Hidden resentment

In recent weeks there has been several attacks on international students from India. The letters below suggest additional reasons other than racism (which is undeniably a factor):

Hidden resentment

With regard to assaults on overseas students, dare one raise possible underlying reasons without being assailed with the usual ideology-based BRIX (bigot, racist, ignorant, xenophobe) discussion-stopper?

Is there a hidden concern that immigration is out of control? That, with an unknown population-carrying capacity, our nation is placing at risk its environmental capital, clearly limited by factors including fresh water availability, declining soil fertility and increasing salinisation?

Is there also a loss of social capital, with resentment at an influx of students seeking to use local qualifications to gain permanent residency for themselves and relatives, supporting with their fees a tertiary education system seemingly unwilling to accommodate all non-full-fee local applicants?

To what extent are such concerns, if widespread among their parents, being manifested among youth gangs by attacks on students from overseas? If so, remediation will require open discussion, not its suppression by hurling BRIX-type abuse at anyone concerned at current levels of immigration. In the longer term, debate can be less dangerous than its denial by ideology-based imputations of racism.

– John O’Connor, Cottles Bridge, 30/5

One agreed with him (below); two other letters didn’t:

Numbers just keep adding up and up

John O’Connor (Letters, 30/5) is to be congratulated for his prescience and willingness to look beyond the obvious racial bigotry and pinpoint the true causes of the assaults on overseas students and concomitant social problems. Tim Colebatch reported (The Age, 9/5) that immigration is soaring under the Rudd Government to record levels of about 300,000 a year. Perhaps 90 per cent of these new arrivals are moving into Sydney (no room) and Melbourne (no water).

Many people are concerned at these numbers and want, at least for a time, the system to slow down. Governments, state and federal, show no concern for community feeling and a pressure-cooker atmosphere now exists in the community, with racial attacks and rampant everyday violence.

This frustration will almost certainly reach its apogee here in Victoria next year when the Brumby Government seeks re-election. Should the rains fail this spring, then the high-population Brumby Government will face an electorate as mad as hell about why it has dried-out gardens and must wash in and drink muddy water.

– Tony Davidson, Glen Waverley, 1/6

And another in support:

Populate and perish – we must ask why

In response to the misrepresentations of Alex Njoo and William Maley (Letters, 1/6), two blindingly obvious points seem appropriate. Australia has been a nation of immigrants for some 60,000 years. Today, all Australian citizens must treat one another inclusively, and with due regard for our country’s sustainable future, while being wary of tendencies to divide into ethnic-based pseudo-tribes.

It emphatically does not follow that immigration at its present levels should be immune from questioning. We all need to know: what is Australia’s longer-term sustainable-population carrying capacity? What limiting factors may have already been exceeded? Should our tertiary education sector continue to act as a de facto immigration agency, additional to a large official intake?

We need a rational debate on this, the most important single issue facing us all. Refutation of population concerns is not even on Australia’s political radar. It should be.

– John O’Connor, Cottles Bridge, 2/6

International students (from India and elsewhere) are a lucrative income source for many universities, which have to substitute for decreased government funding. Personally I have little liking for universities and believe the IS program should be drastically curtailed; it is, as pointed out in the letters, another form of immigration. With resources such as water under strain (reservoirs are at their lowest-ever level and there is no prospect of good winter rains this year), why are we encouraging more and more visitors to come?

“Babies we must afford”, Herald-Sun, 1/6. Dumb opinion piece saying IVF should be supported because it creates more future taxpayers. Considering the expenses and medical complications IVF-created children can incur, it is a poor bargain!

Small is happy

“One and only: singled out for the special treatment”, The Age, 10/5. This article says that single-child families are increasing (which would seem to conflict with the increasing birth rate?). Having one child is sometimes a deliberate choice, but sometimes because parents are older. Some parents, as featured in the article, have come from large families where they were “lost in the crowd” and conversely want their offspring to have more attention. Small families should be actively encouraged worldwide as this will help reduce population growth – one way would be to provide government benefits for a woman’s first two children, but none after that (those who remarry and want more children would also not receive benefits).

The usual counter-argument is that the old will outnumber the young if this trend continues, and that there won’t be enough tax-paying young people to support previous generations, but it is a demographic trend that governments will just have to deal with. Not all old people are infirm, and they can still make useful contributions to society. Perhaps the idea of a fixed retirement age could be done away with – assuming older people can work in jobs they enjoy.

None of the above is intended to deny that we should plan carefully for the demographics of a population in which the number of older people is steadily rising (as the age-cohorts become more even-sized). But we should remember that the old are in many ways less of a burden than the young. Even in retirement, people are often highly productive, performing a myriad of useful and unpaid services, and deploying the skills and experience of a lifetime. By contrast the young, whether babies or school-age children, are too immature or too busy with their studies to be economically “productive” – and in fact need to be looked after by adults.

– Overloading Australia, page 100

This post at the Public Population Forum unfortunately brings racism into the topic – namely an overused assertion that white people are being “outbred” by people of other colors. She makes the mistake of associating skin color with culture, when they are entirely different things. Here’s how I try to express this:

Racism is defined as discriminating against or disliking a person purely because of their skin color and/or ethnicity. As all humans share the same biological makeup and heritage, such a distinction is superficial; skin color and other physical characteristics evolved to adapt to different locations and climates, and are not reflective of a person’s intelligence (or lack of it!). Therefore, on biological terms, such racism is illogical. It comes from a basic suspicion of people who “look different” from those one grew up with; such aversion can be overcome through education and familiarization.

Culture, however, is a different matter; it is not related to human biology. Some cultures are considered more desirable than others to live in, which is why there tends to be high rates of immigration to the former. Some cultures are just odious (e.g. those which regard women as chattels) and deserve to become extinct. Culture is thus not relevant to a person’s race; people of different skin colors who grow up in a particular culture will share the characteristics of that culture.

The countries with high population growth are often those described as “developing”, which happen to be places like Africa, etc. Women in these countries often do not have access to education and family planning, and their role is primarily to reproduce. This is a cultural feature, one that can be overcome when women are given access to such facilities – something that women in First-World countries (USA, UK, Australia, etc.) take for granted. Educated women will often choose to limit their family size, or decide not to have children, as they have control over their fertility.