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Notes -
I spent a while in the last thread talking about immigration and Australian national identity, and it sort of only really just clicked for me how much the formation of that identity was bound up with the demise of the British Empire itself.
It's really obvious when you look at early Australian politics and writing how core the connection with Britain was. You could have a White Australia Policy because the answer to the question "who are we" was "British". Chinese aren't British, so they can't be Australian. But as time goes on that connection becomes weaker and more contested. For example this speech from PM Billy Hughes during World War 1:
At this stage Australia is a young nation, having federated less than 20 years prior. In most people's memory are the times of being colonies rather than a country. Hughes is giving a full throated defence of the British Empire, and explicitly rejecting the idea of a unique Australian identity distinct from the Empire. And he goes on to win the election convincingly. But it's clear that he's speaking in a context where these ideas and values are no longer universal, where some people are starting to think that Australia should be its own thing.
It would not be until after WW2 that Britain really began divesting itself of its colonial holdings - but these things happen slowly and you can see the increasing loss of belief in the Empire reflected in statements like Hughes'. I'm not sure whether it was that the Empire declined and "Australianism" rose to fill the void, or that "Australianism" naturally grew and outcompeted "Britishness". But regardless of which force was the driving cause, it's axiomatic that you can only have one highest loyalty.
So as we gain our own self conception as a country and as "Australian" ceases to mean "British" the rationale for the White Australia Policy fades away as well. It isn't overturned in one dramatic act as an explicit rejection of racism, but rather falls apart piecemeal bit by bit as the rules get adjusted incrementally. After WW2 there is a movement to grow Australia's population to make it better able to stand up for itself in times of war - "populate or perish" is the mantra, and the doors get opened to non-British europeans in order to make that happen. Harold Holt allows Australian soldiers to bring back Japanese "war brides". Asians are allowed to come to study. In 1958, a pathway is created for "distinguished and highly qualified" Asians. During the Vietnam war, South Vietnamese refugees escaping the Viet Cong are warmly welcomed as our allies, with my grandparents among many others taking a Vietnamese family into their home.
Most of this happens under conservative governments. There's some resistance on racist grounds to the crumbling of the White Australia Policy - particularly from Arthur Calwell, the long time opposition Labor leader. Calwell's vision of Australia was one of a "white" nation rather than a "British" nation:
Calwell of course was Immigration Minister in the Chifley government and was the one who initiated the influx of non-British immigrants while at the same time degrading Australia's links to the British Empire.
But "whiteness" has poor appeal as an organising principle. Once you abandon the idea of being specifically British, it becomes hard to justify why the Germans and Italians (who we fought against) are more kin to us than the South Vietnamese (who we fought alongside). So Calwell's vision never comes to pass - Australia never meaningfully exists as a "white" country that isn't also British, and once we cease to see ourselves as a part of the Empire we also start welcoming Asians and other non-Europeans into our conception of what Australia is.
And it works. Back when I was younger there were fierce debates over "multiculturalism" as opposed to "assimilation". It was an intra-white culture war that has gone away almost entirely these days, as the immigrants we used to argue about have grown in number and taken their own role in shaping the course of our society. It turns out they mostly don't want to be stuck in racial ghettos and seen as seperate from the majority. The multiculturalists have found themselves with nothing to defend and the assimilationists have found themselves with nothing to attack.
(as an aside, one of the things I really like about most non-Anglo Australians is their casual dismissal of the woke mind virus that finds purchase among the minds of the Anglo left. There are few things more eye-rolling than a company's Anglo leadership making their mostly foreign-born workforce sit through cultural sensitivity training. Likewise, we had a minor family drama at our last Christmas get together when one of my aunts - a white sociologist - decided to give another of my aunts - a working class Croatian - a lecture about how as "a person from the former Yugoslavia" she didn't really understand how bad racism is.)
I love my country and what it is. It's absurd to me to think of an Englishman as being more "my people" than the Macedonian and Lebanese and Aboriginal and Sudanese players playing our national sport. It's absurd to me to think of the Indonesian and Chinese families at my kids school who willingly sacrificed birthday parties and family events to fight covid in our community as less "my people" than the white Americans who called our country a dictatorship for it. We're united by bushfires that turn the sky red and floods the size of seas. We are bound by so much more than blood.
I agree with all this, but I want to add a caution from the perspective of immigrant Australia.
It's normal common in my immigrant community to:
This combination is far more common than my own eccentric notion of actually being a patriotic Australian.
