Is the jig up with the mass-migration shell game?

Even elites are now finding it difficult to argue the mass migration status quo is sustainable

Photo by Rochelle Brown on Unsplash

Immigration in this country must be the greatest Ponzi scheme going. The requirement for more housing means we need more migrants to provide the skills and labour to build more houses. More migrants means we need more housing, which means we need more migrants. And so the scheme keeps rolling. The economists love it because Australia’s GDP keeps rising, but the GDP per person keeps falling, dragging down the standard of living for all but the very wealthy. 
Geoff Wannan, Dawes Point
Letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, 22/3/24

You know your country’s in trouble when Pauline Hanson is claiming vindication
Headline of Peter Hartcher’s Sydney Morning Herald column, 23/3/24

You’re not a racist if you oppose unchecked immigration, you’re a realist
Headline of Parnell Palme McGuinness Sydney Morning Herald column, 24/3/24   

Unstoppable electoral waves are approaching, but who will be washed away?
Headline of Sean Kelly Sydney Morning Herald column, 25/3/24

Let’s get the requisite throat-clearing out of the way.

I’m the son of migrant. I was, for a time, married to the daughter of a migrant.

Many, probably most, of my friends have at least one parent who was a migrant or are themselves first-generation immigrants.

Like most of those who’ve recently expressed concern about unprecedentedly high migration levels, I have no issue with Australia welcoming a sensible amount of migrants, including refugees. I’m not – not consciously, anyway – pining for a return for the days of the White Australia policy.   

Mass-migration sceptics may be solely motivated by xenophobia. But I’d implore Right-leaning Big Australia enthusiasts and Left-leaning diversity-lovers to consider the possibility that concerns about mass/uncontrolled immigration aren’t always and everywhere an expression of the vile racism evil Caucasians putatively harbour for ‘The Other’.

As an aside, I’ve always found it bizarre that ‘white people’ and Anglosphere/Western European nations get so much stick for their bigotry given they’ve agreed to absorb vast oceans of people from Africa, Asia, India, the Middle East and South America.  

I’ve long wondered why (a) countries that accept few or no migrants (i.e. most of them) aren’t held to the same standards as Anglosphere and Western European nations, (b) why mass migration isn’t more widely embraced if it’s as wonderful as its spruikers claim (why isn’t China importing hundreds of millions of Africans to stave off its looming ‘demographic disaster’, for instance?) and (c) why so many non-Caucasian people are desperate to migrate to Anglosphere or European nations supposedly filled with KKK sympathisers boiling over with racial resentment.

But I don’t want to yet again focus on the dubiousness of many of the claims corporate and cultural elites make for immigration.

Neither do I wish to once again highlight the reckless high-handedness of the top 20 per cent in consistently cockblocking the 80 per cent of the population that desperately wants migration reduced.

I’m not even going to go over all the reasons why Leftists are being even more muddleheaded than usual in championing new goals (open borders and cosmopolitanism) that inevitably undermine many of the old goals the Left traditionally cared about (e.g. a sustainable welfare state, decent wages for workers, social solidarity, affordable housing, preventing “hard-right populist movements” gaining traction etc).

Instead, I’m simply going to note how the public debate has shifted.

Baby step #1 – Elites admit they might have dropped the ball on housing and infrastructure

I suspect well-connected and well-travelled cosmopolitan globalists, such as the political and international editor of the Nine broadsheets, genuinely struggle to comprehend why those of a humbler station aren’t as enthusiastic about immigration as they are.  

Judging by his recent columns, Peter Hatcher believes it’s entirely logical, for a range of self-evident demographic, economic and geopolitical reasons, for Australia to welcome the maximum possible number of migrants. It simply doesn’t seem to occur to him that, to use David Goodhart’s terminology, that the ‘Somewheres’ might view the world differently to the ‘Anywheres’.  

Hatcher sails close to the ‘nutpicking’ wind by throwing his punches at Hanson rather than more thoughtful immigration restrictionists. Such as Dick Smith and Judith Sloan locally, or the likes of Konstantin Kisin or Matt Goodwin in the UK. Nonetheless, Hatcher at least seems willing to concede mass migration has caused some headaches:

But where the population pressure is felt most acutely is in housing. The Liberals’ opposition spokesperson, Dan Tehan, seized on the immigration numbers. “We have never seen this many people arrive in Australia in one year,” he said. “Australians will rightly ask, where are all these people going to live? We are in the middle of a housing crisis. We are in the middle of a rental crisis. People can’t see their GP. Yet [Labor’s] big Australia continues to get bigger”…

But while the politics is a bit ordinary, the problem is very real. A long-running housing shortage has become acute. We have priced a generation out of the ability to buy a home. It’s a grave national failure. When Hanson claims vindication it’s a bad day for our country… Yet she’s right that the last year’s immigration intake is too high for the country’s housing stock… This sort of inflammatory racism is death to Australia’s social harmony and national functioning. Yet it’s just a small foretaste of the divisive, right-wing populism that will follow unless the country fixes its housing problems, and its accompanying problems of missing infrastructure.

