Category: Migrants & migration

Are migrants more at risk of crime?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

Recent crimes against Indian students have people of Indian appearance worried about their personal safety. But are migrants more generally at greater risk of crime?

As the chart below shows, migrants are less likely to have been victims of personal crime, defined as ‘robbery, assault or sexual assault’ in the previous twelve months, than people born in Australia. This holds for all age groups except those aged 60 years and over, for whom crime rates are very low in any case.

image002
Source: ABS, Migrant Data Matrices 2008, derived from 2005 Crime and Safety survey

Nor is this figure distorted by migrants from Britain and other Anglo countries. People from non-English speaking backgrounds and Asian countries in particular are also less likely to be victims of crime (2006 General Social Survey data).
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Views on refugee totals, by boat or plane

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

It’s not quite the question on refugees as such that I was looking for, but if I had not been behind in Pollytics blog reading I would have seen this post reporting an Essential Research poll last year on the size of the refugee program. The table below, taken from Pollytics, shows that a small majority in late July and early August 2008 were opposed to the program at its current size.

refugeenumbers

The same poll found that 62% of respondents thought that previous tough policies on asylum seekers were about right or not tough enough.

Overall, it does look like voters have issues with the refugee program as such, though some of those who are happy with the size of the program seem also to favour tough action against self-selecting refugees.

Unclear public opinion on refugees

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

There is a difficult-to-interpret Newspoll on asylum seekers in this morning’s Australian.

If we are to believe earlier polling, the public wants the government to take a firm line on boat arrivals and illegal migration. Yet according to this Newspoll, only 36% believe that applying tighter immigration laws to asylum seekers attempting to enter Australia would make a difference to their numbers.

With the public almost evenly divided between the government doing a good job managing the asylum seeker issue (37%) and a bad job (40%) this gives neither government nor opposition a clear idea of what the public believes should be done.

With refugee advocates dusting off their rhetoric about the ‘demonising’ of refugees, it’s a pity Newspoll did not fill the big gap in our knowledge: no pollster I am aware of has ever asked what the Australian public thinks of refugee migrants as such, rather than their methods of arrival.

At one level, this is not surprising. The annual number of refugee/humanitarian migrants each year has never attracted much controversy, and has been fairly stable over a prolonged period. All the debate surrounding this issue has just been over whether they self-select or not.

But in understanding public opinion, it is important to know whether voters are concerned about the refugees themselves, in which case the whole refugee/huminatarian program is an issue, or just the method of selection. The racists-under-the-bed left assume it is the former. That’s possible, but hard to fully reconcile with other evidence. For example, support for keeping Muslims out of the country is much lower than previously recorded support for a tough line on boat arrivals.

The ‘megalothymic’ right

~ Andrew Norton ~ 29 Comments

In a Culture Wars chapter called ‘Us and them: national identity and the question of belonging’, ANU academic Kim Huynh organises his argument around the ideas of ‘megalothymia’, which he says ‘denotes a desire to be recognised as superior and separate’, and ‘isothymia’, which lends itself to ‘multiculturalism and multilateralism’.

Huynh argues that the Howard government shifted us ‘decisively to the megalothymic right’ (I predict this label will not catch on). The dog whistlers in the Howard government ‘seek to split society along ethnic lines between the white “us” and the coloured “them”.’ The groups he specifically notes as being targeted by the Howard government are Muslims, people from the Middle East, and the Sudanese.

As we might expect, there is plenty in this chapter about refugees. Certainly, the Howard government treated unauthorised arrivals harshly, signalling a clear intention to maintain control over who enters Australia. So there can be no disputing that immigration policy assumes that there are some individuals who should be denied entry. But can we read into it an assumption that some groups should not be admitted or singled out for especially tough treatment?
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Will Australian universities be hit by an employment domino effect?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

For the last decade or so, Australian universities have been funded by what has been called a reverse Colombo plan – a reference to the post-war scheme that brought thousands of Asian students to Australia on scholarships. Back then, Australians funded Asian education. Now, Asian students fund Australian education through the fees they pay. Without them, the Australian higher education system would collapse.

Obviously, students from much poorer countries than Australia like India and China – our two largest markets – are not doing this because they altruistically want to fund the human capital of middle class Australians. Many of them come here as students because they want to migrate. A 2006 survey of international students by Australian Education International found that about two-thirds of them planned to apply for permanent residence.

The ease with which international students have been able to migrate has owed much to the growth in skilled migration quotas during the Howard years (and continuing in Rudd’s first year), combined with rule changes favouring former international students. Historically, migration levels rise with employment levels, and the Howard government was no exception to this pattern.
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Are all illegal immigration opponents ‘xenophobes’?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

Many people – like Charles and Guido in yesterday’s comments – are quick to dismiss a hard line on illegal immigrants as ‘xenophobia’.

Someone with a generalised suspicion of foreigners would take a hard line on unauthorised arrivals (to use a more neutral term). But it far from clear that a hard line on unauthorised arrivals requires a xenophobic attitude.

If we cross-tabulate responses to the proposition ‘Immigrants who are here illegally should not be allowed to stay for any reason’ with other questions in the Australian Election Survey 2007 we can see how attitudes do not always line up in the way predicted by the they-are-all-xenophobes analysis. For instance:

28% of those who thing legal migration should be increased also favour a hard line on illegal migration.

50% of those who think immigrants make Australia more open also favour a hard line on illegal migration.

