plains to share!

Australia’s national anthem is outdated,
incorrect and should be changed according to the environment group Sustainable Population Australia (SPA).

National President of SPA, Sandra Kanck, says “If we pause on Australia Day to reflect on our identity, our thoughts should turn to reforming the anthem. It is an absolute nonsense to say that this continent has boundless plains to share, as is claimed in the second verse of the anthem.

“This is deceptive advertising,” she says. “Anyone one enquiring about the offer might find their choice was between the Hay Plain and the Nullarbor Plain.

“Our soil is not golden – it is in fact old, thin and lacking fertility. Every dust-storm blows more precious top-soil out to sea. Only six percent of our land is arable, and we are progressively building over much of that six percent.

“If we ever did have an abundance of ‘nature’s gifts’ we have made a mockery of them with our shocking record on mammal extinctions.

“We have so little respect for the seas with which we are ‘girt’ that we pollute them with run-off, and within those same seas we are overfishing towards extinction of the marine life.

“We have so little regard for this land that we have overloaded it with human beings. Hence, we are fast destroying our rivers and forests and reducing our biodiversity.

“Reflecting on the words of our national anthem might help us take stock and recognise what has already been destroyed, and what might be saved.

“But we cannot in conscience continue to sing these words with any pride because so many of them are untrue.

“If we continue using Advance Australia Fair then we must at least change the line ‘We’ve boundless plains to share’. Boundless they may be, but with no shade and temperatures above 45 degrees in summer, no water, and empty salt pans that deceptively look like lakes on our maps, these plains are not habitable.

“Let’s have a national anthem that reflects our aspirations and that sings of Australia’s unique natural assets but, also, let’s not lie to the world about their nature” said Ms Kanck.