Look at the evidence: slowing immigration would be a smart move

Are we 100 per cent certain that ever greater diversity will lead to ever-more (economic and geopolitical) strength and greater social capital?

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

More migrants are coming to Australia right now, on a net, per capita basis, than to any other major advanced country… in recent decades our migrant intake has consistently outpaced almost everywhere else.
Professor Steven Hamilton and Ryan Edwards in the Sydney Morning Herald

Elite self-awareness is poor and self-regard is high. That explains why most of the elites have trouble sorting out the real attitudes of democratic Australia and why they are resented. Any idea that an astute opposition leader such as Dutton will not tap into this sentiment is fatuous.
Paul Kelly in The Australian

Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I’d much prefer to be explaining why I’m pessimistic about Marc Andreessen’s techno-optimist view of the future this week. Unfortunately, the open-border activists are back to their old tricks. Given vanishingly few people in the legacy media (shout-out to Judith Sloan!) are brave/reckless/disagreeable enough to represent the views of the seven in 10 Australians who are willing to admit to pollsters that maybe it would be nice if federal governments (of all political persuasions) calmed down with the mass migration, I must once again plough a lonely furrow.  

Could even progressives be having doubts?
I suspect even some youthful, and not so youthful, Far Leftists are now beginning to have unwanted thoughts about the wisdom of continuing to bring in masses of wonderfully exotic foreigners. ‘New Australians’ who are, of course, entirely devoid of the sinfulness – ableism, cisheteronormativity, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism – so regrettably evident in those evil “white people” descended from Brits and Europeans.

For instance, even readers of the ‘right on’ Nine papers appear to be tiring of not being able to rent, let alone buy, properties in the fashionable, Green-voting, inner-city suburbs. I just Googled it, and the median property price for the Inner West Sydney suburb I’m about to be priced out of is $1,750,000 for a house and $900,000 for a unit. (That will maybe get you a ‘snug’ unit with two to three bedrooms, one bathroom and possibly a car space.)

If you want to buy a family-sized freestanding home with a backyard, don’t expect any change from two, or maybe even three, million bucks. The average rent for units and apartments – in a suburb with lots of tiny studios and one-bedders – is $695 a week. That’s roughly half the take-home salary of the average Australian.*

How are those Australians who clear less than $75K (i.e. most of them) meant to buy properties that, more often than not, cost a million dollars or more? How can they even afford to rent such properties? Unless you’re a high-income earner yourself or had the good sense to be born to one, you’ll need to spend many years saving up that $100,000-plus deposit, all while paying exorbitant rent.

But, hey, I’m sure if you cut back on those avocado-and-toast café breakfasts and live with your parents until you’re well into your forties, you’ll eventually realise your home-owning dreams.

Multiculturalism’s shadow side
It seems odd for nations with severe housing shortages to encourage millions of migrants to come in and make themselves at home.

I’m not making a racial argument here. I’m not even making a political one (yet). I’m simply making a logistical one. Where are all the current citizens and new arrivals meant to live? And how are the migrants meant to find jobs that match their skills?  

If I’ve learnt anything after half a century on the planet, it’s that few things are either all upside or all downside. My bullshit detector always flickers to life whenever anybody attempts to convince me otherwise.

Since the mid-1970s, the general public has been firmly instructed that mass migration is all tasty rainbows and folk-dancing unicorns. That Anglosphere and Western European nations would only ever be “culturally enriched” by migrants; that high levels of migration would be all pro and no con; that Australia/America/Canada/Great Britain/New Zealand were and would forever remain “the most successful multicultural societies in the world”.

Anglosphere and Western European nations have embarked on a vast social experiment in recent decades, importing enormous numbers of people who grew up in very different societies with very different worldviews.

All things considered, things haven’t gone too badly. So far. But Anglosphere and Western European nations haven’t been existentially threatened since 1945. Are we entirely confident they will cohere in the face of a savage economic downturn, major military conflict or even just another pandemic?

For instance, what happens to the many millions of Chinese, and their offspring, who’ve migrated to the West over the last 30 years if the Cold War between China and the US heats up? For that matter, what happens to all those first-, second- and third-generation Japanese, Koreans, Malays, Thais and Vietnamese who are likely to be mistaken for Chinese by non-Asian citizens of Anglosphere and European nations?

And what about all the ancient and intractable ethnic and religious conflicts that have been imported into Western nations in recent decades? Are we entirely sure the West hasn’t been storing up trouble for the future by socially engineering increasingly multi-ethnic societies made up of groups that have a long history of being at each other’s throats? Or have humans in 2023 evolved to the point that they are impervious to the siren song of tribalism?

Nothing to see here
As an aside, was I the only one bemused by culturally cringing commentators insisting Australia would be reduced, South Africa-style, to international pariah status if the Voice didn’t get up then, literally days later, being all, “Move along please, nothing to see here!” when around 1000 vibrantly diverse Australians gathered to chant “Gas the Jews”?

I consume more foreign media than most and can assure my compatriots that 99 per cent of the global population was oblivious to the Voice. Non-Australians pay as much attention to Australia as Australians pay to Papua New Guinea. That is, zero, unless something spectacular happens. The Voice didn’t fit into that category. But a bloodthirsty mob gathering outside the nation’s most iconic structure to demand that the gas chambers be reopened sure did.

