ON A RECENT trip to Australia I spent some time with a group of economists and sociologists at the local Bureau of Immigration and Multicultural Research. They were eager to explain to a visiting American how well their country was managing its immigration policy. They stressed two main goals: to encourage newcomers to seek Australian citizenship; and to promote the idea of a multicultural identity, so that these new citizens will not feel it necessary to abandon their cultural heritage as the price of adopting a new nation. What struck me about this policy was its seeming incoherence. In what, precisely, did these analysts imagine Australian national identity to consist? Why would anyone feel loyalty to a country that required so little of him in order to join it? Upon raising these questions, I was assured by my hosts that I should not worry, the policy was working just fine.
Reading Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation put me in mind of my trip to Australia. Like this American academic among the Australian bureaucrats, perhaps Brimelow, himself an “outsider,” has the perspective, the detachment, necessary to ask uncomfortable questions about American immigration policy. For, if what I found in Melbourne seemed incoherent, what I learned about American policy from Brimelow’s engagingly written and informative book makes its Australian counterpart look like brilliant strategic planning. Brimelow is surely correct when he says that no rational account can be given of how the United States “decides” who will, and who will not, come to and live in our country. I find him persuasive as well when he urges that we must not continue in this way.
Comments