“The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respected stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges.” – President George Washington.
Republicans don’t want a solution; they prefer a crisis to hang around the president’s neck in an election year.
Immigration has dramatically changed Australia, mainly for the better. I don’t think any country has done it as well. If I could be more precise, I think Australia has benefited most from refugees. Whilst the first generation of refugees may often lack skills and education, they more than make up for it in enterprise, courage and risk-taking. That enterprise and high aspirations are often expressed through their children. Refugees are by definition risk-takers who will abandon all for a new life. They select themselves much better than a migration officer can ever select them.
Peter Dutton who joked about Pacific Islanders getting their feet wet doesn’t like being the butt of what he calls jokes, about himself, when they aren’t.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says reports that a secret inquiry has uncovered major loopholes being exploited by criminal gangs in the immigration system he oversaw for three years are laughable.
From relieving the backlog of visa processing to maintaining integrity of the migration system, the 2023 Budget seeks to repair the mistakes of the Coalition. Dr Abul Rizvi reports.
The Government selects on the basis of education then goes no further. It prides itself but does nothing for the nation.
According to 2021 census data, 51,491 people in Australia were born in Bangladesh. Bangladeshi Muslim women here have significantly higher educational attainment than the wider Australian female population. The data shows 19.71% of Bangladeshi Muslim women in Australia have a postgraduate degree, compared with 5.41% of women in general. Overall, 22.75% of Bangladeshi Muslim women have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 15.87% of women across the board.
You reap what you sow. Dutton told them to go home and they did and aren’t coming back
LNP in Opposition to the ALP Government have left not just the buildin but Australia with an Abbottesque NOPE NOPE NOPE and yes “the sky is falling ” shreik. Nothing new to be seen from the Liberal Party!
Jobs summit: international students should get four-year visas
The previous Australian government told this cohort to “go home” when the pandemic hit. Students who chose to remain were locked out of JobKeeper and JobSeeker.
These actions have tainted our reputation as a global student-friendly destination and mean we need to act now to welcome more international students.
The Morrison government, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke and the business lobby desperately want a surge in immigration to fire the economy but 330,000 migrants are stuck on bridging visas as the permanent migration program remains – contrary to reports – mired at an intake of 160,000. Former immigration chief Abul Rizvi on a murky MYEFO and the migration backlog.
LNP supports privatized Prisons for Profit and Prisons for Profit support the LNP. Isn’t that a perfect Quid pro Quo policy? The LNP’s urgency in privatizing all government services is not just a Quid pro Quo movement described by Mussolini as the ideal state. He called it Fascism. However quite the opposite of the ideal Australians strive for called Democracy. Save Our Public Service
The immigration detention industry in Australia profits from imprisoning refugees. The Australian Government outsources the day-to-day management of its cruel immigration detention system to private corporations who, in turn, make political donations to them. One of the largest beneficiaries of Australian Government contracts is Serco Group, which has an octopus-like grip on many former government and community services in the UK and across the globe that are now privatised for profit. This human rights-abusing “profit before people” approach must be stopped and the rights of asylum seekers upheld everywhere.
The unfitness for office of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his coalition government now stands comprehensively exposed. Yet the apparent criminality of Liberal-National cruelty to immigration detainees has somehow remained largely unexposed, unprevented, and unpunished for nearly a decade.
Low morale and dysfunction in DHA Finally, and also not surprisingly, Pezzullo says nothing in the briefing for Andrews about his Department having one of the lowest levels of morale in the Australian Public Service. And of course, he wouldn’t as this is primarily the result of his leadership. The fact is Pezzullo and Outram have lost control of Australia’s visa system and hence, border control. Recovery from this point will be extraordinarily difficult, costly and take many years. But with a government obsessed with its public reputation on border protection, Pezzullo and Outram know that is not what the Government wants to hear — so they have decided the best course of action is just not to tell them and hope they don’t find out.
The second way out of Germany’s crisis would be through immigration. The country could throw open its doors to people from all over the world to take unwanted and unfilled jobs, pay taxes, and support the increasingly aging population. That is exactly what Germany did. The government of Angela Merkel, in 2015 and 2016, accepted over a million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Germany now has the fifth largest population of refugees in the world (after Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan, and Uganda). This headline-grabbing decision, five years later, has been a remarkable success. The million refugees have prospered, reports the Center for Global Development.
