Australia: Don’t push the immigration ‘panic button’, leading demographer tells Gladys Berejiklian

2018/11/27 Leave a comment

Although Australia and Canada share many similarities with respect to immigration-related policies and histories, the divergence in approach and political discourse continues to widen:

The man Malcolm Turnbull once dubbed “the world’s leading demographer” has warned Premier Gladys Berejiklian against “pushing the panic button” on immigration, saying it could undermine Sydney’s economic success.

University of Melbourne Professor of Demography Peter McDonald, whose views were specifically sought by the premier’s special panel on migration, said Ms Berejiklian’s goal of halving overseas migration to NSW would require cutting the skilled migrant intake to zero.

His detailed submission to the inquiry, seen by Fairfax Media, concluded: “My view is that NSW needs to think carefully before pushing the panic button on migration.”

Professor McDonald told the panel the government’s own massive infrastructure commitments – such as Western Sydney Airport – made it a “difficult time” to cut back on skilled labour supply.

In the case where investment contracts were signed and irreversible, firms may be forced to draw labour from elsewhere in Australia, Professor McDonald said. “If the investment contracts are not signed, then the firms facing a labour supply shortage may opt to invest elsewhere,” he warned.

Ms Berejiklian tasked the panel – which includes Peter Shergold, formerly the country’s top public servant – with devising a NSW population policy. So far she is the only state premier to call for a migration cut, and wants to halve the state’s net overseas migration level to 45,000.

But Professor McDonald’s written advice to Professor Shergold noted the vast majority of extra migrants to NSW in this decade were temporary, such as international students and visitors.

Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows that in 2010, net overseas migration to NSW was 50,000 – comprising about 20,000 permanent migrants and 30,000 temporary.

Last year, the total intake was 93,000 – but only 26,500 of those were permanent migrants. Another 72,000 were temporary visa holders, including nearly 40,000 students. Some of those – about one in five, according to Professor McDonald – will go on to become permanent residents.

The bureau also released new figures this week projecting slightly slower population growth than previously thought. Melbourne was expected to overtake Sydney as Australia’s largest city around the year 2037.

Professor McDonald said that while Melbourne was growing faster (2.7 per cent in 2016-17) than Sydney (2.1 per cent), politicians were “not talking about cutting migration to Victoria”, even in the heat of a state election campaign.

He also cautioned against blaming surging numbers of international students for clogged roads or packed trains. “As most international students live close to the campus where they are enrolled, they are unlikely to contribute heavily to congestion in Sydney,” Professor McDonald wrote.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison turbocharged the population debate this week by vowing to slash Australia’s migration intake, declaring voters had had “enough, enough, enough”.

He did not name a new figure, but last financial year the government took in a little more than 160,000 permanent migrants, compared to the annual cap of 190,000.

Mr Morrison said he wanted to give the states and territories a greater say in immigration policy, because different states had different needs and knew their own “population carrying capacity”.

Professor McDonald said policymakers in NSW should focus on Sydney’s satellite cities such as Newcastle and Wollongong, which offered a “better long-term proposition to relieve population pressure” in the capital.

Melbourne and Brisbane’s satellite cities – Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast – were all among the top 10 fastest growing urban centres in Australia, unlike Newcastle and Wollongong.

Professor McDonald previously sat on the federal government’s skilled migration advisory council, was named a Member of the Order of Australia in 2008 and helped oversee the census in 2016. In a 2013 speech, Mr Turnbull described him as “arguably the world’s leading demographer”.

The expert panel, headed by Professor Shergold alongside Infrastructure NSW chief Jim Betts and planning department boss Carolyn McNally, is due to report to Ms Berejiklian this year.

Source: Don’t push the immigration ‘panic button’, leading demographer tells Gladys Berejiklian

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Why Canada’s immigration system has been a success, and what Australia can learn from it

2018/11/26 Leave a comment

Canada and Australia often learn from each other on immigration and related policies (e.g., Express Entry, the point-based system for speeding up the selection process for selecting economic class immigrants) but there are significant differences as this article attests. The author argues that Australia should learn from Canada’s Provincial Nominee Program to diversity where immigrants settle.

Of course, Australian political discourse on immigration is much more polarized, and while Canada is increasing its levels, the current Australian government is reducing them:

Immigration policy will be a critical issue in forthcoming state (Victoria, NSW) and federal elections. The disproportionate impact of immigration on population growth and public infrastructure in Sydney and Melbourne is the key issue.

If we look to the example of another immigrant-friendly country, Canada, however, we can see how giving states and territories a greater role in immigration target setting and selection can help take the pressure off major cities without drastically reducing immigration rates.

Immigration certainly impacts on Australia’s population to a greater degree than most Western nations. Among OECD countries, only Switzerland and Luxembourg have a higher percentage of foreign-born people than Australia.

Today, 28 per cent of the Australian population was born overseas. The key issue for Australia is that immigrants are more likely to live in large cities than smaller cities or regional areas. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 85 per cent of immigrants live in major urban areas, compared to just 64 per cent of Australian-born people.

Indeed, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), Sydney is now equal-fourth in the world (with Auckland and Los Angeles) with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents (39 per cent), while Melbourne is not far behind (35 per cent). Nearly two-thirds of residents in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth have at least one parent who was born overseas.

A new state-based approach?

The stress that rapid population growth has placed on Melbourne and Sydney has recently become a topic of much debate. This week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison pledged to reduce the annual permanent immigration cap of 190,000. Australia accepted just 162,417 immigrants last year, the lowest level in a decade.