Look around the world. Immigration is the incendiary that has fired hard-right populist movements.

As belated and begrudging as admissions from high-profile figures such as Hatcher are, they should nonetheless be seen as cause for wild celebration.

For an interminably long time, arguably from the dawn of multiculturalism back in the 1970s, it has been verboten in polite society to notice migration has costs as well as benefits.   

Granted, working-class and lower-middle-class types might ring talkback radio programs or write to tabloid newspapers to vent. But up until extremely recently, those in Hatcher’s class viewed even the slightest deviation from the Approved Narrative – mass migration and multiculturalism are all sunshine and rainbows; migrants are incapable of doing anything other than culturally and economically enriching those nations fortunate enough to welcome them – as damning evidence of retrograde Hansonite tendencies.

But even the most cosmopolitan of Australian globalists are now being forced to acknowledge that if national governments were going invite, oh I don’t know, 700,000 migrants a year to pitch up, they should have been more willing to tax, borrow and spend.

Baby step #2 –A decades-long political consciousness-raising exercise

If the political class throughout the Anglosphere and Western Europe were going to override the clearly stated wishes of 70%-80% of voters, it might be assumed they would do everything possible to keep a lid on anti-immigration sentiment. By splashing the cash around on housing and infrastructure, for instance.  

I wasn’t around at the time, but I gather this is how things worked when my mother arrived in Australia in the early 1960s. Federal, state and, I’m assuming, local governments heavily subsidised housing construction costs. (These were the decades when many of the suburbs that now ring Australia’s cities were developed.)

That meant even low-income workers could usually afford at least one home. It wasn’t uncommon for the more frugal and industrious migrants to end up with both a family home and an investment property or two.

From 1945-1979 Anglosphere governments took a ‘Big Government’, nation-building approach to most issues, including migration. As I’ve noted once or twice in these digital pages, Anglosphere governments have taken a much more free-market, devil-take-the-hindmost approach since circa 1980.  

So, imagine you’re a contemporary political leader.

You understand you’ll overwhelmingly be judged on the (apparent) state of the economy. As it happens, there’s one lever you can keep pulling that will ensure the economic figures continue to look rosy. But as always in life, there’s a catch. Those hundreds of thousands of migrants you are letting into the country every year won’t just work and consume 24/7 – they will also need houses to live in, public transport to commute on, hospitals to go to when they get sick, and so on.

But if your government spends lots of money subsidising the construction of homes and building infrastructure (and training up locals, rather than importing foreign workers), that beautiful set of figures doesn’t look quite so beautiful anymore.  

What to do?

Fortunately, there’s a workaround. Once again there’s an enormous future cost involved, but you’re probably not going to be around long enough to have to worry about it. You welcome 700,000 migrants a year but only build sufficient housing and infrastructure for 70,000.

In business terms, what you’re doing is ‘sweating the assets’ and kicking the can down the road. While you’re in charge – and if you’re an Australian or British PM, you have good reason to fear you’ll be rolled before the next election – keeping the migration pedal to metal will ensure those GDP growth figures continue to appear reassuring.

Unfortunately, all your recent predecessors – on both the Left and Right – will have been following the same playbook, meaning there’s already a punishing housing and infrastructure deficit on the day you get the Top Job.

So why should you be the one to cop all the political pain involved in increasing government spending and/or decreasing immigration? After all, this will inevitably antagonise a range of powerful interests. Surely, the status quo – massive intakes and massive underinvestment – can be maintained for just a little bit longer? Granted, the masses seem to be growing increasingly restive, but do you really want to risk angering those corporate and cultural elites that might mobilise to destroy your leadership?  

The problem with kicking the can down the road is that the road inevitably runs out. In this instance, you end up in a situation where there are far too many people chasing far too few homes, with entirely predictable results.

At this juncture, politicians have little choice but to acknowledge mass migration has deranged Anglosphere housing markets. But with breathtaking shamelessness, these politicians have consistently argued the solution to all the problems caused by mass migration is even more mass migration. “More migrants means we need more housing, which means we need more migrants,” in Geoff Wannan’s Hellerian formulation.

Migration-debate cognoscenti understand the incentive structure politicians are responding to. They know why Anglosphere politicians – Sui generis Trump excepted – have continued to champion mass legal and sometimes even mass illegal immigration.

