I certainly don't "take it for granted that ethnic minorities divest themselves of their ethnic or national loyalties the instant they are granted citizenship". Indeed, as your examples show, it takes careful management of migration, and specific policies to encourage and facilitate integration. Australia has generally achieved this well. Other countries have not. But no country in recent times has ever successfully managed to seal themselves off from the rest of the world.

I’m interested to know what is meant by “mass immigration”. Certainly, it would seem to be applicable to the dodgy strawman “Vidal” quotation above, where one forum correspondent with numerous identities claims that one journalist, apparently citing another journalist, quotes the noted American author talking about the hypothetical immigration of 40 million Bengalis into Norway. Leaving the dubious veracity of the quotation aside, my major problem with this strawman example is that it’s purely hypothetical: as far as I can tell, nobody anywhere has actually suggested that this “mass immigration” is going to happen.

Other correspondents refer to Australia’s current (much more modest) immigration intake as “mass immigration”, but don’t actually specify what that means. At what level of immigration does it become “mass immigration”? I’ve asked what would be an acceptable migrant intake, but nobody seems to want to answer.

Jennifer Clarke suggested that current immigration laws and policies still favour and privilege “white” prospective immigrants, and also that this situation is unrealistic, discriminatory and unlikely to be sustained into the future. Predictably, this provoked a fair bit of wailing and teeth-gnashing among the racists, xenophobes, white supremacists, monoculturalists and population nutters in our midst, who (also predictably) have not managed to present a coherent argument amongst themselves.

Instead, we have comments that mostly range from the outright racist to more ‘weaselly’ expressions of antipathy towards immigrants from what non-European sources. I take my hat off to wizofaus/dnicholson for his/her patience in dealing with the intransigent purveyors of such tripe, whose positions can only lead to further social disharmony such as we saw in Cronulla not so long ago.

(to be continued)

(continued)

My own position is that any policy on immigration to Australia that derives from any kind of Anglo-Celtic ‘ethnic nationalism’ is both anachronistic and doomed to failure. Australia’s position as an “outpost of the Occident” (as someone quaintly put it) in our region was a temporary phase in the creation of national culture – which is, and always will be, a work in progress.

There are already sufficient numbers of Australians of non-Western heritage to ensure that time and demographics will further consign “White Australia” to a slightly embarrassing historical memory. Of course there will be resistance of the kinds that we see in this discussion – and worse – but ultimately our national culture’s dependence upon its historical links to Britain will become increasingly vestigial.

What really irks me about these immigration ‘debates’ is that it seems to be impossible to call for a reduction in immigration on ecological grounds without getting tangled up in the racist and xenophobic twaddle such as is evident in this thread. This is a real shame, because it prevents a balanced and reasonable discussion about an issue about which most of us seem to agree: i.e. the limited ‘carrying capacity’ of the Australian environment to sustain its human population.

Hi Wizofaust/nicholson. You asked me whether anybody has done research on DNA to deturmin if African blacks are so biologically different to whites that they are more prone to violence, and I replied that I did not know.

Well, whadyaknow? Here is a little gem from a Nobel Laureate which I only just found. I am sure you will find both it and the site it comes from interesting.

Food for thought. Bon appetite.

http://www.debaterelate.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1825&start=0

redneck,
"To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief,"
James Watso

redneck, good link.

Isn't it typical that, when faced with facts from a world-respected scientist, the unwashed lefty hordes scream 'racial hatred' and 'bigotry'.

Is it racism to say that Blacks are good runners?