Your figures for immigration are naive. With an open border, the influx would be limited only by the available transport.

Compare this with South Africa who summarily deports thousands per day, and is still sitting with an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants mostly in vast squatter camps, and are the source of most of the crime which has made Johannesburg the most dangerous city in the world.

This is not something Australia needs or can deal with.

Australia cannot conceive of open borders in a rational way.
But if it is to find its true potential, it should give it a go.

Good and thought-provoking article.

There was an interesting program on the TV other day about a Spanish resort town, much of which is populated permanently by Brits, Danes and Dutch. Thomas Jefferson called Europe “nations of eternal war”. But it seems the Europeans, having spent untold thousands of years warring over their old borders, are starting to think of them as irrelevant social anachronisms, which I think is a great thing.

And of course the single community nations that we today take for granted – like Germany, the USA and Australia – were, not so long ago, made up separate states with trade or movement barriers between them. It is only because of the leading vision of the economists of the nineteenth century, who exploded the fallacies of protectionism, that we are able to speak of Australia now.

The idea that the population of Australia is unsustainable, being based on Malthusian reasoning, is wrong. Their persistence in error proves them wrong, not right as they suppose. It is ludicrous that we live in the least inhabited continent on earth, with untold resources of land and water(!), but are forced to do without the benefit of people just across the way, who also would benefit from living here.

Progress in understanding that those across the way are not aliens, who file their teeth and eat their babies, but people like us, is slow but gradual. This humane understand is naturally retarded by protectionism, nationalism and socialism, and naturally unfolds from free movement and free trade.

For example, many of the objections to immigration are based on the idea that the new-comers would be a drain on social security or infrastructure. In other words, the objections are not based on racism per se, but on socialism.

There is no future in the past, and the day when the people of the world can freely move and peacefully trade between countries will be the fullest expression of our common humanity.

David McMullen...for a Scot who presumably knows a tad about his own nation and race's history.. your suggestion of open borders is bordering on the *words fail me*.

But this does tell us a lot (from your plug for your book Bright Future)

"Collective ownership by those who do the work will then be the obvious way to go."

Ummmmm...errrr.. *no*.. it will not be obvious nor workable. There are more holes in your general proposition than a large kitchen sieve.

I find it beyond amazing that a Scot would even think that way.

I think I'll send you to Inverness for some re-education. It will begin with a trip to my forebears tomb "Fortrose Cathedral" where you can ponder why it lies in ruins. (reading about Cromwell would help)

David let me ask you this.. do you believe in God ?

Do you believe in Darwinian natural selection as an explanation for the various races?

Once I know that..we can progress the discussion.

Since the end of WW2, Australia has managed one of the world's most successful immigration programmes. Australians have generally, with a few exceptions including an occasional outburst of racist sentiment, accepted this programme with good will. This good will continues because people can see the economic and social contributions migrants have made to this country and because, by and large, social cohesion has been maintained. That is, Australians don't see immigration as threatening and the programme has been managed by successive governments to ensure that this perception is reflected in reality.

Open door policies and the current rush of boat people threaten both the perception and reality of social cohesion. Australians will accept a programme they believe is being managed carefully and fairly by their government. When they feel the programme is out of control and people are behaving unfairly in their quest to migrate here, the good will on which the whole system relies is under threat and backlashes against particular groups of migrants are more likely to occur. That's why stopping the flood of so-called asylum seekers is essential to the long term future of our immigration programme.

Peter Hume, the welfare state and government spending big on infrastructure are hardly 'socialism'. Every capitalist economy relies on such government expenditure, including the USA. But it's certainly accurate that some voices claiming to be of the left (what I think of as the 'pseudo-left') are opposed to open borders in immigration. Kelvin Thompson MHR is a good example. He gets away with it in his electorate because of the large proportion who vote Green and oppose population growth.

Which raises a question for David: why did you not mention the Greens' opposition to population growth which implies an opposition to open borders? I have heard the Greens' spokesperson on immigration, Sarah Hanson-Young, say that the Greens support the deportation of those asylum seekers who are found not to be genuine refugees.

That is the category that really matters: asylees who are found not to be genuine refugees as defined by the UNHCR. Labor, Liberals, Greens, etc., all accept that such people should be deported. But this merely keeps us all stuck in the present tragic Ground Hog Day and, as David McMullen so eloquently argues, the best way to abolish illegal immigration is to make it legal.

It strikes me that he is arguing from a genuinely left-wing, or Marxist, perspective; though, of course, some classical liberals (like Chris Berg) also argue for open borders.

What's up with the social system of capitalism that it regards people as a problem?!