Expanded immigration in Australia

According to the June 2 Sydney Morning Herald:

SYDNEY’S population will grow by nearly 1 million people by 2021 due to the Rudd Government’s expansion of the immigration program—putting huge strain on the city’s public transport, health, education and housing.

A leading demographer, Bob Birrell, said the immigration intake would pump up the city’s population to more than 5.1 million, up from about 4.3 million now and 350,000 more than planners had expected.

Dr Birrell, director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, said the Rudd Government was giving too much weight to Treasury Department advice that raising the intake of skilled migrants would prevent a wages breakout and help cap inflation.

“This is adopting a one-track mind to immigration, one that fails to recognise that Sydney historically absorbs about one-third of the people who arrive in Australia,” he said.

“It also fails to recognise the fact that their arrival imposes such huge stresses on existing resources that without the allocation of further funds to accommodate them, it can end of costing taxpayers and governments plenty.”

This of course was the same illogic that led to the disastrous expansion of immigration under the Labor government in Britain in recent years: a one track thought process that says, increased immigration will strengthen the economy, therefore we must increase immigration. As though a country were nothing but an economy. But the funny thing is, the leftist government of Britain and Australia don’t even believe this purely economic, “right-liberal” thinking, and, in any case the social costs outweigh the economic gains. No. What the left wants is to transform their countries into third-world countries, and the economic argument is the simplest way to silence opposition and push the thing through.

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James P. writes:

The other thing to note about increased immigration to Sydney is what a large proportion of the entire Australian population already lives there. Out of 21.3 million Australians, 4.3 million live in Sydney. To add one million to the population of Sydney is to increase the total population of Australia by nearly five percent, equivalent to bringing in 14 million new Americans—and then parking them all in one city—a program which ought to strike any rational person as simply crazy. Needless to say, these new immigrants will almost certainly be non-Europeans and future Labour voters. The immigration scam works the same way in every country, after all.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 15, 2008 01:57 PM | Send