25% of those who think that equal opportunity for migrants has not gone far enough favour a hard line on illegal migration.

28% of those who think immigrants deserve more government help favour a hard line on illegal migration.

Some of these are fairly small percentages of the whole sample, but it is another reminder that public opinion rarely matches the categories used by intellectuals and activists to analyse the world.

The average opinion poll respondent would not see any inherent inconsistency in wanting migration controlled or reduced and welcoming migrants who do arrive in the officially sanctioned way.

Indeed, apart from some libertarians and human rights groups, few people want uncontrolled migration to Australia. Some degree of deterrence and punishment is therefore required, for those who decide to come to Australia whether inivited or not. There is room for a far less moralised debate about how tough the policy to enforce border control needs to be.

 

Does the public support relaxing mandatory detention policy?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

How will Labor’s new migration detention policy go down with voters? While mandatory detention for unauthorised arrivals is still part of the policy, it won’t apply to children or where possible their families, and will be as brief as possible to conduct necessary checks. Essentially, detention is no longer being used as a deterrent to illegal migration, and is instead, in the words of Immigration Minister Chris Evans, about ‘risk management’.

So far as I can see, there have not been any polls directly asking about mandatory detention since this Catallaxy post in 2006, when there was 50% support for the ‘Pacific solution’.

But two polls in 2007 asked about illegal immigrants. A Lowy Institute poll asked how important controlling illegal immigration was, with 56% saying ‘very important’. However, only 28% of respondents said that they were ‘very worried’ about the issue, with a third saying they were ‘fairly worried’.

The 2007 Australian Election Survey asked respondents to agree or disagree with this proposition:

Immigrants who are here illegally should not be allowed to stay for any reason

56% agreed, about half of them strongly. Less than 20% disagreed.

In the absence of new boat arrivals, I doubt this policy shift will cause Labor too many difficulties. But on my reading they are probably out of step with public opinion, which as I noted a couple of months ago is becoming less supportive of the legal migration program.

Update 5 August: There is too little detail to analyse the results properly, but The Age today reports an online poll in which a majority opposed a small increase in the refugee intake.

Who did dog whistling deceive?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

I must have been busy late November last year, and missed this Australia Institute paper, Under the Radar: Dog Whistle Politics (pdf), by the appropriately named Josh Fear. It did get a little media coverage, eg here.

It defines dog-whistle politics as

the art of sending coded or implicit messages to a select group of voters while keeping others in the dark.

Fear clearly thinks that dog whistle politics is bad, but the reader is left a little unsure as to exactly why. The conclusion summarises his reasons

* dog whistling undermines democracy by working against clarity and directness
* dog whistlers have sought to ‘create and inflame paranoia about minority groups and outsiders, and to taint the politics of immigration and Aboriginal affairs with parochialism and suspicion’

But these two criticisms seem to at least be in tension, if not contradiction. If messages so subtle they need decoding inflame paranoia (which they certainly have in Fear’s case), how much paranoia would they create if they were stated with clarity and directness?
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My trip to Planet Irf

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

At his blog Planet Irf, Irfan Yusuf claims that I – along with Michael Duffy, who was interviewing me – am guilty of inconsistency. As readers may have gathered, I do not like inconsistency. Irfan says:

During the interview, Norton and Duffy discussed the relationship between racism and immigration. They both seemed to agree that opposition to immigration during the latter half of the twentieth century in Australia wasn’t necessarily to do with racism but was more an issue of the fear among Australian workers of migrants taking jobs….

Later in the conversation, Norton Duffy state that immigration increased under the Howard government. This, they alleged, meant that the Howard government (and presumably John Howard) were therefore not racist.

So if you support the pursuit of policies that lead to an increase in immigration, you simply cannot be racist. But if you oppose immigration, you aren’t necessarily racist. Go figure.

It seems fairly simple to me: the Howard government and the Australian people are accused of White Australia style racism. But support for an immigration policy that includes record numbers of people with dark skins and exotic beliefs is inconsistent with this interpretation of the last decade. A strong racist would always oppose a policy that let in so many people from cultures they did not like. Because there are few strong racists, migration opinion is driven by other factors.

Support for the migration policy is, however, consistent with lower-level prejudices. Social distance surveys show that letting people into the country is one thing, but letting them into your life another. There can be large attitudinal gaps between migration and marriage. So while I can’t recall what I said to Duffy in that interview, I very much doubt that I claimed that ‘if you support the pursuit of policies that lead to an increase in immigration, you simply cannot be racist.’

After all, I was being interviewed about an article that showed why that was not the case.

Why is opinion on migration changing?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

The Age yesterday reported claims that comments former Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews made last year about the reasons for slowing the African refugee intake led to more hostility towards Africans:

…
following Mr Andrews’ comments the NSW Immigration Department [sic] received reports of racial harassment directed at the African community.

“On 14 November 2007, the (deleted) reported that anecdotal evidence suggested an increase in racial harassment directed at Africans in the Parramatta area,” the department-in-confidence community update says.

As is usually the case with these claims, there is no real evidence here of either cause or effect. My own view is that politicians have little influence on subjects people can make up their own minds about. But what politicians say, and reactions to their comments (usually very heated where ethnicity is concerned), do alter the salience of particular issues. It is possible, though not very likely, that greater public discussion of the problems of African migrants had negative consequences for them.

But we can say that there is little sign in survey evidence that particular issues to do with African migrants, relating to gangs and crime, have had any influence on overall public opinion.
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