Morrison has also called for a major rethink of the “top-down” approach to immigration in Australia, allowing states and territories to request the number of skilled migrants they’d like to admit each year.

The states and territories currently have a limited ability to nominate applicants for certain skilled visas. But state-nominated and regional visa approvals have fallen in recent years to just over 36,000 last fiscal year following tighter restrictions.

Morrison wants to see a bigger role for states and territories:

This is a blinding piece of common sense, which is: how about states who plan for population growth and the Commonwealth government who sets the migration levels, actually bring this together?

What we can learn from Canada

The Canadian government gave provinces a say in setting targets and selecting economic immigrants – similar to Australia’s skilled migration intake – in the early 1990s. Quebec was first to receive a high degree of autonomy in the process – it was given the right to set its own level and selection criteria for all economic immigrants. (The ability to speak French was a must.)

Quebec was also granted the right to set all of its integration programs, funded by Ottawa every year. The payments reached C$540 million this fiscal year, or C$13,500 for each newcomer.

After Quebec was given this authority, the other Canadian provinces demanded the same. But they received far more limited rights than Quebec. They can nominate the number of economic migrants they need as part of the national immigration target set by the federal government, but they can’t independently set their intake target and selection criteria like Quebec.

While provinces nominate – or in Quebec’s case, decide – annual intakes, all cases are still routed through Ottawa for application integrity testing and vetting for criminality, health and security. Ultimately, final approval rests with Ottawa.

Last year, the Canadian government set an ambitious target of admitting 1 million total immigrants from 2018-2020. The target for next year is 330,000 immigrants, of which about 190,000 will be economic migrants. The remainder will enter under the family reunification category and the refugee, humanitarian and protected category.

About one-third of the economic migrants (61,000) will be admitted through the Provincial Nominee Program. This figure excludes Quebec, which will set its numbers separately.

How the Canadian system encourages rural immigration

Giving the provinces a greater immigration policy role has helped to dramatically shift the settlement of immigrants beyond Canada’s biggest cities.

According to immigration statistics, 34% of economic migrants in 2017 landed in destinations outside Canada’s three most populous provinces, Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia – compared to just 10 per cent in 1997.

After immigrants arrive, the key issue for the provinces is retention, since immigrants can leave at any time. The provinces put a strong emphasis on ensuring that economic migrants receive a strong welcome on arrival and are provided with support programs, including education, access to local migrant community networks and assistance finding a job for those who are not sponsored by employers.

One of the biggest success stories of the Provincial Nominee Program is thinly populated Manitoba, which has added 130,000 migrants since 1998. Ninety per cent have gotten a job within a year of arriving and nearly the same number has ended up staying in Manitoba permanently. New arrivals also express some of the greatest feelings of belonging of all immigrants in western Canada.

Why this could work in Australia

South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory – as well as other regional and rural areas across Australia – want more immigrants and refugees.

Attracting immigrants to less-populated states is the easy part: those willing to settle outside Sydney and Melbourne can receive more points if they are skilled migrants, possibly making the difference as to whether they come to Australia or not. The key issue is retention.

My fieldwork with refugees in Australia has shown that the majority of these migrants love living in regional communities and have received a warm welcome from locals. Our research also found they are willing to stay in regional areas if they can get jobs there. Another way of encouraging more immigrants to settle in regional areas could be to offer them priority in the family reunion process.

Importantly, Canada also doesn’t politicise immigration policy. Australia should follow Canada’s lead by giving the states a bigger seat at the immigration policy table and resisting the temptation to blame immigration for complex growth problems in our overcrowded cities.

Reducing the immigration intake cap will have no significant impact on reducing congestion or strain on public infrastructure in Sydney and Melbourne, but it could severely constrain economic growth.

The ConversationJock Collins currently receives research funding from the Australian Research Council for one Discovery Project, two Linkage Projects and one Indigenous Discovery Project.

Source: Why Canada’s immigration system has been a success, and what Australia can learn from it

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Australians divided on immigration from Muslim countries, new polling shows

2018/11/20 Leave a comment

Haven’t seen comparable data from Canada but the “values” question generally – but not exclusively – refers to worries about integration of Muslims:

Australians believe there are six times as many Muslims in the country than the number who actually live here, a new poll shows.

The latest Fairfax-Ipsos poll found Australians “often overestimate the proportion of the population that is Muslim” with respondents “believing it is 17 per cent when the reality is [around] 3 per cent”, Fairfax reported on Monday.

According to the 2016 Census, the size of the Muslim population in this country is 604,200 people, or 2.6 per cent of the total population.

This compares to 30.1 per cent of Australians who have no religion, 22.6 per cent who are Catholic and 13.3 per cent who are Anglican.

The poll of 1200 voters found that 45 per cent of voters believe the number of immigrants coming to Australia should be reduced, with 23 per cent arguing for a rise and 29 per cent happy with the status quo.

When asked about the number of immigrants from Muslim countries, 46 per cent supported a cut while 35 per cent were happy with current levels and 14 per cent wanted an increase.

The poll comes as Prime Minister Scott Morrison considers possible changes to Australia’s immigration system.

Mr Morrison in September signalled plans to slow the intake of some temporary migrants and to encourage new arrivals to settle outside of congested major cities.

On Monday, Defence Minister Christopher Pyne said the government will be sticking to its non-discriminatory immigration policy.

“We have a non-discriminatory policy, that must remain in place … we need to manage our population growth sensibly in a country which quite frankly can take a lot more than 25 million people,” Mr Pyne told Sky News.

