Nearly a quarter of a million immigrants are coming to Australia from mainly the Third World this year: a city bigger than the population of Hobart every year, an unprecedented wave of immigration to one of the world’s most arid and infertile continents, utterly transforming the society in which we live without the consent of the majority of the population, damaging our quality of life, further degrading our natural environment and causing more pollution, including carbon emissions, worsening our water scarcity woes, eroding social cohesion, underming our shared sense of nationhood, exacerbating the housing crisis and congestion, deepening our balance of payments problems, and adding to rising unemployment during a period of economic recession.

My question: Isn't it well and truly time for a major national rethink of immigration policy, specifically why we continue to run one of the largest per capita immigration programmes in the world?

Reyes-: Money in the till, I'd say was the answer to our mad immigration policy. 250thousand new people a year is 250thousand new customers. Politicians get re-elected on the strength of prosperous shops and businesses. Maybe it is also symbolic of our own failure to multiply and produce our own citizens to spend and keep our economy driving forward.

A lot of us out here think the same as you do, that it is bound to destabilise the country at some point, in some way. Probably through separatist state conflicts. IRA, Bin Laden sort of stuff.

While I agree that it is time to rethink Australia's approach to immigration on ecological sustainability grounds, the problem with public debate on the issue is that it's all too easy for it to be diverted into any number of extraneous red herrings. Unfortunately, debate about immigration frequently provides a venue for the expression of xenophobic and/or racist sentiments by those unreconstructed bigots whose ideas are otherwise unaccetable in polite conversation these days.

For example, Reyes slips a few such inferences into the original post - in terms of the Australian environment, what difference does it make where immigrants come from? The unsubstantiated guff about "eroding social cohesion" and "underming our shared sense of nationhood" can be read as an invitation to the disaffected Australian xenophobe minority to hang their hats on the hook of sustainability in the population debate, while the purported "deepening our balance of payments problems" are similarly unsubstantiated.

A good example of this distortion of the immigration debate is provided by the typically paranoid xenophobic response by sharkfin above. My guess is that it's this kind of attitude that is the real reason that all the major political parties in Australia avoid debating immigration like the plague.

Which is a shame, because the Australian environment simply will not sustain an increasing number of people who wish to pursue the same kind of profligate lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. Where they come from is irrelevant.

If we are to be sustainable there has to be a limit on population growth and that can be done in a number of legitimate ways.

Reducing immigration is an obvious choice and it does not mean we halt immigration altogether. There are a number of people who leave Australi's shores each year to emigrate to other nations. We could easily replace one outgoing with one incoming if we are to limit growth.

Other mechanisms that encourage larger families such as baby bonuses and maternity leave could be stopped and that money used where it is really needed.

Increase and target specific skills training to avoid the need to import skills from overseas.

There is an excellent article in the CT on this:

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/aim-for-sustainable-population-and-generous-immigration/1433156.aspx

http://www.acfonline.org.au/articles/news.asp?news_id=2150ation-and-generous-immigration/1433156.aspx

Excellent link Pelican.

From which I extracted the following:

>>>"... it is possible to argue for a sustainable population policy that includes some limits on migration without being anti-migrant. .... I feel deeply that one of the true measures of a society's ethics is how it treats refugees and others on the wrong end of the modern global economy.

Many people may not realise that in recent years more than half of Australia's permanent migrants have been through the skilled migration stream, compared with only 7 per cent of the total being humanitarian migrants and 25 per cent family migrants. So having a sound population policy that brings migration back down to reasonable levels does not mean shutting the door on refugees. In fact, Australia could even increase its refugee intake, while still tracking for stabilisation of the overall population by about 2050, if we reduce skilled migration substantially.

Since most of the recent increase in migration is attributable to perceived economic requirements, not humanitarian or family obligations, perhaps we should scrutinise more closely the claims by industry that they are needed to meet ''skills shortages''. One wonders whether ... are really just code for ''lower wages''. The truth is, the rapid increase in skilled migration is being used as a crutch for the economy, a .... short-term boost to things like housing construction and retail demand but without any serious reckoning of the long-term consequences. Relying on migration to prop up sectors of the economy also diverts us from the task of devising more sustainable solutions."<<<

I have to ask why a prosperous nation like Australian would be seeking skilled migrants anyway?

Could it be due to the 'userpays' system of tertiary educution, introduced by Hawke and expanded by Howard? The closing of technical schools?

I believe we can take in refugees and re-skill our own workforce, but while the only motivation for employment is further consumerism; unsustainable growth, the xenophobic can hide under the banner of "sustainable population" and evade an equitable approach to a stable population.

Quite so, Fractelle and pelican. Indeed, I've made exactly that point in this forum before - i.e. that we should modify our immigration program such that it is restricted to bona fide refugees and their families.

However, I don't think that's quite what some of our most vocal advocates of population restriction have in mind.