All of this sounds like it's the polar opposite of what @AshLeal is claiming, but no. The people I'm talking about are perfectly well acculturated and behave well among other Australian folk, work on common projects with each other.
Here's the thing, though: that's a fair-weather friendship. The moment those people find their home and Australia at odds, they're traitors. And it's rational for other Australians to notice that and - particularly in cases where their home is likely to be at odds with Australia in the reasonably-near future, i.e. the PRC - to want less of these people around; they're quite literally lower-EV than other immigrants and plausibly negative-EV.
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No, but it make it seem rather superficial.
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I've noticed that liberals in Britain (more so Scotland than England these days) and Australia seem to look at the racial strife in countries like America and France and think to themselves that their way is "better", that they've taken a more enlightened approach, or have somehow cracked the code to living in multicultural harmony. You're just living on a time delay, since Europeans still make up the overwhelming majority of your countries. This will change, as it changed elsewhere, and the racial dynamics of your countries will change accordingly. I've lost count of the number of American liberals I've seen bemoan the lost spirit of the 90's, when everyone supposedly seemed to get along, and everyone knew what an American was and wanted to be it. Usually they blame the media, or politicians, or activists, or some other scapegoat for the change, when really what changed was the racial composition of society, which allowed new avenues for racial agitation and spoils that simply didn't exist before.
Do you think any of this is new? I assure you that 10, 20 years ago, your counterparts in America and France were telling themselves similar stories about how we are "bound by so much more than blood". Really, what was their alternative? They had to find some way to accept what was happening, because to question it would be to question themselves. Wait another 20 years and see where you are once your racial group's position becomes more precarious, and all the other groups know it.
30% of our population are first generation immigrants. At what proportion does the racial strife start? 40%? 50%?
I also find the implication that Europeans don't do ethnic strife to be deeply amusing.
Usually it starts around when their children begin taking political office at greater rates and assuming positions of power in media, civil society and corporate hierarchies, which are avenues that their parents generally avoided or did not have the capacity for. Like I said, you are still very new to all this.
Europeans do a lot of ethnic strife, it's why they sorted themselves out into ethnostates defined by the predominance of particular ethnic groups. Australia is like America in that as much it pretends otherwise, its culture is based around a Northern-Western European core that other European ethnic groups assimilated into because they didn't have the baggage of looking so different from the people who founded the country, or of bearing a sense of racial revanchism from being a descendant of a Third World colony that was ruled by people who looked like the founders of the country. Often the children of immigrants react to their deracination from their roots by clinging to an idealized image and history of their ancestral culture and weaponizing it against the culture they live in.
Around what percentage of the government being non-British descended would you expect to see problems?
I don't think the issue is being of British descent; Greeks, Italians, Germans and the like do not carry the "white man humiliated my forefathers and now here I am, powerful in his space" chip that the Western-born kids of Third World immigrants carry on their shoulder. A cursory Google search tells me your federal parliament is still over 90% white, which I found remarkable given how Australian libs rave about their multiculturalism. Talk to me when 20-25% of your parliament is non-white, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of positions in the bureaucracy that don't attract headlines.
Well, that's interesting. Just a moment ago you were saying
But now apparently that's not a problem. We can have the Irish and English put aside their centuries of grievance. The Serbs and the Croatians can join hands as brothers. The Germans and Italians who we fought the bloodiest war in history against can be our countrymen and our comrades in arms.
Tell me, how did we do it? How are we able to look past all these different ancestries, languages, cultures, and histories to create peace and harmony between these different groups? And why does it stop working when someone is brown?
Given that the same thing happens in Canada, the US, and even most of Europe, I don't think the variable doing the work here is "Australia". Certain cultures, among them the Europeans you have mentioned, produce adaptable emigrants. Australia has a well-established, well-integrated Lebanese population not because they are Australians, but because the Lebanese seem to do well wherever they go. The Cantonese do well in Britain because the Cantonese do well everywhere.
Market-dominant minorities, westernized elites from the Commonwealth, and immigrants from first world countries integrate well in all western countries.
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Because it's very easy to blend into a new culture when you already look like that culture. How is this difficult to understand? You will never have to be confronted by the skin and eyes and hair of people in history books and portraits and statues, and be reminded at every turn that this country was not built by people who look like you. The only way to stop being reminded of that is to resent and fulminate against the history books and statues, or to mangle them to soothe the beholder's sense of alienation.
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You sure about that?
Does the Australian police collect racial crime stats by any chance?
