Re: How Australia Asorbed 750000 Immigrants

I don’t know if you read this article in הארץ (or HaAretz -translated) but I did, quite by accident. I don’t know what inspired it or what agenda it's meant to be serving. It’s supposed to be a translation from an article in La Monde, and I don’t know what purpose it was serving in French either. But it did get me juiced up.
It’s primarily about Australia’s apparent ongoing success as a preferred destination for immigration.
So 45% of Australia’s population is not Australian born. No big deal, there must be other countries with similar statistics, possibly our own little number. And since the white Australia policy faded into obscurity close to 40 years ago the immigrants have come from some 200 countries. Once again our modest little Zionist enterprise can boast a wide cross section of immigrant exporting mother countries whose progeny Israel has accepted. But refugees account for only 10% of Australia’s immigration intake. That implies that the rest are skilled workers or their dependants who are still looking to Australia as the lucky country and as a preferred destination on which to land.
With all due respects, I don’t think that that’s an honour Israel can bestow upon itself. Naturally there will be those who would protest the comparison claiming no doubt apologetically that Israel is different because of the security situation and because she serves as a sanctuary for Jews around the world faced with anti-Semitism. In my opinion its that self proclaimed title of sanctuary in the face of anti-Semitism which is problematic for a country aspiring to be a magnet for immigration, even if it is the gathering in of the exiles. And like it or not, given half the chance to vote with their feet, the vast majority of Jews in the exile have no great desire to pass more than a fleeting visit here, if that. And who can blame them? Not me. My hypothesis is that all our successive governments patriotically flying the flag of anti-Semitism refuge, as they are wont to do, even holding it up as the State’s raison d’être, dupe the general populace into believing that the State fulfils it’s obligations as long as it provides us with the means to survive. After all that’s what a shelter is all about. It seems to me just a pretext for all these various governments to not overly worry themselves with providing good governance, for the benefit of the people, which would then be concretely manifested in a society with upward social mobility.
I can’t say what’s going on in Australia these days. I’ve lived nearly half my life here, though it feels strange to say it. But at least in the not too distant past upward social mobility was one of the main undertakings Australia was offering its immigrants.
Australia was and probably still is the lucky country, but it’s not just a matter of mineral resources. Even before the boom of the 60s the pervading national attitude was “fair go”. And I postulate that its that live and let live attitude (not merely survival) pervading from the government and downwards which set the conditions that allowed for that upward social mobility. You didn’t need to be an overachieving megalomaniac to acquire a good standard of living in the lucky country. As one of my father’s Polish friends put it, “If you didn’t waste all your money on beer and horses you could get ahead, even without a real education and with broken English.”
I don’t know how true that still is today and I suspect its not as easy as it used to be, but I feel that here in Israel we are light years away from the ideal of upward social mobility. How many of you know the word for upward social mobility in Hebrew? I admit I had to go out of my way to look it up in a dictionary, (like I did with the Hebrew word for hangover). If the Eskimos have umpteen words for snow, supposedly reflecting the importance of the substance in their culture, doesn’t the paucity of usage and effective total atrophy of the term “upward social mobility” in Israel reflect something about our culture? As opposed to the Australian immigration statistics I would hazard a guess that in Israel’s case 90% of émigrés are refugees of some sort or other and only 10% could be considered ideological, let alone seeking economic advantage.
I’ve got nothing against this country remaining a sanctuary from anti-Semitism but I’m coming to suspect that this ethos of settling for mere survival, this collective cult of suffering, reeks of repression. And I reckon that’s what too many of us are settling for, I think it’s an ethos we all too readily accept. I suspect that there’s something sadomasochistic in conceding to this institutionalised harassment, these intimidating conventions perpetrating the cult of suffering and survival. Is our docility to these conventions the price we pay for the shame and guilt of still being different, outsiders, a minority in our self-proclaimed homeland? Isn’t it time to call a spade a spade, to reject this ethos of suffering and surviving, this pathetic excuse for administrative incompetence, this pretext for the State not supplying good governance for its citizens, which in a competent administration would be concretely manifested in upward social mobility, as even Ming Menzies’ Australia did in the 50s and 60s? I think we Aussies have a worthwhile model of social mobility and integration to use as our reference rather than being intimidated into repressive submission on account of our foreignness. So why settle for less?