Fox is obsessed with the “crisis” at the border and Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Never mind that BLM protests and other urban demonstrations over the past three years have been overwhelmingly peaceful, which is a little fact that Fox somehow fails to share. Analyzing over 7,000 protests between 2017 and 2020, researchers at Harvard University and the University of Connecticut found that 3.7 percent of the demonstrations—that is, fewer than 1 in 25—involved property damage or vandalism. Protesters or bystanders were injured in 1.6 percent of the protests, or less than 1 in 50. Yet Fox makes you think that the exceptions are the rule, by recycling video of demonstrators burning police cars and looting stores. Did that mayhem occur? Of course, and we should all condemn it. But it’s pure demagoguery to replay the same violent clips, when the vast majority of protests looked nothing like that. Similarly, Fox is rife with stories of undocumented immigrants from Latin America who commit crimes. And, yes, that happens as well. But immigration has declined overall, and not just because of Trump’s wall. According to the first results of the 2020 census, which were released on Monday,
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Party now acknowledge that migration is crucial to economic growth and prosperity, writes Dr Abul Rizvi. AFTER TELLING temporary entrants to “go home” just 12 months ago and cutting the Migration Program ceiling by 30,000 per annum to “bust congestion” as part of his 2019 pre-election Population Plan, Scott Morrison now says we must overhaul temporary migration in the post-COVID era to fill rapidly emerging skill shortages.
It seemed that a lot of Americans didn’t vote for Trump as they had realised the country was at rock bottom. Australia surely is also at its own nadir. We have had no climate emissions plan for a decade due to political infighting as discussed recently and the competition on which side of politics can be more horrible to refugees which is thought to win votes. When those who are recovering from addiction are interviewed, a frequent discussion point is they realised they had hit rock bottom and someone or something gave them the impetus to commence the climb out of the abyss they found themselves in. Hopefully Biden is the impetus for the US to start climbing. Is it too difficult to hope that enough Australians realise at the next Federal Election that we have hit rock bottom, and elect parliamentarians that can show us the way out of our climate change denial and refugee abyss?
Australians who fall in love with non-English speaking foreigners will be barred from bringing their partners into the country to be married if they do not speak English.
In Peter Dutton’s Australia your guilty even if you’ve proved your innocent (ODT)
An Ethiopian couple suspected of incest by the Australian government have been told their visa case cannot be reviewed despite fresh DNA evidence that scuttles the claim.
Surely it’s been the failure of government management that needs the blame not high immigration that’s required in an aging market. Investment in ingenuity and short term politics have strangled us. We have Smart TV’s Smart everything but Smart Government. (ODT)
The International Monetary Fund’s latest report on our economy says we have “a notable infrastructure gap compared to other advanced economies”. Spending is “not keeping up with population and economic growth”. We have a forecast annual gap averaging about 0.35 per cent of GDP for basic infrastructure (roads, rail, water, ports) plus a smaller gap for social infrastructure (schools, hospitals, prisons).
A growing movement of American Jews is mobilizing against U.S. immigration policy across the country. ‘We’re fighting for the soul of our country, for our very humanity.’
This time, Never Again Action were also joined by establishment American Jewish groups such as the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center and the liberal, pro-Israel lobby J Street. Participants included not only experienced left-wing Jewish activists but also mainstream Jewish community leaders and politicians — a sign that the segment of the American Jewish community that feels compelled to protest the U.S. immigration regime is continuing to widen. The protesters also appeared to span divides of denomination — Reform, Conservative, Orthodox — as well as generation.
The undeniable emotional power of the Never Again Action protests – the resonances between the darkest moments of Jewish history and the darkness of the present moment – appear to be driving the movement’s growing appeal. What is already one of the most significant American Jewish protest movements in over a decade could very much become a longer and more intense struggle by American Jews against the U.S. government’s immigration policies.
Before he was deported, Jimmy Aldaoud had never stepped foot in Iraq. Born in Greece to Iraqi refugee parents, he immigrated to the United States with his family via a refugee resettlement program 40 years ago, when he was just 15 months old. He considered himself American and knew hardly anything of Iraqi society. Still, on the afternoon of June 4, he found himself wandering the arrivals terminal of Al Najaf International Airport, about 100 miles south of Baghdad, with around $50, some insulin for his diabetes, and the clothes on his back.
Bringing back slavery in the form of indentured labour and no regard for families. Anglocising the nation 1% at a time and changing the gender balance as a result (ODT)
President Donald Trump offered a broad outline of his administration’s new dead-on-arrival immigration plan Thursday, seeking to rake in more money for border enforcement while restricting family-based migration and upping the number of visas for skilled workers.
It’s not even clear that there are so many migrants. According to United Nations data, between January 2014 and March 2018, roughly 1.8 million people crossed the Mediterranean Sea to try and enter the EU. This number — which has driven Murray to such angst that he has pronounced the “death of Europe” — amounts to less than one-third of 1 percent of the EU’s population. In the meantime, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Pakistan continue to quietly host millions of refugees, many of whom were driven from their homes as a result of wars of aggression supported by Murray, whose past books include forthright tomes like “Neoconservatism: Why We Need It.”
He thinks the world economy is a zero sum game. That is a game in which the size of the pie is fixed and if someone gets more of the pie, someone else gets less. That is what he thinks Europe has done to the US, has eaten some of the pie that should rightfully have been ours.
In fact, the pie can grow, and even economic rivals can cooperate to helpt the total pie grow so that both are better off. The US-EU economic relationship has on the whole been this sort of success story.