Last month, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has called for a return to Howard-era immigration levels of about 45,000 a year.

Meanwhile, the poll also revealed that Mr Morrison’s coalition government trails Labor by 48 per cent to 52 per cent on a two-party preferred basis.

But Mr Morrision remains the preferred prime minister, with a 47 per cent to 35 per cent lead over Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

On energy policy, the poll found that voters want the government to focus on reducing household bills (47 per cent), followed by reducing carbon emissions (39 per cent).

The National Energy Guarantee was declared “dead” by Mr Morrison after becoming prime minister, but the government has recently floated the idea of underwriting a new power generation project to help s to drive prices down and increase competition.

Source: Australians divided on immigration from Muslim countries, new polling shows

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The Nauru Experience: Zero-Tolerance Immigration and Suicidal Children

2018/11/09 Leave a comment

Good and disturbing reporting:

She was 3 years old when she arrived on Nauru, a child fleeing war in Sri Lanka. Now, Sajeenthana is 8.

Her gaze is vacant. Sometimes she punches adults. And she talks about dying with ease.

“Yesterday I cut my hand,” she said in an interview here on the remote Pacific island where she was sent by the Australian government after being caught at sea. She pointed to a scar on her arm.

“One day I will kill myself,” she said. “Wait and see, when I find the knife. I don’t care about my body. ”

Her father tried to calm her, but she twisted away. “It is the same as if I was in war, or here,” he said.

Sajeenthana is one of more than 3,000 refugees and asylum seekerswho have been sent to Australia’s offshore detention centers since 2013. No other Australian policy has been so widely condemned by the world’s human rights activists nor so strongly defended by the country’s leaders, who have long argued it saves lives by deterring smugglers and migrants.

Now, though, the desperation has reached a new level — in part because of the United States.

Sajeenthana and her father are among the dozens of refugees on Nauru who had been expecting to be moved as part of an Obama-era deal that President Trump reluctantly agreed to honor, allowing resettlement for up to 1,250 refugees from Australia’s offshore camps.

So far, according to American officials, about 430 refugees from the camps have been resettled in the United States — but at least 70 people were rejected over the past few months.

That includes Sajeenthana and her father, Tamil refugees who fled violence at home after the Sri Lankan government crushed a Tamil insurgency.

A State Department spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the rejections, arguing the Nauru refugees are subject to the same vetting procedures as other refugees worldwide.

Australia’s Department of Home Affairs said in a statement that Nauru has “appropriate mental health assessment and treatment in place.”

But what’s clear, according to doctors and asylum seekers, is that the situation has been deteriorating for months. On Nauru, signs of suicidal children have been emerging since August. Dozens of organizations, including Doctors Without Borders (which was ejected from Nauru on Oct. 5) have been sounding the alarm. And with the hope of American resettlement diminishing, the Australian government has been forced to relent: Last week officials said they would work toward moving all children off Nauru for treatment by Christmas.

At least 92 children have been moved since August — Sajeenthana was evacuated soon after our interview — but as of Tuesday there were still 27 children on Nauru, hundreds of adults, and no long-term solution.

The families sent to Australia for care are waiting to hear if they will be sent back to Nauru. Some parents, left behind as their children are being treated, fear they will never see each other again if they apply for American resettlement, while asylum seekers from countries banned by the United States — like Iran, Syria and Somalia — lack even that possibility.

For all the asylum seekers who have called Nauru home, the psychological effects linger.

Nauru is a small island nation of about 11,000 people that takes 30 minutes by car to loop. A line of dilapidated mansions along the coast signal the island’s wealthy past; in the 1970s, it was a phosphate-rich nation with per capita income second only to Saudi Arabia.

Now, those phosphate reserves are virtually exhausted, and the country relies heavily on Australian aid. It accounted for 25 percent of Nauru’s gross domestic product last year alone.

Mathew Batsiua, a former Nauruan lawmaker who helped orchestrate the offshore arrangement, said it was meant to be a short-term deal. But the habit has been hard to break.

“Our mainstay income is purely controlled by the foreign policy of another country,” he said.

In Topside, an area of old cars and dusty brush, sits one of the two processing centers that house about 160 detainees. Hundreds of others live in community camps of modular housing. They were moved from shared tents in August, ahead of the Pacific Islands Forum, an intergovernmental meeting that Nauru hosted this year.

Sukirtha Krishnalingam, 15, said the days are a boring loop as she and her family of five — certified refugees from Sri Lanka — wait to hear if the United States will accept them. She worries about her heart condition. And she has nightmares.

“At night, she screams,” said her brother Mahinthan, 14.

In the past year, talk of suicide on the island has become more common. Young men like Abdullah Khoder, a 24-year-old Lebanese refugee, says exhaustion and hopelessness have taken a toll. “I cut my hands with razors because I am tired,” he said.

Even more alarming: Children now allude to suicide as if it were just another thunderstorm. Since 2014, 12 people have died after being detained in Australia’s offshore detention centers on Nauru and Manus Island, part of Papua New Guinea.

Christina Sivalingam, a 10-year-old Tamil girl on Nauru spoke matter-of-factly in an interview about seeing the aftermath of one death — that of an Iranian man, Fariborz Karami, who killed himself in June.

“We came off the school bus and I saw the blood — it was everywhere,” she said calmly. It took two days to clean up. She said her father also attempted suicide after treatment for his thyroid condition was delayed.