Yes they do, I linked a report on the stats elsewhere in the thread. Here it is again.
The important information: Most immigrant groups have crime rates substantially below that of the native born population. The big outlier is the Sudanese who commit crimes at a much higher rate. But this is a small group so it doesn't change the fact that immigrants as a whole are much more law abiding.
(as mentioned elsewhere, this is obviously not because other people groups are inherently more moral, it's just a natural and expected effect of applying stringent filters to the immigration process. Our immigrants are mostly very law abiding because we deliberately chose to select for law abiding people. Sudanese are an exception because we selected them on the basis of being refugees fleeing war and did not apply the normal filters)
I thought the Lebanese were heavily into organized crime in Australia?
I had to go digging a bit to find data on Lebanese crime specifically, but according to the latest stats there were a total of 179 Lebanese in prison.
I'm not sure what that works out to relative to the overall Lebanese population, but probably not much.
Our most serious crime organisations are (mostly caucasian) bikie gangs.
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Well, why is it the case that if you moved to these respective People’s “homelands” and lived there for three decades, they would never consider you to be a member? The Macedonians would not consider you Macedonian, the Lebanese would not consider you Lebanese, and the Aboriginals and Sudanese probably wouldn’t consider you one of them even if you were the third generation migrant Englishman. And the Chinese? Forget about it. You can be there ten generations and you would still be labeled a foreigner.
Could it be that there once was, or still is, an English cultural identity and even genetic inclination? In the same way there is for the Chinese? If that’s the case, that would be the #1 argument against the total inclusivity of Australian identity.
Australia is free to set their own policies as to ‘what is an Australian’, just like Macedonia is and Lebanon and Sudan would be if it had its shit together. That you don’t like what they decided to do doesn’t change what they decided on.
Everyone is free to decide anything; knowing why most people on Earth choose to define peoplehood by blood could be useful for checking our neoliberal biases.
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All countries are free to set their own standards for immigration and citizenship according to their own values and priorities. It doesn't bother me in the slightest if the Chinese or the Macedonians choose to have restrictive immigration settings, I'm not interested in living in those places. And even if I did, it's still their right to decide if I can or not - just as it's me and my countrymen's right to decide if I want their people to come here or not.
I am a nationalist, not a globalist. I do not want immigration because I see it as some sort of favour to the world, I want it because it improves my country - making it safer, richer, and stronger.
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What does it matter what their homelands are like? AshLael wasn't claiming the Chinese in China are his people, but that the Chinese in Australia are.
Because Australia is the odd man out in defining Peoplehood merely by the bureaucratic and capricious standards of who has obtained citizenship. The question must be asked, “why do the Lebanese consider other Lebanese their own people, but you want to consider Lebanese in Australians the same people as yourself?” Answering this question will give us important information on the nature of Peoplehood and whether it’s best to decide to define it on legal notions or ethnic notions.
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It's a bit weird that only one group of people is expected to open their membership, while everyone else gets to keep it as closed as they want.
No one is expected to do anything. All countries can and should do what is in their own best interests.
In our case, that means importing the best quality people from other places and making them ours.
Actually, what it means is importing vast numbers of incredibly low-skilled brown people so they can serve as domestic servants, provide downward pressure on wages (Australian labour as a class won some incredibly strong victories and made great deals in the past which are gradually coming undone) and artificially prop up the housing market. Don't forget the race riots we had a few decades ago when muslim immigrants decided that women who wear bikinis or sunbathe are declaring themselves public property too.
Do you really think that Australian immigration policy is bringing in the best? John Howard and his successor governments were not massively increasing migrant flows for charitable reasons - they were doing so because they would not have to face the negative consequences of these changes while reaping all of the rewards. Turning the nation's gas stations into a nepotistic ethnic spoils system rife with wage theft for indian immigrants was the actual result of these immigration policies, and I just don't see how this matches up to the claims being made.
While I'd definitely be on-board with a sane immigration policy that let us drain the third world of their capable populations and leave them worse off relative to us, that's not what we actually have. What we have is a social policy that was used as a weapon by one group in society against another, and outside a few extremely privileged circles the consequences of these policies have largely been negative.
Which visa subclass are these "incredibly low-skilled brown people" coming on?
I don't know - I never asked them. I just know that they're here and in numbers large enough to have an impact on society, and the lived experiences of me and most of the people I know. I daresay you can venture down to your local 7-11 and ask if you really want to know, however.
