Mass migration in Australia - Иностранные языки и языкознание эссе

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Mass migration in Australia

The benefits of past migrations, from the point of view of the migrants themselves and of the other citizens of the developing Australian society. Opinion polls, notions of public opinion. A civilised migration policy for Australia for the 21st century.


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In my view, the basic ethical outlook of Marxist and Catholic philosophy about the relationship between the human race and the material environment are quite similar despite the apparent conflict between them. Over the course of my own life both have contributed to the formation of my attitude to the migration question.
Both ethical systems regard the human species as the highest development of evolution and start with the notion that the interests of human beings are the primary point of departure in judging most ethical questions. Marxists would have it that human consciousness is the highest product, so far, of material development, and Thomists and Catholics would have it that the human soul and humanity are the peak of God's creation.
While both ethical systems would not neglect at all the importance of the rest of the material world, the animal world, etc, they would regard the interests of the human species, viewed as a totality, as the primary point of departure in developing an ethical framework for migration policy.
In this, they would both be different, for instance, to the ethics of Peter Singer, who would rate the interests of the animal world as being on the same plane as the interests of humanity. The ethical standpoint of deep ecologists, and people like Tim Flannery, Ted Trainer and Mark O'Connor would, I believe in practice, give greater weight to the interests of the natural world than to those of the humans that use it.
These two moral standpoints, the Marxist one, expressed in the slogans of socialist internationalism: “the unity of labour is the hope of the world”, and “workers of the world unite”, and the similar Catholic moral view that all humans are brothers and sisters under God, have been major defining ideological influences, sometimes in conflict, but surprisingly often reinforcing each other, in the evolution of the labour movement in Australia.
The eventual, relatively recent, emergence in the labour movement of the idea of the unity of the human race as the dominant ideology, is really a kind of flowering of the ethical views of both the above streams. This flowering of humanism is one of the main reasons why the labour movement's attitude to migration has so dramatically changed in the 20th century from entrenched British Australia racism to support for non-discriminatory migration and multiculturalism.
In Australian cultural terms I am a Marxist atheist of mainly Irish Catholic cultural background. All the original ancestors of the human population of Australia, including the indigenous population, are migrants. The migration history of Australia has been one in which, from the beginning, indigenous Australians, the Irish Catholics and the secular working class of British origin, initially convicts, were in constant conflict with the British ruling class of the new colony.
I'm mainly descended from the Irish, and I identify totally with the conflict against the British ruling class in 19th century Australia, in which my ancestors participated.
From my standpoint, every additional wave of migration has helped to undermine the cultural and political hegemony of the British ruling class, and this is unambiguously a good thing. I celebrate a healthy, plebian, popular Australian nationalism, which is necessarily, and has been historically, in conflict with the reactionary British-Astralian nationalism of the Australian ruling class.
The desperate nostalgia of someone like Miriam Dixson about the passing of what she calls the “Anglo-Celtic core culture” produces in me a certain bitter amusement. I celebrate the passing of that culture. It wasn't my culture at all.
The new, diverse and cosmopolitan Australia, in which we all have a stake: indigenous Australians, Irish Catholics, the secular working class and middle class of British origin, and each wave of non-British migration, including the recent and spectacular Asian wave, has produced, and is constantly reproducing, a robust modern Australian culture of great diversity and strength, which I enjoy and celebrate.
Many of the most stimulating features of this modern culture are the product of, in particular, the post-war waves of mass migration. My Irish Catholic forebears, and the secular working class, took the process of humanising brutal British Imperial Australia a fair distance in the conflicts of the 19th century and the early 20th century, and the recent waves of migration have further civilised Australia.
Even the unquestionably important contribution of the civilised and humane strand within the British cultural tradition, as exemplified by a scholar such as Manning Clark or a writer like Patrick White, can only really come to full fruition within the framework of a healthy multicultural Australian polity, cleansed of the bigoted ethnocentrism of the old British ruling class Australia.
Anyone who has lived, as I have, from 1937 to now, has only to reflect on and remember the claustrophobic cultural atmosphere of British-Australia in the 1950s to understand what I mean in this context. It is hard for any young person now to even imagine the tension created in a cinema in 1960 if you didn't stand up for God Save the Queen.
The most conservative forces in society, which hark back nostalgically to the useful cement provided for the preservation of class privilege by all the ridiculous and unpleasant cultural impedimenta of British-Australia, are at the centre of the sporadic attacks on multiculturalism. Their political motivation in these attacks is quite clear.
Cultural diversity and multiculturalism, incorporated as they are into a new modern, plebian Australian national identity, are a far more civilised human environment for us all to live in.