Seeing some of her friends being settled in the United States while she waits on her third appeal for asylum has only made her lonelier. She said she doesn’t feel like eating anymore.

“Why am I the only one here?” she said. “I want to go somewhere else and be happy.”

Some observers, even on Nauru, wonder if the children are refusing to eat in a bid to leave. But medical professionals who have worked on the island said the rejections by the Americans have contributed to a rapid deterioration of people’s mental states.

Dr. Beth O’Connor, a psychiatrist working with Doctors Without Borders, said that when she arrived last year, people clung to the hope of resettlement in the United States. In May, a batch of rejections plunged the camp into despair.

Mr. Karami’s death further sapped morale.

“People that just had a bit of spark in their eye still just went dull,” Dr. O’Connor said. “They felt more abandoned and left behind.”

Many of the detainees no longer hope to settle in Australia. New Zealand has offered to take in 150 refugees annually from Nauru but Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, has said that he will only consider the proposal if a bill is passed banning those on Nauru from ever entering Australia. Opposition lawmakers say they are open to discussion.

In the meantime, Nauru continues to draw scrutiny.

For months, doctors say, many children on Nauru have been exhibiting symptoms of resignation syndrome — a mental condition in response to trauma that involves extreme withdrawal from reality. They stopped eating, drinking and talking.

“They’d look right through you when you tried to talk to them,” Dr. O’Connor said. “We watched their weights decline and we worried that one of them would die before they got out.”

Lawyers with the National Justice Project, a nonprofit legal service, have been mobilizing. They have successfully argued for the medical evacuation of around 127 people from Nauru this year, including 44 children.

In a quarter of the cases, the government has resisted these demands in court, said George Newhouse, the group’s principal lawyer.

“We’ve never lost,” he said. “It is gut-wrenching to see children’s lives destroyed for political gain.”

A broad coalition that includes doctors, clergy, lawyers and nonprofit organizations, working under the banner #kidsoffnauru, is now calling for all asylum seekers to be evacuated.

Public opinion in Australia is turning: In one recent poll, about 80 percent of respondents supported the removal of families and children from Nauru.

Australia’s conservative government, with an election looming, is starting to shift.

“We’ve been going about this quietly,” Mr. Morrison said last week. “We haven’t been showboating.”

But there are still questions about what happens next.

Last month, Sajeenthana stopped eating. After she had spent 10 days on a saline drip in a Nauruan hospital, her father was told he had two hours to pack for Australia.

Speaking by video from Brisbane last week (we are not using her full name because of her age and the severity of her condition), Sajeenthana beamed.

“I feel better now that I am in Australia,” she said. “I’m not going back to Nauru.”

But her father is less certain. The United States rejected his application for resettlement in September. There are security guards posted outside their Brisbane hotel room, he said, and though food arrives daily, they are not allowed to leave. He wonders if they have swapped one kind of limbo for another, or if they will be forced back to Nauru.

Australia’s Home Affairs minister has said the Nauru children will not be allowed to stay.

“Anyone who is brought here is still classified as a transitory person,” said Jana Favero, director of advocacy and campaigns at the Asylum Seeker Resource Center. “Life certainly isn’t completely rosy and cheery once they arrive in Australia.”

On Monday, 25 more people, including eight children, left the island in six family units, she said.

Those left behind on Nauru pass the days, worrying and waiting.

Christina often dreams of what life would be like somewhere else, where being 10 does not mean being trapped.

A single Iranian woman who asked not to be identified because she feared for her safety said that short of attempting suicide or changing nationality, there was no way off Nauru.

She has been waiting two years for an answer to her application for resettlement in the United States — one that now seems hopeless given the Trump administration’s policies.

Each night, often after the power goes out on Nauru, she and her sister talk about life and death, and whether to harm themselves to seek freedom.

Source: The Nauru Experience: Zero-Tolerance Immigration and Suicidal Children 

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with ,

Immigration minister’s stern warning to Australian citizenship applicants

2018/10/30 Leave a comment

Some echoes of the previous Canadian Conservative’s language when passing C-24, along with the sharp decline in citizenship approvals until additional funding and efforts to eliminate the backlog:

Australia’s recently appointed Immigration and Citizenship minister has issued a stern warning to citizenship applicants amid a rising application backlog and dwindling citizenship conferrals  [grants].

“Australian citizenship is a privilege and it should be granted to those who support our values, respect our laws and want to work hard by integrating and contributing to an even better Australia,” David Coleman, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship said in a recent statement.

“Any conduct that is inconsistent with Australian values will be considered as part of the citizenship application process, including violence against women and children, involvement in gangs or organised crime, and any behaviour that threatens our national security,” he added.

Australian citizenship approvals plunge to 15-year low

While Australian citizenship approvals have fallen to the lowest level since 2002-03, the number of citizenship applications awaiting processing is at a record high with migrants waiting longer than ever before to pledge their allegiance to Australia.

The warning comes in the wake of Australian citizenship conferrals plunging to 80,652 in 2017-18 – the lowest in 15 years. The Department of Home Affairs attributed the decline in citizenship approvals to an enhanced focus on security measures. The minister says he makes no apologies for it.

“Those who choose to become Australian citizens are making a solemn commitment to our democracy, to our way of life. And that commitment, made by five million people over the past 70 years has helped secure and enrich our nation.

“We will always work to make the system as functional and effective as possible for legitimate applicants. However, we make no apologies for ensuring only those who meet our security and character requirements are given the privilege of Australian citizenship,” said Mr Coleman.

