Baizuo Confused as Australia Considers Sane Immigration Policy

Reading the NYTimes on immigration is like watching 5 blind men describe an elephant.

NYTimes: Why Has Australia Fallen Out of Love With Immigration?

Five days after 50 Muslims in New Zealand were killed in an attack attributed to an Australian white supremacist, Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, unveiled a plan he said would address a fundamental challenge to the nation.

But it was not a proposal to combat hate groups and Islamophobia. It was a cut to immigration.

The government’s plan, which had been in the works for months

Whenever Baizuo diversity policy creates ultraviolence, they immediately double-down on diversity. Why would the Australian government continue with a long-term immigration reform effort? Don't they want to virtue signal?

Now, amid a global backlash against immigration that has upended politics in the United States, Britain and much of Europe, even Australia is reversing course, turning away from a policy of welcoming skilled foreigners that helped fuel decades of economic growth — and transformed a nation once closed to nonwhite immigrants into a multicultural society.

Mr. Morrison presented the move as a reaction to crowding in the nation’s largest cities, which has led to congested commutes and costlier housing. “This plan is about protecting the quality of life of Australians right across our country,” he said.

Australia economy boomed for decades because it sells resources to China. That's the Australian miracle, that and the same debt buildup you see all over the developed and developing world.

More importantly, the main argument in favor of immigration is higher GDP, but higher GDP comes with trade-offs such as higher housing costs, more pollution, crowded schools and depending on the quality of immigration, higher crime and welfare use. If you don't value GDP above all else, the case for immigration goes sour relatively quickly. When people experience rise in income, they typically move to less populated areas, with more living space per person and even erect walls to keep people out.

Such concerns are widespread as views in the country have turned sharply against population growth over the past year. There is worry, though, that these “quality-of-life” complaints have been amplified by — or perhaps have masked — a deeper ambivalence about a new wave of non-European immigration, especially from Muslim countries, along with Africa and Asia.

There’s no denying the rapid pace of change, nor its benefits. Australia’s population has grown by nearly 40 percent, from 18 million to 25 million, since the 1990s, and economists argue that the nation’s record-breaking 27 years without a recession would have been impossible if not for surging immigration.

Nope, it's China, not immigration. On a per capita quality-of-life measure, I'd reckon the average Australian would be better off if immigration was near zero since the 1990s.

Most of the 4.7 million foreigners who have arrived since 1980 have been skilled migrants, especially since 2004, when an average of more than 350,000 students and skilled workers arrived each year, according to government figures.
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According to the 2016 census, more than one in four Australians were born overseas, compared to 13.7 percent of the population in the United States and 14 percent in Britain. And six out of the top 10 source countries are now in Asia, with immigrants from China (509,558 people) and India (455,385) leading the way.

The United States exploded into civil war and violence the last two times immigration was this high, and it also banned immigration for 40 years. Australia's foreign born population is double the rate that triggers social breakdown in the USA. Australia's response thus far is extremely restrained.

Many Australians say it is time for these trends to end. In one recent poll, more than two-thirds said their country no longer needed more people. As recently as 2010, a majority of Australians disagreed with that statement.

Mr. Morrison and his Liberal Party — which has often used anti-immigrant sentiment to stir its conservative base — clearly believe that immigration will be a winning issue for them in the national election on May 18.

The government has slowed visa approvals, and plans to cut annual immigration by 30,000 people, to 160,000 a year, a reduction greater than any since the early 1980s, according to archival data.

Still far too high, especially if China's economy slows enough to trigger a recession.

Experts examining polling data and census figures have found that Australian frustration over immigration is focused around general themes: the pace of population growth (1.6 percent nationwide last year, compared to 0.7 percent for the United States) and perceptions around who wins and loses because of it.

With a landmass as big as the continental United States and one-tenth the population, Australia is one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries. It is also among the most urbanized, and it nurses a culture of high expectations; even many city dwellers expect a backyard.