Those who disagree with me on this can try to reverse these developments, but I don't rate their prospects of success very highly. We have already gone a very long way in this very healthy direction.
I don't intend to spend too much time celebrating the immense advantages produced by all our past mass migrations. They are obvious, and they are most strikingly noticeable in the global city of Australasia, Sydney, where we are holding this conference.
Despite the Sodom and Gomorrah weepings and gnashings of teeth about Sydney that you get from the likes of Miriam Dixson, Robert Birrell and Katharine Betts, the extraordinary and workable cultural diversity of Sydney is the small model of what life will be like throughout Australasia within the next 20 or 30 years.
The constant Jeremiad of the Monash anti-migrationists over the last 25 years about ethnic ghettoes, particularly in Sydney, is emerging ever more clearly as time goes on, as merely anti-migration propaganda. These so-called ethnic ghettoes are, in fact, constantly changing and evolving.
In practice, in Australia, and particularly in Sydney, there are very few “unmeltable ethnics”, to use Michael Novak's term from the United States of 30 years ago. While multiculturalists battles to preserve the useful aspects of discrete ethnic identities, nevertheless the evolving Australian national identity, which is quite real, remains the major cultural force into which the other ethnic identities tend to feed and blend, while the discrete contribution of the individual ethnic identities is often renewed by continued migration.
This whole process is accelerated by an increasing amount of exogamy (intermarriage between ethnic groups). The latest wave of mass migration, the Asian wave, has produced an enormous amount of this kind of intermarriage.
The striking feature of modern Australian society is the way the repeated predictions, over many years, of communal strife, by the likes of Birrell, Geoffrey Blainey and Pauline Hanson, are completely contradicted by the reality of Australian life. The further you get into the diversity in the heart of Sydney, for instance, the smaller the amount of noticeable ethnic conflict, which is far less overt now than it was in the 1940s or the 1950s.
We are well over the hump, so to speak, in these matters. Large-scale violent ethnic conflicts are very unlikely in Australia in the future. Most of us are now too civilised and we - in this context a comfortable majority of the population - will beat all xenophobia and racism, even when it is disguised as nostalgia for the “Anglo-Celtic core culture” back into its cave whenever it shows its ugly head.
The b e n e f it s o f p a s t m i gr atio ns, fr o m the p oi n t o f v ie w o f the m i gr a n t s the ms e lv e s a nd o f the othe r c iti z e ns o f the d e v e l o p i ng Au s t r a l ia n s o c iet y
Up to the gold rushes of the 1850s, Australia was mainly a series of brutal penal colonies of British imperialism. But, paradoxically, many convicts stayed voluntarily in the colony after their release because in many ways, even then, it was a better place to live than Britain, Scotland or Ireland.The origins of the convicts were relatively diverse. Although most of them were drawn from the English urban underclass around London, about 20 per cent of them were Irish and almost 50 per cent of the smaller number of women convicts were Irish Catholics.
Over the whole period of convictism, about 1 per cent were black convicts from West Africa and the West Indies, and there were also about 1000 Jewish convicts. The gold rushes brought an accelleration of mass migration, from Great Britain and Ireland, China and Germany, and later in the century, a large forced labour component, the “Kanakas” from the “South Sea Islands” (mainly the Solomons and New Hebrides, now Vanuatu).
The gold rushes and the shortage of labour that caused the mass migration, both assisted and voluntary, resulted in a high price for labour in the Australian colonies, making settlement in Australia very attractive for workers. British working class migrants and Irish migrants contributed to the development of the country and were beneficiaries of the high price of labour in the Australian colonies, as were the Chinese, the Germans and others.
From the point of view of most of the participants in these migrations, Australia was a much better place economically than where they came from. Much historical research has been done on letters back home from Irish migrants in Australia. They were gathered mainly by the historian Patrick O'Farrell.
The overwhelming majority of these letters speak of the better standard of living in the new country than in famine-ridden, Britain-pillaged Ireland. The Irish were particularly motivated by the possibility of taking up land in Australia.
Even the “South Sea Islanders”, who had been “blackbirded” to Australia, and the Chinese, who had been at the bottom end of the Australian social ladder, were very reluctant to leave after the imposition of the White Australia Policy in 1900. There were more economic opportunities in Australia than in China or the Pacific Islands.
The migration to Australia was always much more heterogenous than British Australian mythology allows, and in the early 20th century particularly there were constant chain migrations from Russia, the southern Slav lands, Italy, Greece and Malta, despite occasional brutal outbursts of racism against these migrations. One of the worst examples of such racism was the forcible deportation of 6000 Germans and southern Slavs after the First World War.