The most common reasons for Australian citizenship refusals

Over 4,000 migrants were refused Australian citizenship last year. Here are some of the most common reasons that can have your citizenship application knocked back.

Citizenship applicants are currently waiting 17-19 months to know the outcome of their applications with the backlog ballooning to nearly 245,000. According to the Department of Home Affairs, 244,765 were waiting for the processing of their applications, as of 30th June this year.

Mr Coleman said more investment and resources, including 150 additional staff, are being directed towards processing of citizenship applications.

“Applications are at a record high—we are a country that many people want to live in and be a part of… We are investing heavily to meet this demand, while also protecting the security and integrity of the system to ensure only legitimate applications are approved.”

A pair of shoes costs Indian migrant Australian citizenship
An Indian national has been refused Australian citizenship for not disclosing his court conviction over a stolen pair of shoes and possessing a credit card that was suspected to be stolen.

The minister said, as a result of boosting resources, more than 33,800 citizenship applications were processed during the first three months of the current financial year as compared to 18,700 during the same period last year.

The Department says one of the reasons behind increasing waiting times is an increase in cases requiring “complex identity assessment”.

“The Government has established a 50-person task force within the Department of Home Affairs to deal with highly complex citizenship applications and ensure they are dealt with as efficiently as possible,” Mr Coleman said.

Source: Immigration minister’s stern warning to Australian citizenship applicants

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Australian senator who called for ‘final solution’ to immigration expelled from party

2018/10/25 Leave a comment

Too extreme even for Pauline Hanson, the leader of the right-wing nativist One Nation party, found his comments too extreme:

Katter’s Australian party has ejected its only senator, Fraser Anning, from the party over his statements about “non-European” migration two months after he made a speech calling for a “final solution” to immigration.

Despite the party leader, Bob Katter, backing Anning’s comments in August, the party drew the line on Thursday, ejecting Anning for ignoring directives not to distinguish between “European” and “non-European” migration because to do so was clearly racist.

The party was under increasing pressure to ditch Anning due to a withdrawal of union support and then a threat by the Labor party to direct preferences away from the Katter party in response to the racial furore.

In his first Senate speech in August, Anning praised the White Australia policy, called for an end to Muslim migration and invoked the term “final solution”. Katter, the federal leader of Katter’s Australian party, declared the speech had his “1,000% support”.

In a statement on Thursday, the president of Katter’s Australian party, Shane Paulger, said that “99% of what Senator Anning has been saying is solid gold” but “1% … is totally unacceptable”.

Paulger revealed that both he and Katter had told Anning “there was to be no more use of words like ‘Europeans’ and ‘non-Europeans’”.

“Clearly that is racist; clearly our policies are anti-racist,” he said.

Paulger said that in the title of his plebiscite (restricting non-European migration) bill and a proposed press release, Anning “used the same racial language” despite warnings of “extreme hostility” if he persisted.

“Clearly his divide of ‘European’ and ‘non-European’ would prevent, for example, Sikhs and Filipinos coming to this country,” he said. “His bill said the people should have the last say and that Australia’s policies should favour European migration. Both these things are true.”

Paulger defended the party’s decision to back Anning after his inaugural speech, noting that its policy supported favouring “people who can integrate into our community” and because they felt they knew “what he was getting at” with his warnings against Muslim migration.

He said that 640,000 people that came to Australia every year “overwhelmingly” come from countries without democracy, the rule of law, industrial awards, egalitarian traditions and “Judeo-Christian spiritual belief systems”.

Paulger said Katter’s Australian party supported bringing “persecuted minorities” from the Middle East and North Africa including Christians, Jews and Sikhs, and there should be “no restrictions” on Pacific Islanders coming to Australia.

“In spite of the most severe and clear warnings, Senator Anning has continued down this pathway and consequently we announce the termination of his endorsement by the KAP,” he said. “Clearly Fraser wants the freedom to pursue his crusade. And we think it is best for he and the party to give him this freedom.”

Anning responded to his expulsion from the party in a statement on Thursday night, saying Katter’s press came as a surprise to him.

“I never asked to join KAP,” Anning said. “Bob and other senior party members repeatedly asked me to do so and I only agreed on the grounds that I was free to speak out on immigration, the United Nations undue influence on Australia, stopping foreign aid and the persecuted white South Africans.

“At the time I made my maiden speech, Bob said he supported it 1,000% and Shane Paulger and KAP backed me. I haven’t changed my position but it seems that they have.”

Anning denied being told not to talk about “European” and “non-European” immigration by his party. “How can calling for a plebiscite on a predominantly European immigration program be ‘pure gold’ when I gave my maiden speech on 14 August and somehow ‘racist’ two months later?”

With the exception of Katter’s Australian party, Anning’s first speech was universally panned. Even Pauline Hanson, the leader of the rightwing nativist One Nation party that helped elect Anning to the Senate, decried it as “straight from Goebbels’ handbook from Nazi Germany”.

The speech was criticised by the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, the current deputy Liberal leader, Josh Frydenberg, Labor and the Greens.

Source: Australian senator who called for ‘final solution’ to immigration expelled from party

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Australia Has a Plan to Keep Immigrants Out of Its Largest Cities

2018/10/11 Leave a comment

The Provincial Nominee Program in Canada certainly led to a diversification of where immigrants settle even if most went to our largest cities:

Immigrants to Australia will soon find themselves excluded from Sydney and Melbourne, the country’s two largest cities. Instead, new arrivals will be confined to rural, low-growth parts of the country—or so the government intends.

