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Australia

Race Colours Immigration Debate

Australia’s decision to abandon its commitment to high immigration has intensified the debate over the country’s immigration policy, with the race issue at dead centre. Kalinga Seneviratne of IPS reports from Sydney.
IMMIGRATION has again become a much-debated subject in Australia, which is suffering its worst recession in 60 years and now has more than 10 percent of its population unemployed.
And as in previous immigration policy debates in this country, race is again at centre stage.
With popular opinion now seeming to favour reduced immigration, the Labour government decided last week to slash its immigrant in take for the next financial year to 80,000. dropping plans to push the numbers up to 128,000 in mid-1994.
To achieve the lower figures. the Immigration Department has toughened the ground rules, such as emphasising English-language skills, making entry harder for migrants from non-English-speaking Third World countries.
The Cabinet decision has intensified the debate over Australia's immigration policy and whom it should attract.
During recent immigration policy conference In Sydney, a speaker from the Chamber'of Manufacturers of New South Wales said immigration policy should be made more attractive to people from the Over-
seas Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.
It was pointed out by another speaker at the forum that all OECD countries, except for Japan, are ■white".
Until the early 1970's. Australia's immigration programme was not accessible to non-white people. But last year, eight of the 10 top countries that provided migrants to Australia were Asian.
Australia's Skilled Migration Programme and Business Migration Programme (BMP) are both dominated by Asians. The BMP was introduced in 1981 to attract self-employed persons. entrepreneurs and senior executives to migrate to Australia. Last year, stricter guidelines and conditions were imposed due to local negative feedback.
The BMP was aimed at Europeans in the hope of luring "technologically innovative entrepreneurs'. But Europeans were largely uninterested. By 1991 nearly 70 percent of business migrants came from Taiwan and Hong Kong. In 1990 alone, these migrants brought with them assets of about US SI. 14 million.
But some Australians remain unimpressed. Says New South Wales Labour Council Secretary Michael Easson: ‘On the basis of some newspaper reports last year, one could easily gain the impression that a large number of business migrants coming into Australia were criminals and that many had characters of suspect behaviour."
Robert Birrell, sociology reader at Melbourne's Monash University, thinks Australia’s
Skilled Migration Programme ts flawed since ft has attracted people from a different cul lural background and educational standards.
lie says the result was that al least a third of all migrants who came to Australia in 1991 are now dependent on unemployment benefits. "The nature of skills we are attracting present particular problems," Birrell said in a recent radio interview.
Birrell said Hong Kong immigrants "who have training in the United States, Canada or Australia (arc) very acceptable ... but if you are coming from in Indian or Sri Lankan college which is not top order and you haven’t had the experience of Western-type industry, you may well struggle."
Such arguments are refuged by Australians who see the
country’s future in integration and cooperation with its neighbours in Asia.
Says Australian Financial Review economic editor Michael Stutchbury: "If we want to integrate with Asia, we Just don’t only receive refugees thrown out by nasty wars in Vietnam, but we must deliberately insert the Asian component into our immigration intake."
Stutchbury secs professional cartels as the major threat to a migrant’s Job prospects. In April, the government announced it was cutting by half the number of foreign-trained doctors allowed to practise in Australia due to what it said was on oversupply of doctors in the country.
But Stutchbury says there is • "a huge amount of youngsters wanting to become doctors
and there’s a shortage specialists in country areas. The main problem is that the medical market Is controlled by a cartel of doctors." He adds that undermining the cartels is "one way of making the immigration programme work."
Stephen Castles, Multi-Cultural Studies Centre Director at the University of Woolon-gong, says it is futile to isolate Australia from the rest of the world, especially now that the country is hard-up and needs its Asian neighbours to recover.
"If we see our future in Asia, then we cannot really isolate ourselves," Castles says. "As our links with Asia increase through trade. Investment, education, tourism and cultural exchange, there will be increasing movement of people."
He says Australia will soon have to compete with Asian tiger economies for the skilled labour market and noted that Singapore. Korea and Malaysian arc now recruiting unskilled labour from South and South-east Asia.
Said Castles: "It is impossible to build an integrated work) market, based on flows of capital, knowledge and commodities and yet stop movement of people."