Australia needs an immigration vision, not just a shrinking target

The Trump regime has just issued a new national security strategy taking aim at Europe for being non-Trumpist. Europe is apparently faced with “civilizational erasure” because it is being turned into a zone of “strife” by migration policies, so that it will be “unrecognizable” in two decades, while some NATO members will become “majority non-European”. America under Trump is now overtly conducting a racially based white nationalist policy.

Well, duh. Do I not know, I hear you say, that your time is valuable?

Yes, but it’s the next step that moves us into the difficult places. If America’s foreign policy is now to be ruled by an evangelical hostility to immigration from non-European nations, wherever it occurs, where does it leave Australia? And where does it leave Australia’s own politics? Is anyone here prepared to stand up for immigration?

We could, I suppose, take some comfort from the fact that Australia is an immigrant nation, with about a third of us born overseas (mostly in the UK, though). In a climate of worldwide xenophobic hysteria – the venom that powers Trump in America, Reform in the UK, and Marine Le Pen in France – that may not be enough.

After all, Trump’s attacks on immigrants are just about the most popular part of his platform (at a rating of net −7 nationwide, as opposed to −32 on inflation). His attacks on immigrants eating American cats got him elected. Even now, his attacks on immigrants appeal to immigrants.

A recent New York Times poll of immigrants in America found that 60 per cent of them approved of Trump’s harsh measures at the Mexican border. You might think that that meant these people disapproved of others not going through the official hoops – jumping the queue, colouring outside the lines, being boat people – but 47 per cent of undocumented immigrants wanted the border nailed down against people exactly like them.

Having ICE thugs pull people off the streets for deportation is less popular, but 24 per cent of the undocumented backed even that – supporting measures that could any day now affect their own status directly, like turkeys voting for Christmas. Across the world, immigration is today so unpopular that it can induce almost anybody – citizens, migrants, asylum seekers, politicians, economists – to trash their own best interests and join the throng of people with rocks in their hands calling for scapegoats. Last year’s migrants can already see the advantages in pulling up the ladder.

Here in Australia we’ve reached consensus that immigration is too high, and both parties promise to reduce it. This has moved the debate onto a surreal level of unspecificity. Whenever any politician is asked what changes they’re advocating, the answer is that they’ll cut the figure until it’s not ‘too high’. As practically nobody knows what the current level of immigration is or what it’s composed of, we can carry on whinging about ‘mass migration’ till the cows come home without ever having to say what we really mean.