The proposal is part of “a decentralization agenda” announced by the country’s population and urban infrastructure minister on Tuesday. “Nearly all of the growth in Australia is into the three population centers of Melbourne, Sydney and Southeast Queensland. And that’s putting enormous pressure on Melbourne and Sydney particularly, and we see that in the congestion on the roads every day,” Alan Tudge told an Australian TV program.

Australia has been widely criticized for its treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, but it settled the second most refugees per capita in 2017, after Canada and Norway. Now the government wants to use migration policy to limit population growth in Sydney and Melbourne, each of which counts more than 4.5 million residents and has grown by more than 10 percent over the past five years. Three in four new arrivals in Australia settle in one of the three areas that would be off-limits to new migrants not sponsored by employers or reuniting with family.

These issues—bursting cities, uneven migration patterns—are not unique to Australia. China has sought to restrict domestic migration to Beijing and Shanghai, citing “big city diseases” like pollution, traffic, and competition for schools, apartments and medical services. In Canada, where immigrants have long clustered in just a couple of cities, province-based visas, meant to draw arrivals to lesser populated places like New Brunswick, now account for one in five immigrants.

In the U.S., virtually none of the country’s largest cities would have added population in the last few decades without immigrants. But the impact of new arrivals is felt in rural areas too: the majority of non-metropolitan population growth between 1990 and 2010 came from Hispanic migrants. The connection between immigrants and economic growth is complicated, but various politicians have floated the idea of revitalizing depopulated areas through immigration. Why not let Syrians settle Detroit? Or Fremont, Nebraska?

In the U.S., at least, where unfettered interstate travel is sacred, plans like Australia’s can provoke unease—even when they are framed, as they usually are, as bonus lotteries to offer green cards to those who wouldn’t otherwise have them. Shouldn’t new Americans be entitled to the same rights as everyone else, including the freedom to move? Why wouldn’t immigrants want to move to the same opportunities sought by native-born Americans? Then again, others point out, employer-sponsored visas like HB-1s already essentially constitute place-based immigration.

Some economists argue confining migrants to low-growth areas doesn’t make sense: Immigrants (and natives) should move to fast-growing regions with high-paying jobs, and those places should provide enough housing and transportation to accommodate them. (Even high-cost cities like New York continue to draw newcomers.) Cities, the thinking goes, function best at scale, strengthened by the increasing potential interactions between people and jobs. That’s little consolation for regions with little population growth, some of whom will pay you to move there.

In the same way that the U.S. helps settle refugees but doesn’t restrict their movement, Canada doesn’t actually make regionally-sponsored visa recipients stay put. In Australia, Roman Quaedvlieg, the former head of the country’s border police, argued that enforcing the new provision would be nearly impossible.

The Australian government hasn’t announced yet how to make sure new immigrants don’t do what immigrants have done for centuries the world over: Move to the big city.

Source: Australia Has a Plan to Keep Immigrants Out of Its Largest Cities

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Australia: Plans to outsource visa processing are scary, former immigration official says

2018/10/09 Leave a comment

The risks are real without proper consideration and oversight:

A Department of Home Affairs plan to outsource visa processing will lead to increased automation and “premium” services that could undermine the integrity of the system, a former senior immigration official has warned.

Abul Rizvi, a former departmental deputy secretary, told Guardian Australia the potential for a private provider to create a fast and slow lane for processing had “frightening” long-term implications and the proposed use of applicants’ data for marketing purposes was “appalling”.

Rizvi joins the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) and the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia in expressing concern about the outsourcing plan, which has not received a final sign-off from the cabinet after months of testing the market for expressions of interest.

In February Guardian Australia reported that departmental briefings to industry had revealed that a successful private bidder could offset the $1bn cost of a new visa processing system by raising revenue through “premium services for high-value applicants”, different access for those able to pay more, and “commercial value-added services”, such as offers from banks, telcos and tourist operators.

Rizvi said he was “very concerned” about the prospect of premium services because “there would inevitably be an incentive for the company to be more facilitative with regard to subjective criteria for applicants who have paid for the fast lane”.

“Any monopoly provider would want to maximise charges for the fast lane and try to drive as many applicants as possible into that lane.”

He said applicants whocould not afford the higher charges were likely to come to Australia on visitor visas and apply for other visas after arrival, exacerbating “integrity problems” caused by the existing backlog of people in Australia because of the department’s “extraordinarily poor administration”.

In July, the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, boasted about a decline in permanent migration, despite industry warning that the government was “throttling back the rate of migration by stealth” through longer wait times.

Rizvi predicted that outsourced visa processing would lead to tension between the Department of Home Affairs’ increased use of “subjective criteria” for certain visas and the private operator’s desire for increased automation.

“The company or companies that win these tenders will want to automate decision-making as much as possible to minimise costs.”

Rizvi said it was appalling that “extraordinarily personal information” such as an applicant’s relationship status, job, income and health could be used by a commercial firm for marketing purposes.

The chairwoman of the Federation of Ethnic Community Councils of Australia, Mary Patetsos, said it would be “very concerned” about commercialisation of applicant information. She also opposed measures that could lead to an increased cost of visas, particularly for family and partner visas.

“Australia has a long-standing reputation for its impartial, fair and transparent immigration system,” she said. “It should not be put at risk.”

Patetsos warned that premium services “could undermine fairness”. “The opportunity to bring family to Australia to live or visit for extended periods should be available to all Australians – not just the wealthy.”

