The Western elite are more out of touch with ordinary people than at any time perhaps since the Sun King swanned around Versailles. On few issues, though, are they more out of touch than on immigration.
Governments on both sides of parliament, NGOs, universities, big business — all solidly line up behind, not just immigration, but mass immigration.The more, the better. A million new people, every few years. In line with its ideological leaning which happily (for them) aligns with demands from the aformentioned pressure groups, the Albanese government is ramping up immigration to levels never before seen in Australian history. Even in the depths of the pandemic, with Australians overseas barred from returning, the Morrison government snuck in 150,000 migrants.
Voters, on the other hand, think quite differently. Poll after poll shows that a majority of Australians want to reduce immigration levels. Less than one-third want the population to keep increasing. Those numbers are almost certainly skewed by polls that survey twice as many university graduates than there are in the general population.
Australians rightly see mass immigration as a gigantic Ponzi scheme, where the (ridiculously thin) economic benefits of mass migration are outweighed by massive costs, which the Big Australia advocates then try and fix with… more immigration.
As for the supposed “economic benefit”, the much-vaunted boost to GDP ends up working out to about $100 per Australian, per year. For that princely sum, they are gifted with stuff like this:
Three million people among Australia’s 26 million population are permanent migrants who arrived since 2000, with the largest contingent coming from India.
And the vast majority of those permanent migrants – 87 per cent – now live in capital cities, 56 per cent of them concentrated in Greater Sydney and Greater Melbourne, new Australian Bureau of Statistics data reveals.
Those figures work out to 130,000 people per year — but immigration numbers are set from now on to be permanently more than twice that. And the scale of the demographic change outstrips anything in our modern history. Imagine if 20,000,000 British upped stakes and flooded into Delhi and Mumbai — that would be the scale of demographic change Australia is subjected to. Does anyone imagine the native Indians wouldn’t quite rightly have something to say about that? But we’re supposed to not just ignore it, but celebrate it.
And we wonder why we have a housing crisis:
Software engineer Chirag Chaplot, 33, and his banker wife Garima Kumbhat, also 33, moved to Australia in 2018 just months after being married in India. He was an Indian citizen, but was raised in Bahrain. She was born and raised in Mumbai […]
The couple have just bought a new home in Altona in Melbourne’s west.
“This is our second home.”
We’re told that mass immigration is necessary because of “skills shortage”. Yet 90% of Australians surveyed agreed that Australia should “train our own skilled people, not take them from other countries”. Instead, lazy governments and employers take the easy option of just importing foreigners. Of course, they’re not having to commute hours from ever-more-sprawling suburbs, cram their kids in full-to-bursting schools, or wait months for a doctor’s appointment. When your whole world is cheap foreign workers and chic ethnic cafes, of course mass immigration seems like a win-win.
The new data also exposes one of the biggest lies of mass immigration: “skilled workers”. Is Australia importing useful workers, like builders, electricians and plumbers?
“For migrants from the skilled visa stream, the most common occupation was Business, human resources and marketing professionals at 10 per cent.”
The Australian
In Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the planet Golgafrincham solves its population crisis by shipping off a useless third of their population — “Telephone Sanitisers, Management Consultants and Marketing executives” — to an insignificant, backwater planet.
Australia is doing the complete opposite.
