Concerns about immigration should not be ignored

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”.