She said it would be unacceptable for Australian families of limited means to be denied family reunion, which was “integral to successful settlement, social cohesion and wellbeing”.

The deputy national president of the CPSU, Lisa Newman, said a two-tiered visa processing system “will lead to dangerous outcomes”, with the operating company incentivised to to put its profits ahead of the need to assess “gold-plated” visa applicants to the same standards applied to those who could not afford to pay a premium.

“It would also give the company an incentive to further delay processing times for regular customers to try to force them into upgrading.”

She called on the Coalition to abandon the proposal.

The CPSU intends to campaign on the visa outsourcing issue at the next federal election, targeting the immigration minister David Coleman’s seat of Banks, and other electorates with a high number of Australians born overseas, including in western Sydney.

Tender requests went to the market in July and there have been industry briefings in Sydney, Canberra, San Francisco, Singapore and Bengaluru, as well as consultation by the Department of Home Affairs with its workforce.

Groups reportedly keen to bid include a joint venture between Accenture and Australia Post, and a consortium involving Pacific Blue Capital, Qantas Ventures, PwC and Ellerston Capital.

Pacific Blue Capital is run by Malcolm Turnbull’s former employee and friend Scott Briggs. In September, Labor signalled it would pursue the government’s planned outsourcing of the $1bn visa processing system in Senate estimates and called on ministers linked to Briggs to recuse themselves from consideration of the outsourcing proposal.

Source: Plans to outsource visa processing are scary, former immigration official says

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Prime Minister Scott Morrison exposes Australia’s big immigration myth

2018/09/18 Leave a comment

Despite his anti-immigration reputation, many of the points he makes in this interview are sensible:

PRIME Minister Scott Morrison has taken aim at Australia’s obsession with population growth, saying it is a “fairly irrelevant statistic” and immigration policy is far more nuanced than many of us realise.

Population growth surged to the top of the political agenda in August as the number of people living in Australia passed 25 million, with prominent figures such as entrepreneur Dick Smith warning our “way of life” would be under threat unless immigration was drastically reduced.

In an exclusive interview with news.com.au, Mr Morrison struck a very different tone.

He identified a pervasive myth at the heart of the immigration debate — that permanent migrants from overseas are the biggest strain on Australia’s infrastructure.

He said temporary migration and natural population growth, caused by the people who already live here having children, were far more significant factors.

“I’ve never bought this idea that the permanent immigration intake is the thing fuelling population growth. Because it’s not borne out in the actual maths,” Mr Morrison said.

“When it comes to population growth at the moment, there are 10 extra people that have got on the bus. Just over four of them are temporary migrants. Just under four of them were born here, a natural increase. And only two of them are permanent migrants.”

A huge chunk of that — 38 per cent — came from the natural increase category. Among the rest, temporary migrants easily outnumbered permanent migrants.

Importantly, growth varied wildly in different parts of the country — a point Mr Morrison felt had often been lost in the national population debate.

“You have got to understand what the population impacts are, not just in terms of how much the national population is growing by. That’s a fairly irrelevant statistic,” Mr Morrison said.

“What matters is what is it growing at in Melbourne; in the western suburbs; in the eastern suburbs. What is it doing in southeast Queensland? What is it doing in Townsville? What is it doing in Perth?”

In some areas, he said, the combination of natural population growth and interstate migration “eclipses international migration a couple of times over”.

“I mean, what are they going to do — stop the Victorians, or stop the New South Welshmen?”

Meanwhile, smaller cities such as Adelaide were simply “crying out” for more immigration, not less.

“The idea of average population growth is about as helpful as average rainfall. It has the same practical meaning,” he said.

“You can have very low levels of population growth that are actually being quite unhelpful in terms of what’s happening in the economy, or social cohesion.

“You can have high levels of it, which if it’s all pretty much skills based and everybody’s in a job and it’s focused on regional areas, it can be quite suitably absorbed.”

The fundamental problem for the government is that most immigrants want to live in our biggest cities, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, and far fewer are interested in staying in regional areas.

The ABS statistics we cited earlier showed 165,000 migrants, or about two-thirds of last year’s net migration figure, went to those two cities.

There is only so much the government can do about it, beyond placing conditions on some temporary visas, or rewarding temporary migrants who move to regional areas. Mr Morrison signalled he was open to expanding on those initiatives.

But he certainly can’t dictate where permanent migrants get to live.

Source: Prime Minister Scott Morrison exposes Australia’s big immigration myth

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Artist says Serena Williams U.S. Open cartoon ‘not about race.’ Experts disagree

2018/09/13 Leave a comment

Good background and discussion. My reaction looking at the cartoon is that it was racist:

If you follow tennis or Twitter, at all, you have probably seen the cartoon showing Serena Williams stomping on her racket in her U.S. Open loss on Saturday, with her features exaggerated into a caricature.

It is a product of Australia — from the Herald Sun, a tabloid in Melbourne owned by Rupert Murdoch. And it has set off an international storm of outrage, with athletes, fans and even J.K. Rowling denouncing the cartoon as sexist and racist.

How did it come to be?

On Tuesday, the artist, Mark Knight, and his boss tried to explain, arguing that their critics missed the point.

“The cartoon about Serena is about her poor behaviour on the day, not about race,” Knight said in an article on the Herald Sun website about the backlash.

The newspaper’s editor, Damon Johnston, backed him up.

“A champion tennis player had a mega-tantrum on the world stage, and Mark’s cartoon depicted that,” he said. “It had nothing to do with gender or race.”

