Given the Coalition's attacks on Aborigines' and migrants' rights, and the formation of new extreme right parties such as Australia First, the results of a June 14-16 national poll on immigration provide further evidence of the progress being made by racist and national chauvinist ideologues in Australia.
Sixty-five percent of the 2000 people surveyed by AGB McNair said that the current level of immigration — a total of 98,000 people per year — is too high. Of these, 74% gave high unemployment as the reason why.
On questions about the intake composition, the majority said that the current proportion of migrants accepted for humanitarian reasons (15%) was about right, but 61% said that the numbers accepted in the family reunion program was too high.
One of the most disturbing findings of the poll was that 88% of those who thought that too many migrants came from one region targeted Asian immigrants.
These results must be music to the federal government's ears and we will no doubt hear them quoted often over coming months. Leaked documents and ministerial statements indicate that the Coalition intends to cut the Department of Immigration's budget by $10 million; cut the number of refugees and humanitarian entrants from 15,000 to 12,000; and increase the number of business migrants.
Ironically, these moves coincide with the 1995-96 Amnesty International's annual report which reveals an increase of 4 million in UN-registered "persons of concern" in the last 12 months. More than 14.5 million people have been formally recognised as refugees, yet governments are increasingly refusing to provide them with protection.
And for those migrants who do make it into Australia, life is going to get much harder. Last month, the federal government froze the funding for migrant employment training programs and introduced legislation to prevent newly-arrived migrants from receiving social security benefits (including the carer pension, disability wage supplement, unemployment benefits, and the mature age, sickness, maternity, child disability and youth training allowances) for two years after their arrival. It has also tightened eligibility for special benefits.
Cutting funds to this sector is unlikely to affect the number of applicants. It will, however, cause great hardship for those who arrive with minimal resources and job prospects. A June 19 report by Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research found that one-third of recently arrived migrants were dependent on welfare payments soon after entering the country and at least 25% were still dependent in their second year.
During periods of economic hardship for the working class, scapegoats are needed to divert people's anger and frustration away from the real cause of their misery. Time and again capitalist governments and media play the race card to fuel national chauvinism to achieve this end. This is made easier here because of this country's history of terra nullius followed by the long-standing bi-partisan White Australia policy.
The poll results are, therefore, not surprising. Neither is the anti-Asian sentiment, even though 1994-95 figures reveal that Britain is still the biggest source of migrants, followed by New Zealand, the countries of former Yugoslavia, and only then Vietnam.
Despite the government and media scare-mongering, the facts are that migrants neither "take our jobs" nor "exploit the welfare system".
People from non-English speaking backgrounds are over-represented in the ranks of the long-term unemployed. A Bureau if Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research survey in May of more than 5000 migrants who arrived in Australia between 1993-95 found that 39% were unemployed.
But data for 1990-94 shows that jobless migrants under-utilise social security services. Further research shows that, in each of the last three recessions, the unemployment rate of migrants has risen more quickly than that of the Australian born and has fallen more slowly during the recovery.
The real cause of unemployment is not immigration but corporate greed. When big business needed unskilled labour in vast quantities in the 1940s immigration targets were 75% greater than they are today. Australia's post-war economic boom was delivered by migrant factory fodder.
Today, when high unemployment already provides big business with a ready made reserve army of labour, mass immigration is "rationed". And those migrants who do manage to gain entrance serve as useful punching bags as the government tightens the thumb screws on the working class as a whole.