Continued from my last post…

I don’t advocate closing our borders, I advocate net zero immigration with a doubling of the refugee intake and a greatly improved international aid effort.

Andrew, you write; “Migration to Australia increases our population levels - although even the current rate will lead to a stabilised population in Australia by mid-century”.

As Colinsett points out, this is terribly wrong. Crikey, it really bothers me when people in the top echelons of our political system get basic facts so awfully wrong. At the current fertility rate, with low immigration levels, our population will stabilise by about mid century.

“People still consume resources wherever they live.”

In practically all cases, they will consume much less in their home countries than they would in Australia. Money spent helping them at home is also very much more efficiently utilised than it is in providing them with an Australian way of life and level of consumerism. In fact, several fold more efficient.

“It’s true people living in Australia consume more than many other places, but this shouldn’t be used as an excuse to keep people out, but rather a reason to reduce our unnecessary consumption.”

It is a pretty good reason for concentrating on helping people in their own countries rather than bringing them here. Besides, what on earth are the Democrats doing about reducing our consumption? As I said in an earlier post on this thread and about a million times all up on OLO, peak oil is the paramount concern at this point in time. What are the Democrats doing about consumption in preparation for this resource crisis? I haven’t heard boo out of them. With this crisis looming we really do need to reduce immigration to net zero, if not implement a moratorium on it.

O here we go again, word count nearly exhausted and I’m still only half way through my response

I personally believe we can take migrants from most countries if they can easily assimilate into our common cultural practises. For instance we take Lebanese Christians with little social conflict, compare to Lebanese Muslims. We take South Koreans with no social conflict, we take Egyptians with no social conflict. However when we take practising Muslims we have social conflict, which indicates to me they are a religious idiology that cannot settle without social conflict. Therefore we must evaluate people on their political / religious aspirations.

Quote, "Even if it were desirable and possible to frame laws that could select migrants according to their “affinity” to some ideal of an Anglo-Saxon Christian Australian culture, many of our migration places would be unfilled if we tried to insist on drawing from such a shallow pool."

I believe Australia can only accomodate about 30,000,000 by having a slightly lower standard of living if they disperse more widely throughout the continent. The problem is most want to live in major cities. This destroys the sustainability of the environment.

To Yabby,

skills shortages in Rural area is due mostly to the younger people moving to the cities to find work and go to study. Most never come back. If they did return, skills shortages you mention would'nt be such a problem.

Racism is felt more acutely in small towns than in the cities. This is due to the limited number of jobs and resources people are competing for.

You would find that even if immigrants were to be settled in rural areas initially, they would still find themselves in major cities. Thus not really solving the problem of skills shortages.

Skills shortages are overcome by telling the kids to come home, not importation (a lazy, short sighted option)

Leigh

Once again, thank you for another thoughtful post. I share your views but I am unable to articulate them as well as you do.

Cheers
Kay
PS: My last post was rather stupid and did not add anything to constructive argument. My apologies to the Forum.

Few pre-qualifiers:
*I'm not a racist...don't care where people come from or what they look like.
* To talk, as some do above, about overpopulation in relation to a country this size is plainly absurd..the place is almost uninhabited.

The message: When I was a boy and before Al Grassby was Minister for Immigrashe 'multiculturalism' was unheard of...we had a concept called "assimilation"...that meant learn the language and absorb the local ideas of law, morality etc..become an Australian (why else would one come here...?)...but then Labor got elected and said people actually migrated here so as NOT to become australians and that to expect migrants to absorb our culture was (by some leap of logic) 'racist'...(especially as we had no culture anyway according to Alf)...Thus did assimilation become a dirty word and multiculturalism arrive in Oz.
Quite apart from being an ugly word multiculturalism is a defective concept; a crock of counterproductive crap that fosters cronullas.
Take some of those boys and whip them mercilessly in between a few lessons about our laws and morality and perhaps they'd evolve into proper humans as well as acceptably monocultural aussies.
Luv,
Alf.

Andrew,

having just looked at the Democrat web site - a further comment:

It appears to me that the Democrat Party are being deliberatly misleading and disingenous on the subject of continuing high immigration numbers.

If you and your party do support high levels of immigration, then you should state this clearly and unequivocally on your web site, (either in your policy statement or on the home page with other major issues).

I suggest you are frightened to do so, because of the unfavourable reaction you would get from your dwindling band of disillusioned supporters.

Your comments please.