Let’s examine that defence — with some history, context and a few experts in both cartooning and Australian race relations.

Who Is the Artist?

In Australia, Knight is a household name, known for being provocative. Politics and sports are his two main subjects and in defending his Williams cartoon on Twitter, he pointed to a previous critique of Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios as proof of his impartiality.

But Knight’s critics also point out that he has been accused of racist depictions before.

Earlier this year, he published a cartoon showing African teens fighting and causing destruction. It was an effort to criticize a local politician for banning the display of Sky News, a Murdoch-owned television news channel, from train platforms, but that is not how it was received.

Many Australians argue that Knight’s work reflects a wider pattern. Australia has never fully confronted its own history of racism, and scholars say the conversation around race in Australia is not as robust and layered as it is in the United States.

Ideas like implicit bias are rarely referenced or widely understood, for example, and many people say Knight’s employer deserves a fair share of the blame.

Murdoch’s News Corp. is the largest media company in Australia with assets that include more than 200 newspapers and magazines along with television channels and radio stations.

Many of these outlets, moving loosely together, have stirred racism for decades. And yet the tone and frequency have been intensifying more recently as their preferred party in Australia, the Liberals, have struggled politically.

The Murdoch press is not alone in the case of Williams. The sports media in Australia — in general dominated by white, older men — condemned Williams’ outburst while dismissing her argument that male players are given more leeway to misbehave.

“This is what Australia does,” said Shareena Clanton, an Aboriginal Australian actress and activist. “This is what it has always done to people of colour and, in particular, Black women who reach the top.”

“This whole cartoon is vile,” she added, saying that Williams’ opponent, Naomi Osaka, had been drawn as a white woman. “The fact that it was printed and passed the editor’s room speaks even more volumes about the landscape of our media here in Australia.”

Chris Kindred, a cartoonist in Richmond, Virginia, said it only confirmed what many Americans already knew. “It’s nothing new,” he said. “Australia has an issue confronting racism. Water is wet.”

Do the Artist’s Intentions Matter?

Knight and his editor have said that their motivations were pure.

“I drew this cartoon Sunday night after seeing the U.S. Open final, and seeing the world’s best tennis player have a tantrum and thought that was interesting,” Knight said in the statement, adding: “The world has just gone crazy.”

That explanation does not work for many cartoonists. Many said that working in the medium of cartooning means soaking up some of the history and that history is, flat out, inseparable from racism.

In interviews, other cartoonists went even further.

“Comics has a very long history of racist iconography, which includes blackface iconography in some of the most acclaimed cartoonists in history,” said Noah Berlatsky, author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

“Thomas Nast, Winsor McCay, Will Eisner, R. Crumb all used blackface imagery; Dr. Seuss did viciously racist anti-Japanese cartoons during World War II, and on and on,” Berlatsky said. “Using exaggerated racist imagery for comic effect is one of the most characteristic moves of the comic medium.”

It is hard to believe, he said, that Knight did not know this history. A spokesperson for the Herald Sun said Knight was too busy to be interviewed. But cartoonists who have tried to defend similar work in the past have argued that this history inoculates them — that it is just how cartooning works.

No way, Berlatsky said.

“The problem is that picking up racist iconography from 100 years ago in order to attack a Black woman still makes you racist, even if you think you’re participating in the tradition of comics rather than in the tradition of racism,” Berlatsky said. “The tradition of comics very often has been the same as the tradition of racism, and you can choose to push back against that, or you can be racist. Knight has chosen the second option.”

But Is It Fair to Hold an Australian to an American Standard?

Not being American, some cartoonists argue, is no excuse.

“While Australia has its own unique colonial history separate from the United States, the Western world, including Australia, share an esthetic history,” said Ronald Wimberly, an artist and designer known for his commentary on race and comics.

That history includes an effort “to dehumanize Black and brown people by degrading their features into symbols of the subhuman,” Wimberly said, offering a detailed critique of the U.S. Open cartoon, which he described as a failure on many levels:

“Is this cartoon racist? First, what is this cartoon doing? What’s the object? The text is a pretty clear, if flaccid, punchline regarding Serena Williams’ poor sportsmanship. It alludes to Serena being childish and angry (I’d argue that the text relies on racist, sexist tropes, too).

“But cartoons are a drawing medium. Now, I don’t want to blindly attribute intent, but setting aside the possibility that the cartoonist is just that poor a draughtsman, the drawings seem to ridicule Serena’s appearance. These aren’t very good likenesses. Mark isn’t using the medium to support his joke by, say, depicting Serena as a baby, in which case the pacifier should have been more prominently featured.

“Cartooning uses the shorthand of symbols to depict things. This is our craft. Using symbols. The pacifier is a symbol of immaturity, it alludes to a baby throwing a tantrum. But Mark is also drawing from a different history of symbols here. Racist and sexist symbols. Mark critiques the appearance and performance of Serena’s body in relation to race and sex, not her sportsmanship.”

Wimberly said there was only one conclusion that anyone who knows anything about cartooning or race could come to: “Whether or not Mark intended to draw on the racist history of the symbols, he has. His intent is irrelevant. Either he is a deliberately racist cartoonist — or an incompetent and careless cartoonist.”

Kindred, the cartoonist in Virginia, said that it ultimately comes down to quality, not just sensitivity.

“We want people to make better commentary,” he said. “Racism is a lazy joke to lean on.”

Source: Artist says Serena Williams U.S. Open cartoon ‘not about race.’ Experts disagree

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

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