Multiculturalism has failed: let’s cut immigration, refugee intake
Sherry Sufi
The Australian
12:00AM July 16, 2018
John Howard, as prime minister, removed references to multiculturalism when he renamed the Department of Immigration more than a decade ago. His critics wondered, what’s in a name? The issue wasn’t the term but the principle that underlies it.
There have been two multicultural experiments in history. The first was empires. That failed. The second is mass immigration. That’s on the verge of failure.
Empires were still around last century, but due to constant wars they didn’t have fixed borders. In defeat, the borders shrank; in victory, they expanded. New territory meant absorbing new nations. This meant constant shifts in demographics. Tensions led to strife between people.
Jewish struggles for independence against the Roman Empire more than 2000 years ago show how ancient is the human desire for self-preservation. From the Maccabean Revolt before Jesus Christ to the Bar Kokhba revolt after him, Jewish people had long sought independence. It took until 1948 to be free at last.
The Ottoman Empire ruled over Macedonians, Albanians, Bulgars, Greeks, Arabs, Jews and Armenians among others, but the rulers were Turks. It crumbled after World War I.
The British Empire ruled three-quarters of the planet. India was once its “jewel in the crown”. Despite his British education, Mahatma Gandhi led a nonviolent revolt to oust India’s British rulers.
The Soviet Union was the last to crumble, as late as the 1990s. Estonians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks and a dozen other nations were brought together under one state, but their rulers were Russians. The Soviet Union is gone.
The age of empires was over. What replaced it was the nation state. Empires over two centuries broke down into independent countries with their own flags, anthems, emblems and jurisdictions.
Unlike shrinking and expanding empires that underwent constant demographic shifts, nation states have demarcated borders. Where Spain ends, Portugal starts. Where India ends, Pakistan starts. Where the US ends, Mexico starts.
This grand tessellation of nations remains the formula for the 193 UN member states. Global consensus supports it on the basis that each and every nation has the right to sovereignty and self-preservation. But mass immigration undermines the nation state. Non-Western countries understand this and choose to opt out accordingly. Yet the West continues to participate in this second multicultural experiment.
Our academic and political elites often remind us that absorbing more people is “good for the economy” because of more lower-skilled workers, higher gross domestic product and cheap labour. Although tendentious at best, even if this were construed as a net benefit, the reality is that this motivation is driven by an unrelenting guilt from our colonial past.
What seems like rational policy is actually based on emotion. Mass immigration defeats the whole point of nation states replacing empires. Instead of transcending tribalistic tendencies, mass immigration provides the seedbed for inter-ethnic hostilities and re-creates the conflict-prone environments of imperial times. Except back then, the rulers came to the ruled by force. Today the ruled come to the rulers by choice.
Nowhere are conflicted loyalties more pronounced than in the case of imams within Australia’s Muslim community who waste disproportionate amounts of time complaining about imaginary “white privilege”, “racism” and “Islamophobia”. In 2015, for example, the grand mufti of Australia said racism and Islamophobia were the “causative factors” behind terrorism in Australia.
Despite the obvious fact that Islam is not a race, such misguided claims seem all too common among mainstream Islamic leaders. If their efforts were spent combating the conspiracy theories about the US and Israel that continue to paralyse Muslim public opinion, they would do more to stop terrorism than anything a government policy could accomplish.
The Romans were pagan, the Ottomans were Muslim, the Brits were Christian and the Soviets were communist. The first multicultural experiment failed for all equally. No societal framework can sustain itself for long if it ends up becoming a laboratory of conflicted loyalties. Australia still participates in the second experiment. It’s time to opt out.
There is a time and place to appreciate diversity and to be charitable to those from beyond our shores. Australia has been, and still is, one of the most generous nations on earth to immigrants from all walks of life.
But as the age-old adage goes: charity begins at home. Self-preservation comes first. The way forward is to scale back our annual intake of legal immigrants from 190,000 to half that.
The reduced intake should be from regions with compatible values and goals.
Our refugee intake should also be scaled back from 13,750 to half that, with a focus on those most in need. Resettling the victims of hate crimes from the rural carnage in South Africa should remain a priority, for example.
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