Trump also thinks that there are a limited number of possible jobs, and that if some people fill those jobs, they are taking them away from others. But the labor market is also not a zero sum game, an idea called the “lump of labor” fallacy. That is why he resents immigrants, who he alleges are taking jobs. In fact, the number of jobs can grow. And the evidence is precisely that immigration causes economic expansion and an increase in the number of jobs. Small businesses expand when there is more labor available, which benefits everyone.
Zero sum game ways of thinking are extremely dangerous. They are first of all simply incorrect. Second, they promote conflict, because instead of realizing that everyone can win, they emphasize inflexible competition (in Trump’s case, on racial bases, feeding his fascism).
“More often than not the questions are framed in a way that’s related to being repressive towards immigrants. It’s worth remembering that numbers have to be interpreted, and it’s also about what kind of political interest there are in using the stats, how those stats are read. Stats are in themselves neutral, they have to be interpreted,” he emphasizes.
“If you really want to deepen understanding in this area you have to consider what the stats are and also what they’re going to be used for. Are they going to be used to better locate people without residence papers, for example? To track down migrants and their kids? Or are they going to be used to improve how the police act, and to create a less discriminatory police? It’s very complicated, and more often than not the discussion in the area in Sweden is too simplistic,” he concludes.
Correcting Bolt’s BS is a full time task because there is so much of it (ODT)
Asylum applications in 2016 dropped to about 29,000.
Sweden used to grant permanent residence permits to individuals granted asylum. The legislative changes in mid 2016 began restricting residence authorization by granting temporary permits and putting more requirements in place for permanent permits.
What about claims linking new arrivals and crime?
“In general, crime statistics have gone down the last (few) years, and no there is no evidence to suggest that new waves of immigration has lead to increased crime,” Selin said.
Generally, there’s a certain over-representation of people with immigrant background in crime statistics, but that tends to be closely related to high levels of unemployment, poverty, exclusion, low language and other skills, Selin said. “Swedes with these characteristics are also overrepresented in crime statistics,” he said.
If we look specifically at sex offences, which the Fox News segment highlighted, there were 18,100 sex offenses reported to the police in 2015, down 11 percent from 2014, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.
“The act of ripping children away from their parents is nothing new for the United States. Separating children and their families to ‘kill the Indian to save the man’ by sending Native children to boarding schools, and doing it in the name of religion, is one generation removed from my family,” wrote Peggy Flanagan on Twitter. Flanagan, White Earth, is a candidate for lieutenant governor in Minnesota. “Trump’s ‘zero tolerance policy’ is nothing more than a clear violation of human rights. We must learn from history. We must stand with immigrants and refugees.”
Independent Senator Fraser Anning has frequently used Twitter to campaign against those migrants and asylum seekers he claims come to Australia “for a life of permanent handouts”.
Senator Anning, who represented Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party until January 2018, has also praised Turnbull Government plans to tighten eligibility for welfare payments for recently-arrived migrants.
the rich get richer, the earth dies, common people bicker and argue about Patriarchy and marriage rights while everything burns around us. And all the while the press declares this as progress and trumpets changes in laws about marriage, and discriminating for women (and against men) as signs of progress. The world is being destroyed, families are being destroyed, debt is growing, congestion is growing, the environment is being destroyed, and men are being pushed out of work, becoming more and more sidelined in society. Families are falling apart and people becoming more frustrated, more angry and more violent. Yet amongst all this discord it is declared that there are signs of social progress. What a bloody mess! And who can we turn to now? The union movement has almost been crushed by neo-liberal forces, or sold out to growth, and it too has been directing resources into the new ‘left’ agenda.
Both sides taunted each other from across the street, with the left-wingers holding signs saying “fight racism” while the right-wingers carried banners saying “let the right ones in”.
The prospect of constant sniping from Tony Abbott on migration is more proof of the lust for destruction within a federal Coalition that is struggling so badly to offer the “stable government” it promised at the last election.
No issue has the power to divide Australians like a call to turn away migrants. Anxiety about population growth is a force that cannot be contained once it is unleashed. Knowing this, the political leaders of the past agreed on bipartisan policy for decades.
The implications for Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership are plain. Abbott used energy policy to create constant friction within the Coalition last year and is using the population debate to intensify those tactics this year.
This is an irresistible issue for the conservative base but it could break the settled bipartisan approach to migration. What hope is there for an agreement in Canberra when the governing party cannot agree with itself?
Abbott’s not problem solving for the nation he’s problem solving for himself and it really ahs more to do with the game of politics rather than anything else. There is nothing here that hasn’t been pioneered by his Murdoch advisers in America like Roger Ailes the creator of Fox News to attention grab and Abbott has turned to the full package to appeal to the One Nation voters and ALP doubters as he did once before in Australias most historic fear campaign on everything in 2008. He is afterall a one trick pony. ( Old Dog)
“some on the right of the political spectrum have invested their faith in a crude form of populism which derives its momentum from explicit and coded attacks on minorities whether defined by sexuality, race or religion.”
via 
olddogthoughts 
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