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Who is being implied in passive voice here? Certainly not me, I'd prefer the Chinese stop being racist. AshLael doesn't appear to be "expecting" the Australians to open up their membership, just stating he is Australian and he does.
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This reads like hagiography to me. I'm not Australian but I've visited a few times and engages with Australians abroad and I couldn't help noticing how racist some people were. "Don't get me started on the Lebos", "Abos are just paint sniffers etc". Mind you this was from a second generation Indian migrant so perhaps assimilation in Australia is to become racist?
Perhaps in Australia racism is at a casual and non-consequential level and that's healthier than a deeper racism of other countries who have a pretence of non-racism.
Or might you be in a liberal well-off bubble where people are genuinely getting on fine racially - ignoring the ugly racism that to me seemed to occur fairly regularly throughout my travels...?
I'm talking about national identity, not racism. I grant that these are related issues, but there is a distinction. There is no question that Aborigines are Australian - even the people that hate Aborigines would agree with that.
I don't pretend that there is no racism in Australia - I do maintain there is not very much, but counterexamples can always be found.
Having said that... Aborigines are something of a special case. The uncomfortable truth is that the guy who called them a bunch of petrol sniffers may have been coarse, but he wasn't wrong. Aborigines have shockingly high levels of every bad socioeconomic measure you care to name. Drug abuse, child abuse, unemployment, domestic violence, teenage pregnancy, etc, etc. It's bad among the city-dwelling mixed race Aborigines and it's extremely bad in the remote outback communities where they are actually black. Aborigines are 3% of the population and 28% of the prison population. No one wants this to be true, but it is, and everyone knows it.
Petrol sniffing specifically is a big enough problem that we passed a law banning normal petrol in Aboriginal communities. They have to use "low aromatic fuel" which is less potent and abusable as a drug.
There is a huge amount of desire to see all of these metrics improve and massive amounts of money have been thrown at solving the problem, but nothing has worked. So the guy who made that comment may or may not have been racist... but either way, he was telling it like it is.
I see what you mean about national identity and the national consciousness of it - that can be a different thing from racism for sure. I'm encouraged by your comments as the line I get from media in my country is about things like the popularity of the One Nation party and suggestions that Australia had quite an underbelly of racism.
Not that my concern is that people can't be racist per se - people can have their own views, it just seems like a poor marker for liberal democracy if there is a lot of racial tension. It sounds like this isn't particularly the case in Australia.
I was aware of the dysfunction in Aboriginal communities - I think the racist element that can arise is if that's overgeneralised suggesting an inherent genetic lack and the counter examples are never mentioned. I know there are systemic and difficult to resolve issues though as with other indigenous peoples under colonisation.
The popularity of One Nation may have been overstated to you. They got 4% of the vote at the last election. And even among that 4%, I highly suspect that a fair number of voters cast their votes despite the party's reputation for racism rather than because of it.
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This reads like hagiography to me. I'm not a liberal (well,not a modern one), but I interact with them, and can't help noticing how racist some of them are. "White fragility", "abolish whiteness", "whiteness is showing up on time"... Mind you this was from some of the most privileged white people I met, so perhaps liberalism is about being racist?
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I love the idea, even now as I'm thoroughly burned out on it, there's something about it that I find appealing. The problem is that even if it isn't exactly like Marxism - lovely in theory (and only if you don't ask too many questions), but mountains of skulls in practice - it seems to occupy the same zip code. Right now I believe this is a path only available to young nations, who have a wild frontier, and a lot of building to do, but it gets a lot harder when they've already established themselves, and harder still when they fought bloody wars to keep what they've built. Not impossible, mind you, it's still possible for someone to fall in love with a place and "go native", as it were, but it takes a lot more than just showing up somewhere.
Also, you have me at a disadvantage here, since I cannot tell you how things are in your own country, but I'm very skeptical of the idea that "multiculturalism" was so thoroughly rejected. From the few (virtual) glances I took at your country, it seems a lot like the UK - some (mostly common) people putting up a heroic fight against it, and almost all of the elites (including "conservatives") hellbent on ramming it down people's throats.
To be clear, I'm not saying that "multiculturalism" was rejected. The elites never conceded that point, nor were they defeated. And the word still bubbles up alongside other buzzwords like "diversity" or "inclusivity".
I'm saying the idea that the word originally signified and the fight around it just sort of withered on the vine. Our immigrants predominantly do not simply create little enclaves for themselves and their co-ethnics. They mix and interact with everyone else and adopt local attitudes and customs. I eat chicken parm with Colombians, play 500 with Indians, and go to the footy with Chinese.
