Jardine,

You are right so far as immediate causes are concerned, but why have ethnic and religious communities that have more or less coexisted for ages suddenly turned on each other? Afghanistan has a fertility rate of 5.1 births per woman, and it was 6.7 back in 2008. Their population has a 29 year doubling time. Whether a country is overpopulated depends on its resources, including water and agricultural land, and the level of technology, unless people can produce goods or services that they can trade for food, as in the case of New York and Glasgow. People per square kilometer is irrelevant, or Antarctica and the Sahara would be seriously underpopulated.

When food and other resources run short due to population growth, people are tempted to drive off or kill their neighbours if they can. Societies fracture most easily along ethnic or religious lines, as these provide good rallying points when people are joining up sides, although other excuses can always be found if these won't do. There is a lot of literature on this. See Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature" for a summary and a lot of references. Good sources, containing first hand accounts of excavations, are "Constant Battles" by Prof. Steven LeBlanc (Archaeology, Harvard) and "War Before Civilization" by Prof. Lawrence Keeley (Archaeology, University of Chicago). From the latter book (p. 91)

"My own first excavation training was on a prehistoric village site on the San Francisco Bay in California. Thousand-year-old skeletons with obsidian arrowheads embedded in the bones, missing heads, and other signs of violent death were so common that our excavation crew referred to burials as 'bad sights'."

The Hazaras are the remnants of Ghengis Khans garrisons who maintained the integrity of his empire by exterminating anyone who lived within 500 miles of the Mongol borders. When the Khan's troops entered Afghanistan, they decided that the entire population of Afghanistan were within the death zone and they went around killing everybody they could catch. The Shiites and Sunnis who live in Afghanistan still consider it to be their Holocaust and they understandably are not well disposed to the ancestors of the Khan who committed genocide on them.

One point I would like to make. Whichever branch of Islam is on top at any time will immediately go about persecuting the others in its need to be on top. The Wahhabis and Shiites, and Alawites and Sunnis all persecute each other and kill each other off within those areas that they control. When the Hazaras in Afghanistan were on top, they were most definitely killing everybody else off.

How is this therefore Australia's problem? Somehow, we have to feel sorry for both the persecuted and the persecutors, even though who is what depends upon where they live. And we must let them launch an amphibious assault on our country and steal of emergency accommodation. So that when 100 homes are destroyed in a bushfire, like at Sydney last week, we have no emergency accommodation for our own people.

Bugger the lot of them. I always rail against moral absolutes, but there is one moral absolute I do believe in.

In Australia, Australians come first.

Matt
“…we are by and large trying to elevate the status of women from entrenched patriarchal cultures.

Speak for yourself. I’ll believe you when anyone saying it is trying to liberate men from their traditional obligations under patriarchy.

Divergence
Yes all that’s true but they haven’t suddenly turned on each other. They’ve been persecuting each other in all these refugee-generating countries for centuries. For example in the 19th century, an Afghan king just declared open season on Hazaras, either to kill or enslave. And no doubt the reason is as Lego said: the Hazaras are the descendants of Genghis Khan.

No doubt if we lived in a cornucopia of unlimited resources, there would be no occasion for such conflicts.

But the point is, it’s not scarcity of resources per se that’s causing the refugee flows: it’s ethnic and religious persecution based on bad cultural habits. Plus being invaded by Yank empire and their cronies doesn’t help either.

If all of these territories were evacuated and an equivalent number of people who think like 19th century British or 21st century Australians were miraculously planted there, it wouldn’t look like Kabul , it would look like Sydney.

It’s cultural. They have a culture of bad government - very bad.

Jardine,

The culture certainly has an influence, but Prof LeBlanc (see my last post) points out that many American Indian groups appeared very peaceful when the Europeans first contacted them, while the archaeological record showed widespread violence among their ancestors. The Europeans had introduced Old World diseases to which the Indians had no resistance, and these diseases swept through the New World, decimating groups that had never heard of Europeans. (There was even a theory that the depopulation of the New World was responsible for the Little Ice Age, as trees grew back over agricultural land and pulled carbon dioxide out of the air.) The Europeans also introduced new crops and livestock, as well as new agricultural technology, which increased the carrying capacity. Once resource pressure was off, the fighting often stopped, depending on the culture.

Similarly in Rwanda, the genocide was preceded by years of shrinking land holdings due to properties being subdivided among many children, and more immediately, a severe drought.

Attacking people is dangerous and best avoided, as they can fight back and you can be hurt or killed.

Your refugees are also not going to admit to you that they primarily came for "a better life", as this might defeat their asylum claims. This is not to say that some of them didn't experience severe persecution.