Immigration

In this week’s ABR Podcast, we revisit the Australian Labor Party’s long and uneasy relationship with immigration. Dr Ebony Nilsson, a research fellow at the Australian Catholic University, argues that while the ALP no longer looks like a ‘happy white men’s club’, its policies on immigration reflect a longstanding ambivalence around race. Listen to Ebony Nilsson’s ‘A happy white men’s club: The Australian Labor Party’s uneasy history with immigration’, published in the July issue of ABR.

On election day in 2022, thousands of Australian voters – perhaps already in line at their local primary school, democracy sausage in hand – received this text message. Refugees had not been a hot-button issue in this election, and the messages were generally seen as an unsuccessful last-ditch effort by a Coalition government already on the ropes. But the new Albanese Labor government was quick to confirm, just a day after being sworn in, that it had turned the boat back without hesitation. A public warning was issued to people smugglers that Australia’s border policy remained iron-clad and inflexible. Such statements are usually for the benefit of the Australian public, rather than an imagined audience of people smugglers.

Australia’s Immigration Revolution cites a Green Paper on Europe’s demographic future which argues that ‘never in history has there been economic growth without population growth’. While the authors find this assertion debatable, they leave us in no doubt about the challenge posed by the rapid ageing of developed nations. They question the ‘capacity of the labour force to support the aged population’ after the baby-boomer generation retires, pointing to the risk that capital will be diverted from ‘productive investment’ to ‘population maintenance’, weakening competitive advantage in an ‘increasingly competitive global marketplace’. Immigration does not resolve the ageing problem (since migrants also grow old with time), but it offers ‘the most immediate and simplest short-term measure to deal with labour and skills shortages’.

The title of Gillian Bottomley’s lively study addresses both the major theme of migration and her own position as an academic anthropologist. Bottomley targets specialist studies with hard and fast disciplinary categories and attitudes and rejects the tone of impersonal scholarship which such works frequently adopt.

I grew up in a New Australian household, and admit at the outset to a biased view. My Lithuanian-born parents were actual Baltic immigrants among the other nationalities referred to by the blanket designation ‘Balt’. Much of the anecdotal material of Jayne Persian’s Beautiful Balts was deeply familiar to me from childhood ...

Three years ago, Australia was supposedly being overrun by asylum seekers arriving by boat. The situation was considered grave and dominated public debate and the ...

Gwen Good’s migration to Perth in 1963 turned out well. She loved Australia, the climate that turned life into one long summer holiday, and the house that she and her family soon acquired. She was an active member of her church, and a contented wife and mother who revelled in her children. By the 1980s she was ready to give away the bundle of reel-to-reel tapes on which, decades before, the family had conveyed its early impressions of Perth in audio letters to be sent home to England. The letters had come back to her when, in turn, her parents migrated to join the Goods in Perth. They held a past that had blended so seamlessly into the present that it no longer seemed particularly interesting.

The 120,000 expatriate Italians living in Australia, all of them newly entitled to vote in the recent election, contributed significantly to the knife-edge defeat of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in April 2006. Before the counting of all such votes in the four electoral regions into which his own government had divided the world, Berlusconi looked to have a one-seat majority. Then the votes of emigrant Italians swung the outcome the other way. For the first time, their say elected six expatriate senators and twelve deputies, including one of each from the Australia/Asia/Africa region – both of whom happen to live in Melbourne.

It is one of the ironies of Jewish life in Australia that it is at once thriving and dying. The Jewish community drew its contemporary renaissance from the influx of postwar Jews from major centres in Eastern Europe, which were annihilated by the Nazis and their collaborators. Mostly victims of anti-Semitic persecution, the immigrants of the 1930s to 1950s brought a deep awareness and love of their culture and religious practice to an agreeable Australia, bolstering a Jewish community which to that time was predominantly British in origin and largely assimilationist. As Suzanne Rutland points out, in what is essentially a book of record, the immigration from Eastern Europe revitalised Jewish life in Australia.

Of late, there has been a welcome surge in the study of British migrants in Australia. James Jupp’s The English in Australia (2004) provided one of the first overviews since the 1960s. Andrew Hassam followed migrant Britons from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, and younger scholars such as Sara Wills, Carole Hamilton-Barwick and Lorraine Proctor have begun to explore the local intricacies of settlement and identity. Given both the subject – numerically the largest of the postwar migrant groups – and the growth in historical and sociological accounts of immigration and multiculturalism since the 1970s, the surge has been a long time coming.