How Australia Absorbed 750,000 Immigrants Over 5 Years

by Silvie Kaufman in הארץ translated by Mark Frank

Leichhardt, Australia. The town hall is filling up slowly. The ceiling fans are working, there are nibbles on the table and the crowd seems contented. The guests come with their families, some in dresses and high heels and some in thongs. This is an important day for Mayor Caroline Allen, cloaked in a black fur lined toga. “This is the first Naturalisation ceremony I’ve conducted,” she declares. Amongst the new inhabitants of the small town- not far from Sydney- are Armenians, Chinese, South Africans and even an American who married an Australian woman, a daughter of English migrants. “I’d rather bring up my children here than Seattle.” he says.
There’s nothing new about immigrants coming to Australia. 45% of the giant country’s 21,000,000 citizens aren’t Australian born, but came from 200 different countries. 10% of them of them are refugees who came on the basis of various humanitarian programmes. What’s surprising is that the trend is continuing - between the years 2001-2006 Australia took in 755,000 immigrants. This year 153,000 more people will arrive.
All this is going on in relative harmony, notwithstanding the riots at Cronulla beach in Sydney in December 2005, during which violent clashes broke out between old timers and Australians of Lebanese origins. In the run up to last weeks elections immigration hardly ever came up as an issue. Admittedly Prime Minister John Howard was defeated after 11 years in power, by leftist leader Kevin Rudd, but many credit him with achieving the ethnic calm. According to commentator Paul Kelly, Howard managed to merge multiracial immigration with multiculturalism with an intensification of the Australian identity. “We live in a cosmopolitan country which is nationalist at the same time,” says Kelly.
The formula for success looks simple enough. Each year the government sets an immigration ceiling, not on geographic or ethnic bias, but rather according to the need for working hands.
This year Australia will take in 102 thousand skilled workers and their families, 13 thousand refugees and around 20,000 immigrants on grounds of family reunification. The immigrants can estimate for themselves their chances of getting a visa on the Internet. They have to accumulate 100 points in order to get a work visa for 3 years. If you speak fluent English, you’ve got 25 points. 30-34 years old? 25 extra points.
However opponents of Howard feel that even if he allowed immigrants in he made it hard for them to integrate. Sometimes he adopted positions of Pauline Hanson, the local counterpart of the French neo nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen. He didn’t permit a refugee boat to anchor in 2001, opposed lingual multiculturalism, and applied a citizenship test which required the reading of a book on life in Australia.
16 years of prosperity and economic growth could have eased the situation these days, but apparently even integration has its limitations. Caucasians dominate government bureaucracies, Television stations, advertising campaigns, and directorships. “Integration and diversity exist at the lower levels but not at the top,” said a senior journalist. Racism hasn’t disappeared.

Australia and her Immigrants

755,000 immigrants arrived in Australia between 2001-2006
45% of 21 million population aren't Australian born
153,000 will arrive this year, 102,000 skilled workers