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Concerns about immigration should not be ignored

By Graham Young - posted Thursday, 15 October 2015


A change of leadership in the Liberal Party has convinced some erstwhile supporters that now is the time to form new parties on the right of Australian politics.

At least one of these is based around an organisation called the Q Forum, which has concerns about Islamic immigration.

Will any of these groups achieve the prominence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation?

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I don’t know.

What I do know is that if you ignore the concerns of a large part of the community, or dismiss these concerns as illegitimate, then you get the sort of political forest fires that we saw with Pauline Hanson.

In that case a new party went from a standing start in 1997 to 22.68% of the Queensland vote and 11 seats one year later in 1998.

What I also know, based on a qualitative survey of 1,349 Australians we conducted, and the study we have just released, is that if parties are based around concern about Islamic immigration, then a significant segment of the community is likely to welcome them.

I also know that while this concern is strongest on the right with 75% of our Liberal, and 69% of our non-Greens minor party respondents saying Islamic immigration is bad for Australia, on the left 22% of ALP and 18% of Greens respondents thought the same. 

Even more startling, only 8% of all respondents thought Islamic immigration has been for the good.

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But not only is this an issue for a prime minister seeking to be inclusive, it is even more an issue for the community itself, or more properly the communities themselves.

There are the recently arrived migrant communities, and those communities who have been here centuries, and then there are overlapping communities based not on ethnic origin, but shared beliefs.

The research identifies different belief groups with significantly different attitudes on immigration, even when they use the same words.

One such word is citizenship.  For those we have termed “campers” a person qualifies as a citizen just by being present in Australia. For “team Australia”, a term we borrowed, citizenship depends on signing up to a core set of beliefs that represent the Australian project.

The first group believes that diversity is a good in itself, and the more diversity there is the better-off we are as a nation. The second group has no problem with diversity as long as it leads to a strengthening of aspects of society, but there must be direct benefits.

The first group strongly overlaps with another divide between those who are “humanitarian” in their approach to immigration and those who are “utilitarian”.

The humanitarians are strongly concerned with unauthorised boat arrivals, and in fact refuse to engage on the issue of immigration on any other points. Immigrants are valued as people per se.

Utilitarians on the other hand support immigration, but only so far as it benefits the existing culture. So increased migration is seen as benefiting Australia by creating a “big Australia” and therefore providing a larger economic market and making Australia more secure in an increasingly populous world.

They approve of skilled migration, and expect migrants to integrate. They are not necessarily opposed to multiculturalism, but their concept of multiculturalism is not one where different cultures are tolerated, but where we are one culture, a feature of which is tolerance of diversity.

So when we are debating immigration, even when we are using the same words, like “citizen”, we often mean radically different things, leading to a dialogue of the deaf.

It is highly unlikely that resistance to Islamic immigration arises from some broad-based racism in the society as the majority of our respondents (69%) favoured immigration at, or above, current levels.

There was some resistance to net migration from Liberal voters (40%) and non-Greens minor party voters (43%), but there were still majorities in both these groups (57% and 53%) in favour.

A number of issues characterise resistance to Islamic immigration and they almost universally stem from a fear that Islamic culture is incompatible with western culture as practiced in Australia.

Some respondents are concerned about Islam as a religion, but others thought the issues might arise from the cultures of origin of Islamic immigrants.

Team Australian and the utilitarians were most likely to be opposed to Islamic immigration and to see this as part of a culture war, a similar thesis to that advanced by Samuel Huntington in his book “Clash of Civilisations”.

This was because of a fear that immigrants would not integrate because of their religion, or more strongly that their religion was actively opposed to western culture, a sort of “culture jihad”. They differentiated this lack of integration from previous waves of immigrants who they saw as having been culturally more similar to pre-existing inhabitants, and therefore integrating relatively easily.

At its strongest this manifested in a concern that Australia is being colonised by Islam; Sharia Law, as well as being another cultural differentiator, was also seen as a potential threat.

Another issue was the perceived lack of economic skills of immigrants, so that they became a burden on society, rather than adding to its wealth.

There was also a human rights concern and this was present across all groups and arose from the perception that Islamic migrants were not just misogynistic, but homophobic.

So the hijab is raised as a symbol of violation of human rights, rather than just a cultural garment. Female genital mutilation was also frequently raised.

The idea that Islam discriminates against other religions also gives rise to human rights concerns arising from the issue of how non-believers may be treated.

Where to from here?

These are perceptions. They may be right, or they may be wrong.

For example there is some evidence from overseas that Islamic communities do not tend to integrate like previous migrant communities. Other evidence contradicts this.

But people vote on the basis of perceptions, not fact. To successfully settle these new immigrants we need to work out whether these issues are real, and deal with them.

Above all that means acknowledging that these concerns are genuine and real to those who hold them.

The lesson from our recent past is that ignoring them, or denigrating them, or attempting to marginalise them, won’t result in harmony, but a political explosion.

That is a lesson that the minority, as much as the majority, needs to heed.

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This article was first published in The Australian.



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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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Australian Attitudes to Immigration

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