A large number of Jewish people migrated to Australia just before the Second World War, escaping fascism in Europe. They were very glad to get here and many prospered in Australia.
Some parts of northern Australia, such as the Cairns area, the Townsville area, and particularly the Northern Territory, always had a much more diverse ethnic and cultural mix than many other parts of Australia, even despite the White Australia Policy.
For much of its history, for instance, the Northern Territory had a larger proportion of people of Asian origin, Aboriginal origin and mixed race origin than whites. A recent very useful article in Labor History by Maria Martinez underlines the complex interplay between the racial composition of the population in the Northern Territory and attitudes in the labour movement that helped to undermine the White Australia Policy, even on a national scale.
After the Second World War another wave of mass migration commenced, including people from the Baltic states, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, Italians and Dutch. They were very glad to get here, away from war-devastated Europe, and they participated in building the Snowy Mountains Scheme and developing modern Australia. In the 1960s and 1970s more people came from Arab countries and Turkey, and they, too, contributed to the development of Australia and did well here compared with the then relative poverty of the places they came from.
There are now 300,000 people in Australia of Indochinese origin, who are here because of Australia's involvement in support of the United States intervention in the civil war in Vietnam. Although most of the Indochinese came here as refugees, they show no signs of wanting to leave and they have contributed to the development of modern Australia. Historically, Australia has been a haven for refugees from many countries, including now, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovars and East Timorese. They too have contributed to the development of modern Australia.
The latest wave of migration has been very varied, mainly from Asia, and this has pushed the number of people with some Asian background up to 1.4 million in the past 15 years. This migration has included both hard-working poorer people, highly trained young people and energetic business migrants bringing modest packages of capital with them.
This Asian migration is particularly obvious as a major factor in economic development, has served as a buffer against economic depression, and has particularly contributed to development in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, and to reducing unemployment in those cities.
The striking thing about these migrations is that, particularly since the Second World War, when our rate of migration has been by far the highest in the world (except for Israel), it has in fact been achieved at the same time as a substantial and obvious reduction in racial and cultural tensions, compared, say, with the 1950s. This is in fact the opposite of the exaggerated conflict that the chauvinist opponents of migration constantly predict even now, despite all the evidence in front of their eyes.
In Australian conditions, the more diverse the migration, and the larger it is, the more it undermines stupid xenophobic practices and attitudes.
Anyone with an eye to see, walking around this laid-back, tough, intense Sydney of ours, can't avoid being struck by the way the cultural diversity that is now dominant in our city works so effectively. It has been very moving to me in the last couple of weeks attending demonstrations, which rapidly grew in cynical old Sydney, to 30,000 people, in support of the people of East Timor, to observe the wonderful cultural diversity of the Australians in those demonstrations.
I grew up in the 1940s and the 1950s and you'd better believe it, mass migration has been overwhelmingly beneficial to every aspect of the real quality of human life in Australia, as I experience it. Food, culture, politics, the economy, the whole universe of things that affect the essential features of our life.
Opponents of migration and other reactionaries have recently dusted off the quite old theory of the new class to stigmatise supporters of migration and multiculturalism as members of an egregious elite, different to the popular Australian “volk” who, it is claimed, are ativistic and racist to the core.
This desperate rhetoric is inaccurate as a sociological description of modern Australian society, and rather ineffective as a call to arms. When examined closely, it is obviously a biased, primarily ideological construct.
Nearly 20 per cent of the adult population, including school teachers and nurses, now have degrees, and half of them are women. Do they all constitute members of a “new class”? The idea is absurd. When pressed, ideologues such as Betts, Dixson and Bill Hayden redefine their proposition a bit to say that maybe the “new class” consists only of people in the media and the bureaucracy who favour migration (and disagree with them), which makes this construction even more absurd sociologically speaking. It is merely a sort of bizarre point-scoring aimed at stirring up perceived popular animosity to people with degrees.
The problem with it as a call to arms is that a majority of the industrial working class without university degrees, at whom it is presumably directed, are recent non-English-speaking-background (NESB) migrants themselves, and are therefore very unlikely to respond to this demagogy. This recent desperate new class rhetoric underlines the developing social isolation of the people who use it in the newly evolving Australia that is already around us.
Betts and other conservative populists make big fuss about some very old public opinion polls, which they claim show that migration is unpopular. Occasionally Betts acknowledges that opinion polls results are influenced powerfully by how the questions are asked, and what information is given to the people polled about the issues before they are polled, but she shrugs off this problem and makes much of her proposition that the elites are ignoring public opinion in their support of migration.
In the absence of carefully controlled polling, not overloaded by emotive construction, Betts's conclusions from her polls have to be treated with great reserve for the same reasons that opponents of the death penalty tend to put aside emotive tabloid polls, which often seem to favour capital punishment.
We now know a great deal about the phenomenon of push polling, and many of Betts's favoured polls get close this. The deliberately emotive way many public opinion poll questions are posed is the reason that most democrats are very suspicious of the right-wing populist mania for citizen-initiated referendums.
An interesting new development, probably caused by rapid demographic changes in Australia's major cities, is that recent opinion polls, organised though they are in this fairly emotive way, are beginning to show a fairly substantial swing in favour of migration (article by Murray Goot in The Bulletin of February 15, 2000). What spin Betts and company will put on these changing poll results?
In reality, political outcomes in bourgeois democracies such as Australia are decided by a complex interaction between various aspects of the popular will, and the special interests of the ruling class, expressed through their manipulation of the media. What comes through in the media is much more an expression of the interests of the tiny elite that owns the media than any independent expression of opinion by a so-called new class of media workers.
In elections the voting is decided by a multitude of factors, and “public opinion” is actually a product of the push and pull of assorted interests and pressure groups. It is even possible that, influenced by right-wing populist hysteria against migration, expressed through the tabloid media, a majority of electors may wish for a reduction in migration. When they come to voting, however, many other factors influence their decision as well.
Many people who favour low migration end up voting for parties that will support high migration and, indeed, the reverse also applies because of the many factors that affect voting behaviour. That's all part of the political process.For example, a clear majority of the population opposes a GST. Nevertheless, the Tories and the ruling class have managed to push through a GST because they succeeded in scraping together a slight majority in an election.
I believe that highish, humane imigration, non-discrimination in immigration, and reasonable family reunion, are overwhelmingly morally justified.
I believe that one takes advantage of one's democratic rights to influence the political process in whatever reasonable way is available to get the outcome you want. Everybody else involved in politics does the same thing, and why should those who favour high migration suddenly impose on themselves a self-denying ordinance in these matters when the reactionary tabloid press puts so much effort into whipping up prejudice against perceived minorities, and migration in general.
An underlying British-Australia cultural egotism surfaces repeatedly in Katharine Betts's book, The Great Divide: Immigration Politics in Australia (Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 1999). Her ingenious use of the notion of “markers” in relation to the so called “new class” is very revealing. In her view, implacable hostility to racism, and any sympathy with multiculturalism are evidence either of membership of the “new class”, or “special interests”, by reason of NESB background.
She also indicts her so-called new class for an “anti-national” animosity towards wars and militarism, and associates this anti-militarism with “new class” attitudes on racism and migration. I find this construction extremely curious, as I'm told Ms Betts is herself a Quaker.
I wonder what Ms Betts makes of the almost total transformation of the bulk of the “new class” including myself, into advocates of immediate military action to protect the people of East Timor against the vicious Indonesian army.
I reject celebration of the imperialist bloodbath of the First World War. I spent the most useful part of my life campaigning against the Vietnam War and I take none of that back. Nevertheless, I strongly favour the recent Australian military intervention in East Timor, much to the chagrin of the right-wing populist P.P. McGuinness. (McGuinness and I always seem to be on opposite sides, and this pleases me. On the odd occasion when I've agreed with McGuinness, I very carefully examine my reasoning to see where I've gone wrong.)
Curiously, Sydney postmodern theorist Ghassan Hage, who expresses an ostensibly leftist opposition to existing multiculturalism in his exotic book White Nation, actually shares Betts's methodology, in that he develops his own version of the inaccurate “new class” theory.
What an implacably British-Australia chauvinist construction Katharine Betts's use of new class rhetoric really is. It has no appeal at all for me, given my largely Irish Catholic background, and it's not likely to appeal to any social group other than a rapidly declining Anglo upper-class. The industrial working class is largely of NESB background. The nudging 20 per cent of the population who now have degrees, and the 700,000 students are, by definition, infected by this “rampant cosmopolitanism”. The audience for Betts's now slightly eccentric “new class” theory is really quite small, and declining all the time.
The most coherent, energetic and persistent anti-migrationists are the group around Robert Birrell and Katharine Betts at Monash University, who tend to make the ideological running for most other opponents of migration.
The really rabid xenophobes, such as Pauline Hanson, feed off their arguments. The Monash group has two quite contradictory lines in relation to the economic effects of migration.
One line of argument, which they share with people such as Ted Trainer, is a general, currently rather popular, polemic against the whole idea of economic growth. They argue that economic growth, which migration fuels, is bad for us.
Well, there's a tiny element of truth in this line of argument. Some economic growth is bad and should be fought on a case by case basis. For instance, woodchipping of old growth forests is quite antipathetic to the interests of the human race and the environment. Much economic growth, however, while it should be made more civilised and reorganised in a rational way, is desirable from the point of view of most humans on the planet, who don't yet have sufficient access to all kinds of material goods to make their life better.
The arguments of deep ecologists such as Ted Trainer against all economic growth are, in practice, hostile to the aspirations of most human beings for substantial improvements to their conditions of life. The use of this kind of argument by comfortable, affluent anti-migration academics in a rich, first-world country such as Australia is thoroughly repellant, and I'm fascinated that the Monash group has used that kind of argument in the six or seven books that I've collected of their published work, as far back as 1977.
The other main line of argument is more or less the opposite of the first one. It is that migration is bad for the economy because it diverts resources from unstated better uses to the construction of infrastructure for the migrants, and that much of this labour is used in a manufacturing economy that is being scaled down anyway because of globalisation and the destruction of tariff barriers (which the Monash group explicitly applauds).
They even argue that a bad feature of migration is that some resources are diverted to infrastructure for the new migrants, reducing the average productivity of labour. Nevertheless, interests such as the housing industry and manufacturing capitalists that want to sell their goods, are attacked for having a vested interest in migration.
Viewed in any sensible or even-handed way, these economic attacks on migration tend to undermine and contradict each other, but for these people anything goes in the war against migration. As one line of economic their argument after another is demolished by changing circumstances (almost none of their economic predictions in relation to migration have eventuated) the Birrell group works very hard to come up with a new economic angle against migration.
There is now a fairly considerable body of concrete analysis and description of the economic effects of migration, the most recent example of which is the work of Bruce Chapman in Canberra. The general conclusion of almost all economists, conservative or left-wing, with a few exceptions, is that migration is either more or less neutral in relation to economic effects or, in most circumstances, a positive stimulus to economic development and a positive factor in reducing unemployment.
Empirically, this would certainly seem to be the case. Cities in Australia such as Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, which are hot-spots for migration, are also at the lower end of the unemployment statistics. Cities such as Melbourne, Newcastle, Adelaide and Hobart, which are stagnant as far as recent migration is concerned, are at the higher end of the unemployment statistics.
There is another subtle economic point about substantial, diverse migration. One of the factors that helped Australia get the Olympic Games was the presence in Australia of substantial migrant communities from almost everywhere on earth, and the Games will give Australia a considerable economic boost, both before and after, for obvious reasons.
A similar point applies to trade, particularly with Asia. The presence of energetic trading communities from different countries contributes to trade with those countries. Again, a number of firms trading mainly in Asia have chosen to use Sydney as a location for their call centres and card centres because Sydney has a large reservoir of skilled labour speaking and writing just about every language on earth.
The anti-immigrationists make three main appeals. One is to the perceived latent resentment of Anglo-Australians against changes to the ethnic and cultural mix of Australia. This line of argument is essentially an appeal to cultural ativism.
It is usually there in the arguments, but it is often veiled a bit to avoid offending the more civilised Australians. At the popular level, talkback radio hosts, and the One Nation bunch exploit this perceived ativism mercilessly. At a theoretical level people such as Miriam Dixson and Paul Sheehan implicitly invoke this perceived feeling while ostensibly deploring it.
The second line of argument is that migration is economically bad for Australia. That argument is unsustainable and I've dealt with it above.
The third argument is much more powerful and potent these days, even with many people who are opposed to overt racism, and regard themselves as civilised. It is expressed in the viewpoint of the organization called Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Society and in the political outlook of the conservative electoral formation, the Australian Democrats, who advocate zero net immigration.
The best-known popular advocates of this point of view are Tim Flannery, author of The Future Eaters and his disciple Paul Sheehan, author of Amongst the Barbarians. Other people who write about these questions and claim some expertise in the field, are the poet Mark O'Conner, the CSIRO scientist Doug Cocks, Ted Trainer the deep ecologist, the Birrell supporters and Katharine Betts.
Their essential argument is that Australia is a supremely eroded, overwhelmingly arid continent, that we are already overpopulated, and that if our present rate of population growth, the historically general 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent annually that has been the case over most of our history, continues further, disasters will develop in the not-too-distant future.
In one article, Flannery advances the argument that we should reduce the population from 19 million to 12 million. One wonders whether that includes an offer of voluntary euthanasia on his part! This line of argument involves a very considerable virtuosity with statistics.
Cocks and Flannery, who attempt occasionally to quantify their views, toss around various figures for arable land available in Australia. They appear to concede that most estimates of available arable land, made by people who know something about the subject, show that ther
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