Mercurius –

Please have a look at my post of 30 June 12:25 pm regarding the long term economic impacts of increased immigration. The Productivity Commission found no real living standard advantages to increased immigration.

I disagree that the Australian people will never support reductions in immigration. I believe that most Australians think that immigration is needed to benefit the economy in the long term and that is not true. I also think that most Australians think that we need high immigration to prevent the impacts of an ageing population and high immigration does not help an ageing population.

If Australians knew that there were few advantages and many disadvantages to their standard of living by having high immigration, most Australians would support low immigration.

I see everybody who has written into this forum as my “fellow traveller.” I even think of you as a fellow traveller because you agree that we should do more to live sustainably and you agree that reducing immigration would make it easier to solve our environmental problems. Your belief that high immigration is still preferable for whatever reason doesn’t worry me at all. Please help me understand when you get a chance.

Last word –

My guess regarding the CO2 per head is that the 19.1 kg is kg/per day so 7000 kg CO2/ year. Electricity is only part of the full greenhouse load per person. The Australian Greenhouse Office website has lots of numbers.

This is from an article by Robert Rowthorn, Professor of Economics at Cambridge University in the UK in the (British) Sunday Telegraph (5/6/06):

"If you repeat something often enough, you can perhaps make people believe it. What you cannot do is turn it from being false into being true. And the Government's claim about the economic benefits of immigration is false. As an academic economist, I have examined many serious studies that have analysed the economic effects of immigration. There is no evidence from any of them that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative.

Immigration can't solve the pensions crisis, nor solve the problem of an ageing population, as its advocates so often claim. It can, at most, delay the day of reckoning, because, of course, immigrants themselves grow old, and they need pensions.

The injection of large numbers of unskilled workers into the economy does not benefit the bulk of the population to any great extent. It benefits the nanny-and housecleaner-using classes; it benefits employers who want to pay low wages; but it does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons, who have to compete with immigrants willing to work hard for very low wages in unpleasant working conditions."

Eric wrote:

"If Australians knew that there were few advantages and many disadvantages to their standard of living by having high immigration, most Australians would support low immigration."

This is exactly the problem with economists as well as with the government - reducing all incentives to economic gain or loss. So let me tell you just this: with economics you never win, because no matter how rich you get, you cannot take your wealth with you when you die.

Allowing others to immigrate is the only thing that give us, non-indigenous Australians, the moral right to be here. The same way the door was open for us to arrive (or our parents/grandparents), so it should be open for all good people.

Immigration also brings in new ideas and prevents cultural decay.

But for those who prefer to think in terms of loss/gain, here is a point to consider: as the differential between the standard of living in Australia and most of the rest of the world increases while people from poorer countries are not allowed to come here as individuals, wouldn't that increase and bring to the point of explosion the collective motivation of other nations to take our continent by force? what standard-of-living are you expecting to experience if that happens?

Yuyutsu

The argument is not for zero immigration, it is for net zero immigration, which would still mean a considerable immigration intake, of 30 000 or maybe as high as 40 000 per annum.

So to you and Mercurius and others who espouse the virtues of immigration, I say that you in part right. Immigration is not entirely without an up-side. But it is essential that we weigh this up against the blatantly obvious down-sides of ever-more people, while being aware of the disgraceful gross misinformation peddled by Costello in particular, governments at all levels in Australia in general, and the all-powerful vested-interest business sector.

Your fear re threat of invasion, either by force or by mass refugee exodus, is definitely worth considering. But how would opening Australia’s borders prevent it? Lets face it, even if our population increased five-fold, we would still look pretty empty to the Javanese, if not all Indonesians, Chinese and others….. and we will have blown our quality of life and our resource demand vs supply capability to smithereens.

Increasing our population is not answer to that threat, or perceived threat. On the contrary, it is necessary to maintain a decent level of wealth whereby we can afford a strong defence capability, and that requires a healthy well-functioning society that is not fractured by all the things that mounting population pressure can cause.

Allowing high immigration to continue will run us down and serve to make this sort of threat more real.

OK, so now you are going to accuse me of alluding to a ‘fortress Australia’ mentality. Well, before you do, just think carefully about my response might be.

Yuyutso says immigration brings new ideas. This argument is redundant since communications technology means that we can get new ideas from afar. Did you watch four corners(?) the other day about hospital safety systems in Canada? The Australian medical profession can learn from the Candian experience just by attending conferences and studying events in that country.

China has academics who study the success of the west to gather ideas to improve their own countries (admittedly, this info is from memory and may be incorrect). I was watching how providing toilets in India improves the health and well being to the people of india the other night. Sewerage is also used to create methane gas for cooking! People in developing countries helping themselves constructively, THAT is what I like to see.

The only cultural decay we have is from our elite selling their own people out through ridiculous levels of immigration from anywhere. Immigrants from the developing world tend to undersell themselves, which has the corporate sector licking their lips. An example I can think of is trolley pushers around Melbourne are now blacks from Sudan. Formerly, my mate had those contracts, but was undercut by these imports who work for $7 per hour as opposed to $14 per hour! Coles Myer no doubt are telling us not to be racist. How patronising.

Yuyutsu maintains that Australia should have high immigration because it is a moral obligation to lower your living standards if other countries are overpopulated. Presumably Yuyutsu is arguing for a more even distribution of wealth in society, but this leads to a contradiction: As overpopulated countries tend to have very uneven wealth distributions, pursuing high population growth an Australia may lead to more inequality.

Further, Yuyutsu believes that by improving our standard of living with a stable population, we will only make ourselves a target for an invasion. This would suggest that Yuyutsu believes that overpopulated countries are less peaceful.

I can only conclude from this that Yuyutsu thinks it a moral obligation to make Australia more inequable and hostile. Unsurprisingly, the politicians are sticking with the “high immigration brings wealth” dogma.