Considering immigrants as individuals is not enough — where they come also needs to be taken into account. By Celina 101.
Left-wing pollsters, journalists and politicians will openly celebrate the fact that particular migrant groups vote disproportionately for them. Yet the moment someone on the Right cites the very same voting pattern as evidence that immigration has political consequences, the observation becomes improper and scandalous [e.g. Jacinta Price got dumped on by everyone for pointing out the left-wing voting patterns of Indian immigrants]. It seems group behaviour is perfectly legitimate to discuss when it flatters the Left, but suddenly taboo when it comes from the Right. …
Politician understand that group aggregates exist when it comes to political campaigning and messaging. But the moment the same logic is applied to immigration policy it suddenly becomes fundamentally illegitimate; that is the group aggregation hypocrisy. They pretend it does not exist when it is convenient.
But reality is otherwise. People migrate with families, settle near co-ethnics, marry within communities, sustain homeland media and homeland politics, and transmit identity to their children. This is simply what human beings do. It is what the British did when they settled this continent.
An immigration program is therefore an aggregate policy. The Coalition’s plan claims to address the problem while refusing to think at the level on which the problem actually exists.
Methodological individualism, the idea that values are portable properties that can be bolted onto any person who signs a form has been rejected by essentially all mainstream sociologists for precisely this reason. It is pure ideology, not social science. Values are derivative of a culture one must live inside and identify with. Values cannot conjure identity, identity produces values. …
Westerners are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic):
The World Values Survey, which is the largest empirical study of human beliefs, has mapped the planet’s populations into stable cultural zones. Joseph Henrich’s work on WEIRD psychology argued that distinctive individualism, impersonal trust, and rule-following of Western populations were produced over a millennium by specific Western institutional pressures. These traits are psychological outliers specific to Westerners, not human defaults. …
Australian values — our “monoculture”:
What is actually distinctive about Australia’s political order is its provenance. The colonies received the accumulated institutional capital of Britain: the common law, trial by jury, responsible government, a free press, property rights, the presumption of innocence, and, most importantly, its people.
Federation in 1901 was drafted by men who understood themselves as British, ratified by voters who understood themselves as British, and interpreted by judges trained in a British legal tradition. Until 1949 there was no Australian citizenship. Australians were British subjects. Empire Day once mattered more than Australia Day. …
Australian values did not fall from the sky over Canberra. They are the customs of a particular people with a particular history. Modern Australia has spent fifty years celebrating the customs while disowning the people and the history. The official national story now effectively begins in 1973 with the end of the White Australia policy and the proclamation of multiculturalism. Everything earlier is retained selectively, like Anzac Day without the Empire the Anzacs died for.
Free speech is part of our monoculture, so Sharia law cannot be part of that culture:
If values were universal, attitudes toward free speech would not differ systematically by civilisation and race. [But] they do. …
What the evidence supports is that populations formed under different peoples and institutions carry measurably different assumptions about what speech is for and when it should be punished. A migration program drawing heavily from such societies shifts the national distribution of those assumptions. A values test and social media audit might catch the man who posts beheading videos. It cannot catch the tens of thousands of arrivals whose settled instincts are alien to ours. Yes, it might be a value to them. It is simply not an “Australian” one, or was not, until the composition of Australia began to make it so. …
Multiculturalism is ideological nonsense:
Australians are asked to believe two contradictory propositions.
First: the demographic composition of the migrant intake is culturally irrelevant as individuals from any society can adopt Australian values.
Second: Australia’s increasingly diverse society is so vulnerable to offence and intergroup hatred that it requires an expanding apparatus of speech regulation such as section 18C, widened state anti-vilification laws, hate-symbol bans, religious-vilification provisions, misinformation frameworks and a permanent administrative culture of communal sensitivity.
Both cannot be true. Free speech is supposedly an “Australian value”. Speech regulation itself is contrary to that value. …
If newcomers absorb the host political culture, that culture does not need to be re-engineered to keep the peace among them.
If social harmony now requires that Australians say less about migration, religion and one another, then demographic composition has already altered the operation of Australian values. Mass third-world immigration that necessitates censorship has changed the values it was claimed to leave untouched.
In a society with a strong common ethnic identity, a man can attack your ideas while remaining your countryman. The argument is a contest inside the family. In a society reorganised into permanent ethno-cultural blocs, criticism of a migration stream is treated as an attack on the identity of the group. Meta-analyses show a robust negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Lower trust plus mobilised communal identity is precisely the environment in which anti-vilification law becomes attractive to governments of both parties. …
If Australia possessed substantive values binding on all, they would be incumbent upon newcomers to accept. Instead, the elevation of diversity and multiculturalism as core values functions as a repudiation of any particular Australian inheritance. …
If shared values are important, that implies homogeneity is better than diversity, because more homogenous populations have greater social cohesion and more shared values.
Multiculturalism
Freedom of speech is not one Australian value among several. It is the precondition for noticing, naming and contesting everything else; intake numbers, ethnic voting patterns, civilisational identity, demographic change itself.
Under free argument, the defenders of mass third-world immigration must persuade the public to consent to all of these paradoxes, which more and more people are seeing through.
But, under a mature censorship regime they need only prevent the public from articulating opposition. A patriotic movement that cannot legally name the policy it seeks to reverse has already lost.
So pick one. Australia can maintain the largest sustained third-world migration program in its history, institutionalise social incohesion, and progressively tighten the rules of public speech to manage the resulting frictions. Or it can preserve the inherited political culture drawn from its White British and Western inheritance. …
The immigrant’s society must be taken into account:
A nation is an inheritance carried collectively through time by a particular people. Values are properties of that people.
Because a values test cannot be meaningfully applied at the individual level, an immigration policy built around maintaining Australia’s values has to be applied at the level of the group. A country cannot lie about its values, its values are what they are. …
The very premise of testing values at the individual level is laughably unrealistic. Applicants can be trained to pass the tests. They will tick all the boxes and say, “Yes, I agree with all this stuff.” But how do you know they mean it?
You cannot know what someone believes by putting them in a situation where they are incentivised to lie to get what they want. … It is not possible to run a full character analysis on every individual person arriving in the hundreds of thousands. The only feasible way is to analyse it at the level of the country and the group. There may be individual Iraqis who sincerely want to assimilate and adopt “Australian values”. Yet, it is not feasible to separate those ones from the ones who do not. The only practical course is to bring migrants from places where pretty much all of them already have these values, where they have been established organically in the culture over centuries. …
If you want migrants who will adopt Australian values, the easiest and only feasible way is to prioritise migration from other White Western countries, where those values are already established organically over centuries. Individual exceptions exist, but you cannot sort them at scale. Bring people from places where the distribution already matches what you claim to want.
If Australia transforms the people, suppresses the history, and restricts the speech through which the inheritance is defended, no values statement will save it. Western values require White Western people. There is no third option.
The current censorship regime hates this obvious truth. Have you ever seen it in print before, in modern Australia? Celina101 is a brave woman.
