Imagine if, in the late 1930s, when Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle were arguing for rearmament and against appeasement, their speeches on the danger of Nazi Germany had been interspersed with comments to the effect that Europe nonetheless needed to address the Jewish problem. In fact, imagine that their calls for resistance to fascism, while evidently sincere, took second place to their stress on the need to limit and reduce Jewish influence.
Would they have been listened to? Or would they would have been discredited out of their own mouths as intellectually bankrupt and politically incoherent?
The point seems obvious. Yet that is the situation today of many of Europe’s leaders, notably Germany’s Friedrich Merz and Britain’s Keir Starmer. Faced with a political movement aiming to overthrow the establishment that they ineptly represent, which uses demonisation of (dark-skinned, mostly Muslim) immigrants as its leading weapon, their response is to join in the demonisation themselves.
To describe this as fighting with one hand tied behind your back would be too kind. It amounts to agreeing in advance with the opponent’s position, immediately giving it (and them) credibility and respectability – “shifting the Overton window”, as the political scientists would put it. If you’ve already conceded that the far right’s main grievance is in fact justified, what then is your argument for why voting for them is such an awful thing?
A couple of months ago I pointed to the same phenomenon in Australia, in the way that the Liberal Party under Peter Dutton had brought One Nation within the tent and thereby “bolstered its respectability, making it seem like a normal option rather than the pariah that it once was.” I promised then that the question of what could be done instead would be “another post, coming soon.” Belatedly, this is it.
The answer, of course, is that it’s hard, whether for national leaders or for ordinary readers. The state of the world often seems overwhelming. What can individuals do against the weight of destiny that seems to be dragging us back towards barbarism? And how can we be confident we are not doing the wrong thing and making matters worse?
Despair is all too tempting, but there is at least one simple thing that we can all do. Stop demonising immigrants.
If you’re serious about defending civilisation against the barbarians, don’t adopt the barbarians’ discourse. Don’t use terms like “strengthen the possibility of repatriation” or “island of strangers” or “effective entry ban” or “disincentive-based policy“. Don’t copy Australia’s abominable treatment of refugees. Don’t do anything to reinforce the view among voters that immigrants are an alien, invasive presence, rather than ordinary human beings just like themselves.
Treating immigrants as human beings might not be popular. But it won’t get any more popular if you run away from it. If you tell people to hate and fear immigrants, that’s not going to do anything to curb the appeal of the parties who’ve made hatred and fear of immigrants their animating principle. If you won’t defend human decency, who will?
Many years ago, when John Howard as opposition leader floated an anti-immigration strategy, prime minister Bob Hawke was appalled and promptly went on the attack. His then media adviser Barrie Cassidy takes up the story:
Beforehand some advisers had warned him that Mr Howard might have public sentiment on his side; that he should proceed with caution. Hawke said to them: “Then tell me what I need to say to turn them around.”
If the world wants to copy Australia, that would be a good place to start.
The World is Not Enough 
The 1951 Refugee Convention says nothing about forcing states to accept someone’s claim to be a refugee or forcing them to admit them to their territory. Being able to live in the community whilst being processed had become a perverse incentive. Which is why the Keating government removed it.
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I’m criticising those such as the Greens and ASRC for telling porkies. Nothing to do with you, sir.
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Sorry LWT, that comment somehow appeared on the wrong thread; it was a response to grahamy01, not to you. Now fixed.
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So the first response to the post is to do exactly the thing that the post was recommending people not do.
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I’m not demonising anyone. Brexit and the Voice and Trump 1 and 2 shows what happens when the general population feel that they are not being listened too. They turn to those that will.
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Oh, sure, ‘perverse incentive’ isn’t one of the explicitly listed examples, if you want to hide behind that figleaf.
What the example of Brexit shows is that David Cameron made a colossal blunder by saying the equivalent of ‘Maybe these people have a point and we should give it some consideration’. The Brexiteers did not have a point and David Cameron should have acted accordingly. He lacked the grit which Bob Hawke showed in the example mentioned.
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Paul Keating and Gerry Hand in 1992 were not far right such as Nigel Fararge or UKIP. Labor is also only centre right as Bandt and his mob claim if one (a general “one”) is far left.
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No, Gerry Hand was very much on the left. But by feeding the electorate a diet of immigrant-bashing he & others like him helped to prepare the ground for the far right by giving respectability to their policies.
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listening to white working class voters is important though. They know that mass immigration means employers will hire those people as cheap labour. That is why the white male working class now votes for Trump and the like
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Listening to people is important, but listening to people does not mean automatically agreeing that they are right. My daughter listens to me, and then when she thinks I’m wrong she tells me. As a result, I learn, which is good. I am lucky to have in my life somebody who is not afraid to tell me when they think I’m wrong.
Some people get more attention paid to them and some get less: it is a good thing when a conscious effort is made to pay more attention to those who otherwise get less attention. Most of the time, working class people get less attention than employers and the rich, so a conscious effort to pay more attention to working class people would usually be a good thing. Most of the time, white people get more attention than people who are not white, so what would be a good thing would not be be a conscious effort to pay more attention to white people but rather a conscious effort to pay more attention to people who are not white. If a politician said ