‘Who’ matters

John Grant 6 January 2024 The Spectator Australia?

Perhaps the only positive to come from the Israel-Hamas war and its?upheavals?is that it has opened up space for an honest conversation about immigration. As these events have made clear, there are sizable numbers of people in Western societies who thoroughly?despise us.?

In Australia, this is the result of an immigration regime that’s been run on a near?carte blanche?basis. To take?the figures?first, we’ve had ‘historic highs’ in immigration with net overseas migration of half a million in the year to September and an international student intake that’s now over 600,000.

Regarding the?sources of our migrants, our permanent migrants stem overwhelmingly from East Asia and the Subcontinent and not from our Anglo-European origins: three of our top five source countries, for instance, are India, China, and Nepal.

This is not an error, but deliberate policy. As Immigration Minister Andrew Giles?boasted?on social media, the Albanese government swiftly processed a million or so visas as they came into office. Giles and Co were, to quote: ‘Cleaning up the visa system and clearing the backlog after almost a decade of Liberal neglect.’

Yet the simple but taboo fact is that not all immigration is equal.

The most obvious example of this is in the recent rise of anti-Semitism. In contrast to historical Western anti-Semitism, the current wave overwhelmingly emanates from Australia’s Islamic communities where we have seen a disturbing rise in hate preachers and violence visited upon the Jewish community.

This trend is seen across Europe as well. Take the?Kosher supermarket killings?in Paris in 2015, or the record number of Jews?leaving Europe, or that there are?security guards?outside Jewish schools. Indeed, there’s a very real prospect that there’ll be?no Jewish communities?left in Europe at all by the end of the century.

The failures of the West’s immigration programs are not restricted to the Jewish community. Here, for instance, is ex-Downing Street advisor Nick Timothy on some of the?effects of immigration?in the UK.

‘Seventy-two per cent of Somalis here live in social housing. Fifty-seven per cent of Bangladeshi and Pakistani women are economically inactive. Forty-six per cent of Pakistani-heritage babies born in Bradford have parents who are cousins. Proportionately, Albanians are 10 times more likely than the public as a whole to be in prison. The number of people unable to speak English well or at all has increased in the past 10 years by more than 20 per cent to more than a million.’

In Europe, things are much the same. In the Netherlands, a?recent report?revealed that migration from rich countries was a net benefit while that from poor countries was not. In Denmark, a 2018?study?showed strikingly similar results: it noted that in contrast to Western migrants, non-Western migrants from areas such as North Africa and the Middle East were a net fiscal negative.

And as it is in the UK and Europe, so it is here as well, especially now that around one in three Australians are?foreign born?as are 45 per cent of residents in Sydney and Melbourne.

Here are some assorted statistics, you can make of them what you will. Sudanese-born Australians?have the?highest imprisonment?figures of any immigrant group, with rates around three times the national average.?The number of foreign-born Australians with no or?poor English proficiency?is over 800,000. Around three-quarters of recent migrants are?low-skilled.

People born in North Africa and the Middle East have?unemployment rates?some three times higher than those born in North-West Europe and the Americas. Migrants from non-English speaking countries have?higher crime rates?than those from the UK or North America. Migrant and refugee women have?poorer health outcomes?than the native-born and are much less likely to be employed.

In Victoria, the Sudanese-born?make up?‘7 per cent of individuals charged in home invasions, 6 per cent of those in car theft offenses and 14 per cent of individuals charged with aggravated robbery’?despite being just 0.16 per cent of the population. In New South Wales, Muslims make up about 3 per cent of the population but around 9 per cent of?the prisoners.

These are not good outcomes for a society in which the official dogma is that ‘we’re the most successful multicultural nation in the world’ while generating these statistics. Indeed, even to mention this is to cast yourself as a heretic and to exclude yourself from polite society.

What is needed, however, is for Australia to embrace reality again and to acknowledge that there are meaningful differences between groups and their capacity to successfully integrate and contribute to our society.

This is a view that still prevails in places like East Asia and Hungary and that’s been prevalent through almost all of human history. Indeed, it’s a notion that European nations have returned to as they’ve seen indiscriminate immigration dissolve their societies before their very eyes. That poster child of post-war liberalism, Sweden, for instance,?is now on track?to be 20-30 per cent Muslim by 2050.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Europeans are winding back their experiments in mass immigration. As Christopher Caldwell?has noted, [highly-restrictive] ‘Denmark is?the country on which virtually all European governments have announced they wish to pattern their policies.’

Australia, too, should heed this advice. As is becoming clearer by the day, our experiments with mass immigration have not improved our country.

AUTHOR John Grant