"Hey you evil racist Australians who like your backyards, you live in shipping containers on feces covered streets and like it! Virtuous Baizuo live in gated communities with high walls and demographic profiles that look like they were taken from a white nationalist forum."

But Nicholas Biddle, an economist at the Australian National University who oversaw a major poll on immigration late last year, found that people living in the places most strained by population growth are not the ones most likely to demand curbs on immigration.

When Mr. Biddle mapped, using census data, the characteristics of those who were opposed to population growth and immigration, for example, he found that none of the areas in the top 20 percent of opposition to population growth and immigration were in Sydney or Melbourne.

Instead, based on the nationwide polling, the place where residents were least likely to be opposed to population growth was Surry Hills, an inner suburb of Sydney where housing prices have skyrocketed and traffic can be suffocating.

Maybe the skyrocketing home prices factor in? Also, what's the demographic profile of those residents? Do they skew towards those backyard loving Aussies or towards foreigners who are used to living in shoebox apartments back home?

But even some of the most frustrated commuters called not for fewer people, but for improved infrastructure, microcities outside Sydney’s center or changes in workplace culture that might limit rush-hour commuting.

"Called for." As you as you put the bill in front of them, they will scream.

Some residents of the area justify their opposition by asking whether Australia has enough water to support a larger population, an element of the country’s immigration debate since the 1980s, before desalination plants became more common.

Environmentalism is racist.

But there are also people like Stephen Ryan, 69, a retired power station worker who was not shy about arguing that Australia was better off when its immigrants were mostly from England.

“The Arab people, they don’t want to do anything,” he said. “They just want to go on the dole. That’s just the way I see it.”

It is the kind of attitude that, according to many immigrants in Australia, still shapes the discussion around population growth in a country that barred nonwhite immigrants until 1971.

The rise of right-wing politicians like Fraser Anning, a senator who blamed Muslim immigration for the New Zealand attacks, and Pauline Hanson, who once wore a burqa in Parliament to protest Islam, has pushed racism into mainstream public discussion.

“In the last few years, we have seen politicians state that people had a right to be bigots,” said Tim Soutphommasane, a former race commissioner in Australia and a professor at the University of Sydney. “There’s been a creeping normalization of far-right political ideas.”

Nothing validates the far-right more than making common sense development and environmental protection into far-right policies. The Baizuo have triggered a self-reinforcing cycle whereby they create a backlash to their extremist policies and then classify ever larger swaths of the population as Nazis/far-right. As a result, the center of politics accelerates to the right because they provide ever growing cover. If you're a racist Nazi for wanting to reduce immigration from 200,000 to 150,000, but you have a nagging worry maybe zero is the best number, you suffer nothing by shifting your policy to zero immigration. You become a double-secret racist Nazi.

On a local level, two competing visions of Australia are essentially fighting for votes: the Australia longing for a nostalgic past, and the Australia trying to figure out the next phase of integration for a more globalized nation.

Globalism is collapsing. Those trying to figure out the next phase of integration might as well work on Russia's next 5-year plan.

Young political candidates like Kadira Pethiyagoda are at the forefront of potential change. Mr. Pethiyagoda, 39, who immigrated from Sri Lanka and served as an Australian diplomat, is running for the Labor Party in Melbourne.

“Services are being cut, wages haven’t gone up, the cost of living is increasing. People are being squeezed,” he said. “Politicians are pointing to all these problems, trying to pretend the cause of this is only immigration.”

...“It just makes me feel confident that maybe somebody who understands the challenges that migrant families face can actually accurately represent our views and actions,” said Yvonne Maringa, 35, an English immigrant of Zimbabwean descent. “I think there’s a limited understanding still of migrant communities and their needs.”

That last quote encapsulates the whole issue. Native Australians want their government to work for them, not for migrants. Immigration was sold as helping natives, but instead the migrants demand their needs be met as life deteriorates for natives.

Baizuo have sown political conflict and division. The broadly-defined right (anyone who is nationalist and anti-immigration) will ring up political victory after victory until diversity reverses through assimilation or emigration.