But it seems voters used to take politicians’ claims about, for instance, Australia’s miraculously recession-free economy at face value and were oblivious to the sleight of hand involved in this sugar hit. (The impressive economic performance of Australia in recent decades appears somewhat less impressive once you learn how many per capita recessions it’s gone through.) 

But even the lowest of low-information voters now seem to have realised that the seemingly impressive economic figures that are constantly bandied are little more than vanity metrics.

Many Australians believe their quality of life has declined rather than improved in recent decades, despite all the economic-activity-generating migration that has taken place. Few voters in the bottom four quintiles of the income distribution now believe the answer to Australia’s – or America’s, Canada’s, France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s, Great Britain’s, Spain’s, New Zealand’s – problems is to bring in even more immigrants.

Which brings me to my final point.

 Big step #3 – What kind of country do you want?

For a century and a half after the white settlement of Australia, the large majority of this country’s migrants came from the UK or Ireland. Unsurprisingly, Australia was cringe-inducingly British, as well as somewhat Irish Catholic, during this era.

After WWII lots of Greeks and Italians migrated and (eventually) made Australian society more Mediterranean.

As an another aside, when I was growing up, nobody blamed the young people’s housing difficulties on their weakness for avocado-on-toast café breakfasts. That’s because (a) there were far fewer cafés around and (b) avocado-on-toast wasn’t a thing. (The late, great Bill Granger didn’t kick off the ‘Aussie café’ growth industry until the mid-1990s.)    

Likewise, the many Vietnamese who’ve arrived in Australia since the mid-1970s have made Australia more Vietnamese. Similarly, the Chinese and Indians who have arrived in large numbers in recent decades are currently making the country more Chinese and Indian.

Those who are pro-migration invariably point out that the natives almost always freak out when a new wave of migrants shows up, and their fears generally turn out to be overblown. I’ll concede that point. But I’ll go on to note the climax of the boy who cried wolf story does involve a wolf eating a boy.

Even if you accept that mass migration has worked out reasonably well so far – at least in nations such as Australia, Canada, the US and New Zealand – that doesn’t mean it will necessarily continue to do so forever. What might be termed ‘Keynesian-era migration’ differed substantially to the turbocharged ‘Neoliberal migration’ of recent decades.

Here’s how:

*Levels of migration, especially after the initial post-war surge, were lower and better controlled

*Goodwill was by no means universal, but many native-born Australians (and, I presume, Americans, Canadians and Kiwis) were favourably inclined to those Brits and Europeans fleeing their impoverished and devastated homelands in the wake of WWII. For obvious reasons, the situation is more complicated with Vietnamese migrants. But this later wave of migrants did have some powerful supporters, including the Catholic Church   

*Migrants could reasonably expect to be able to live out the Australian/American/British/Canadian/Kiwi dream of landing a secure, full-time job and earning an income sufficient to buy a home and raise a family  

*Migrants were forced, or at least incentivised, to assimilate to some degree back when the world was far less globalised, communications technology was far more primitive, and university-educated Caucasians were far less Oikophobic.

Assimilationist policies are now frowned upon. But European nations have discovered the only thing worse than assimilationist migration policies are non-assimilationist ones. Especially ones that encourage migrants to view their values as superior to those of the host culture, and to ghettoise themselves in parallel societies.

So, yes, people like me have in the past overestimated the deleterious effects of mass migration and/or the arrival of migrants from a non-traditional source country. But the way the migration system works now is not the way it used to work.

And this brings us to the room-filling elephant everybody involved in the migration debate is constantly dancing around – migration irrevocably changes societies. A critical mass of Anglosphere and Western European voters used to believe those changes were, on balance, positive. Or at least not negative enough to get too worked up about.

As both sides of the migration debate would presumably acknowledge, support for migration has collapsed as the realisation has increasingly dawned among voters that they’ve been sold a bill of goods.  

This is the issue Palme McGuinness has been courageous enough to raise. Last weekend, she informed her readers a Syrian-born German political scientist had made much the same arguments as Douglas ‘The Strange Death of Europe’ Murray (currently touring Australia with Josh Szeps of Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps).  

Palme McGuinness is the daughter of a German migrant. Bassam Tibi is a high-profile German intellectual who was moved to ponder clashing cultural values after a spate of honour killings. Here's the money quote:

At the end of the 90s, [Tibi] coined the German word Leitkultur, meaning (and I’m translating here from Tibi’s own definition) the shared and guiding culture created by people from different cultures who come together in a community of shared values… He warns that it is a betrayal of those who choose the values of the West when intolerance is allowed to take hold in the name of cultural diversity… If we want to continue to be a great migrant nation, testing every idea against how it contributes to a tolerant Leitkultur matters a lot.    

I’ve run out of time and space to get into it, but sooner or later Australians – of all backgrounds – are going to have a difficult national conversation about what our Leitkultur should be.