What our politicians won’t admit about immigration

With apologies to Rudyard Kipling: If, as a neo-Nazi, you attend an anti-immigration rally, which you insist provides an opportunity to show common cause with middle Australians who hold valid concerns about the level of overseas migration, and then you follow it up with a violent attack on a peaceful gathering of Aboriginal people, who are about as far removed from the title of “immigrant” as it’s possible to be, then you are saying the quiet part out loud.

Your problem is not with immigration, in general, it’s with brown and black people, specifically, and any culture which you designate as too different from whatever you claim yours to be.

The same goes if you say you are “highlighting the fact that there is a huge concern for Labor’s mass migration agenda”, which is placing pressure on “housing, infrastructure and services”, but you end up singling out a particular nationality – Indian people – as “a concern”.

So was the claim made by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price on the ABC this week, when she said that “there is a concern with the Indian community … and only because there’s been large numbers and we can see that reflected in the way that the community votes for Labor at the same time”.

She implied that Labor was bringing in Indian people – who do represent the largest cohort of permanent migrants to Australia – because they vote Labor.

Senator Price later walked back the comments, noting that Australia’s immigration system is non-discriminatory. “Suggestions otherwise are a mistake,” her statement read – a marvellous example of the evasive capabilities of passive language.

Is it any wonder politicians prefer, on the whole, not to talk about immigration? It’s a subject that has a tendency to get icky, so quickly.

We do, of course, hear motherhood statements from our politicians about the contribution of migrants to this country, and during the election campaign, former opposition leader Peter Dutton explicitly linked the housing crisis to excess immigration. He promised to cut immigration.

As evidenced by the Coalition’s colossal loss, it didn’t work for him, but Labor was sure to match the promise, if not in numbers, then in intention – Anthony Albanese also pledged to cut migration levels.

It is rare that you will find a politician stating the obvious – that population growth in Australia is propped up by immigration (as it is in most OECD countries), and that successive Australian governments of both stripes have relied on immigration to power economic growth, while neglecting Australia’s profound productivity slump.

It is unheard of that a politician will say out loud what demographers and economists know – that most rational governments have given up on trying to make the women of OECD countries have more kids.

Instead, they are importing people (and their delightful children) from other countries to help bolster the tax base and man the service industries we all rely on.

In an essay for The New York Times published this week, Boston University philosophy professor Victor Kumar writes that “population growth isn’t a progressive issue”. But it should be, he argues.

Pro-natalism (advocacy for increased birth rates) has been captured by the political right, particularly in the United States, where Vice President JD Vance has repeatedly lamented America’s low birth rate, and castigated “childless cat ladies” as selfish and, essentially, socially useless.

The nationalist government of Hungary has a strong pro-natalist agenda, which it has backed up with family-friendly policies. They haven’t worked to lift the birth rate.

In the nationalist context, pro-natalism is strongly linked to the belief that if white Christians don’t have enough progeny, they will eventually be “replaced” by the progeny of non-whites.

This paranoia was central to Nazism, and one of the reasons why the control of female fertility is inextricably linked to fascism.

Pro-natalism has been co-opted by the right, who are able, with varying degrees of success, to use it to paint progressives as anti-family or even anti-baby, in the same way that Ronald Reagan weaponised “family values” for the Republicans in the 1980s.

(Democrat candidate Bill Clinton fought back against this depiction in his 1992 run for president, by asking “where are [Republicans] when there is no healthcare for pregnant women? When too many children are born with low birth weights?”)

Across every society on Earth, the more highly educated women become, the fewer children they have. And highly educated women are more likely, overall, to vote for progressive political parties (perhaps it’s women, not Indian nationals, that Senator Price should have her eye on).

But there is also research, including from Australia, showing that women would like to have more children than they do. There is a gap between what they want and what they think they can manage. In that gap lies a choice, which they can now exercise in ways they couldn’t in previous historical eras.

In that gap, there also lies a political opportunity for any party that seeks to uphold “family values”.

This week we have seen what happens when the immigration debate is overtaken by bad-faith actors who use it as a Trojan horse for voicing prejudice against particular communities.

It’s imperative that good-faith politicians, on all sides, reclaim the debate and remind Australians of how indebted we are, culturally and economically, to immigrants.

As Immigration Minister Tony Burke said this week of the Indian community: “We are lucky they have chosen us”. NSW Liberal Opposition Leader Mark Speakman said the Indian diaspora is a “blessing”.

But as politicians express these sentiments, they probably need also to be honest about the economic reality that any cut in immigration will be likely to involve a cut in economic growth. And that if we don’t transform our economy and society to make it easier for women (and their partners) to have more babies, we will continue to rely on overseas arrivals, hopefully with a spirit of gratitude.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer, columnist and author.

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