Let’s not fuck this up  
Many Australians have a parent, or at least a grandparent, who arrived here from an impoverished, repressive or chaotic part of the world. Those who aren’t migrants are often surprised and perplexed that migrants – and the offspring of migrants – tend to be far less enthused about mass migration than ‘native’ Australians, Americans, Brits, Canadians, Kiwis etc.

Migrants who are opposed to high levels of legal migration and enraged by any level of illegal immigration are often accused of wanting to “pull up the ladder behind them”.

In my experience, this charge is overly cynical.

Many migrants – even many of the in-demand, highly educated ones – have ‘lived experience’ of nations that are, shall we say, less than perfect. They understand better than most that many people don’t live in civilised societies. They are sceptical of the notion that new arrivals will abandon their religious beliefs, ethnic hostilities and value systems immediately upon setting foot on Australian/American/British/Canadian/New Zealand soil. (If only because they know they didn’t abandon their own beliefs, hatreds and non-WEIRD value systems as soon as they stepped off the plane or boat.)

I once interviewed John Birmingham (check out his Substack here:

Alien Sideboob

) about his rollicking history of Sydney, Leviathan. Birmingham leans to the Left. I gather he is, like me, the son of a ten-pound Pom. If memory serves, he explained the widespread phenomenon of migrants being cautious about migration to me thusly: “They came here and found paradise. They don’t want other people turning up and fucking it all up.”  

That’s my sole concern about unsustainably high levels of immigration. That business, cultural and political elites are going to fuck up the Anglosphere and Western Europe by continuing to bring in far more more migrants than societies can possibly be expected to metabolise.

Even those elite individuals who are all in on the debatable proposition that “diversity is our strength” presumably believe that there is some level of immigration that is too high. Even if they don’t, they can at least probably concede that elites continuing to import vast numbers of foreigners against the repeatedly stated wishes of the majority will inevitably result in a reactionary backlash that won’t be pretty.

So, this may be an appropriate juncture for them to counsel their more short-sighted peers to “yank the handbrake”.  

Right of reply
Then again, maybe I’m being overly negative.

After all, according to the powers-that-be, there’s nothing to worry about and “Cutting immigration would be a mistake for Australia”.

You should be able to access the (soft-paywalled) article I’m referencing, but to summarise:

*Unprecedently high levels of immigration shouldn’t be cause for concern. Regardless of any pitfalls. Which don’t really exist anyway, once you look into it
That’s because “fearmongering about our migration intake is, variously, straight-up wrong, premised on faulty logic, or at best based on decidedly mixed evidence”.

Yep, you guessed it, more migrants arriving always and everywhere leads to more jobs, housing, well-functioning public services and wealth for everybody!

*Immigration always “grows the economy” in a way that improves everyone’s quality of life
As Hamilton and Ryan aver:

Some have gone so far as to suggest that while migration can increase aggregate GDP, it also increases the population so has at best a neutral effect on GDP per capita. For what it’s worth, based on the available evidence, the IMF and OECD say exactly the opposite. The IMF states that “immigration significantly increases GDP per capita in advanced economies, that both high and lower-skilled migrants can raise labour productivity, and that an increase in the migrant share benefits the average income per capita of both the bottom 90 per cent and the top 10 per cent of earners…”

Hmmm, so I guess that means “the bottom 90 cent” of earners in Anglosphere societies have been making out like bandits for the last 30 years? That seems a tad counterintuitive. But who am I to question the IMF and OECD? After all, it’s not like those institutions have an agenda.  

*Migrant Australians are smarter, better-educated, more entrepreneurial and harder working than non-migrant Australians
This definitely doesn’t mean migrants will outcompete native-born Australians in the labour market. But it definitely does mean Australia will be more productive and hence more prosperous if it lets in many more migrants.

It’s unthinkable that those productivity gains will be captured by “the top 10 per cent of earners” rather than automatically flowing through to the bottom 90 per cent. Who, as Hamilton and Ryan have already conclusively established, have been living increasingly leisurely, propertied and joyful lives since circa 1980. Thanks to neoliberalism in general, and the much freer movement of labour and capital across borders in particular!   

Never mind the quality, feel the width
At the end of their ‘More immigration will solve all Australia’s problems and turn it into a supersized Singapore’ rave**, Hamilton and Edwards do begrudgingly concede that mass migrations might just have some – scarcely worth mentioning – drawbacks.

But as they breezily point out:

Rather than pointing to these costs to justify yanking the handbrake, perhaps we should instead advocate for better policies to mitigate the negatives. The burgeoning YIMBY movement has shown masterfully how this can be done.

Sure, Anglosphere and European nations might not have built sufficient housing or infrastructure for decades. But no need to worry about that because the “burgeoning YIMBY movement” will “masterfully” solve all those problems in the coming months, if not the coming weeks/days/hours.

All good then. I stand corrected.

*According to the ABS, as of May, 2023, “average weekly ordinary time earnings for full-time adults” was $1838.10 a week. That’s pre-tax – the everyman Aussie ends up with maybe $1400 in the hand a week to cover their housing (and all other) costs. As stats nerds will have already noted, I’ve referenced the average, not median, salary. Half of all full-time workers in Australia make $65K or less a year.)

**Singapore, like most of the world’s nations, has long been extremely selective about who it allows to migrate (temporarily or permanently). It currently has a population slightly north of five million.

BTW, I often wonder why, if mass migration is such a panacea, it’s not more popular outside of the Anglosphere and Western Europe. I guess that’s just because the likes of Lee Kwan Yew were never as smart as most economics professors and property developers.