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I've heard that there's a moderate amount of racism against Indians, at least Indian students studying there. How true is that?
Not that I would particularly care, I have thick skin when I know the person is question is powerless to do something about it.
There's a bit of a meme about it in India I think, based on a couple of cherry-picked/misrepresented incidents. I don't think it's at all accurate. I have never encountered anything I would describe as anti-Indian racism (at uni or elsewhere), and I have not heard of any from (Fijian) Indian family members. I've occasionally heard complaints about thick accents but that doesn't rise to the level of racism in my book.
That's not to say that racism doesn't exist at all, but there isn't much. At one job my white supervisor complained about my Filipino co-workers speaking their native language when talking to each other (he felt they might be talking about him behind his back, I think). That struck me as a bit unreasonable, but even then I struggle to call it racist. One of my Dad's friends once asked him how he would feel if one of my sisters brought home a black man (in a tone that implied that this would be a bad thing). I knew an older married couple who were both very racist (and moved to America amusingly) - she once proudly told a story about how she pitched a fit because her taxi driver was some kind of brown, and I heard him say that he would never eat food cooked by a Filipino. But these are pretty unusual cases.
There is a decent amount of strong anti-Muslim sentiment. I don't personally consider that racism (for both Islam-is-not-a-race reasons, and also because I think it's pretty fair to judge a person on their actual beliefs), but some people do. Quite often the most extreme anti-Muslims I've spoken to have been Indian, but there's plenty among Anglos too (and a lot of it does go too far in my view). EDIT: Probably this has lessened in recent years as we have had fewer high profile Islamic terrorism incidents around the world.
I suspected much the same, but it's good to have confirmation.
As far as I'm concerned, a useful rule of thumb is to discount allegations of racism by about 90%, because the people making them are statistically illiterate. You can go up to 99% depending on your stance on HBD.
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As far as I'm aware this was blown up out of all proportion in the Indian media as one of the earlier examples of clickbait. There were isolated cases of racism in Australia (Indian students targeted for mugging) that were 'Chinese Robber'ed into making it seem like Australians were racist (and specifically more racist than the international average).
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There is some - years ago there was a scandal where there was a spate of Indian students being assaulted on suburban trains - but not sure it's any worse than other Anglo countries.
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As a (white) immigrant to Australia this is much rosier than my view. I've heard plenty of woke and anti-white rhetoric from non-white immigrants (including from Indians and East Asians), to the point of losing friends over it. And while Australia's immigration story has been pretty successful overall, a lot of that is down to selectivity. The cases where that's been abandoned, such as Sudanese refugees, haven't always gone so well - the Sudanese commit crimes such as burglary at a rate a whopping 50+ (edit: 7) times the native population - a fact that was reported in The Age, hardly a right-wing outlet.
I also think COVID lockdowns were largely unjustified bullshit (especially the restrictions on outdoor activities), but that's another story.
Edit: now that I think about it, the most aggressive wokeness from non-whites I've heard has mostly been from 2nd gen or people who immigrated here as children rather than adults, so probably more down to absorbing the surrounding woke culture. Of course 2nd gens are an inevitable effect of immigration so that doesn't fundamentally change the story.
Aggravated burglary specifically was something like 40 times in 2017, though this admittedly had a lot to do with a small population and a gang going hard on organised crime, meaning it's very easy to get outsized figures in a way that doesn't represent a necessarily 'real' base rate. The ~7 times figure below is more accurate overall, though making allowances for a much younger population I'd say the real base rate is intuitively somewhere in the 4-5 times more likely zone.
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Correction: the Sudanese crime rate is more like seven times the native population, not 50+. Your point is directionally correct but wrong in its extremity.
I wholeheartedly agree with the fundamental point though. Selectivity is very good. The immigrants we let in overall have a much lower crime rate than the native population, and that is part of the reason why many people - including me - are happy to have more of them. If the normal case was more like the Sudanese or even the Afghans that support would dry up fast.
Edit: I do agree that immigrants and their families are not immune from catching the woke, and in any large population group there are inevitably going to be some true believers anyway, plus there are always those who see an opportunity to play up their non-whiteness to profit off white guilt, etc. But I stand by my view that our immigrants are on average substantially less insane in this specific regard. They also mostly don't get involved in anti-woke culture warring, mind. They just roll their eyes at the whole thing and go on with their lives, which I think is very healthy and sensible.
Thanks, looks like I misremembered the actual number or muddled it with something else.
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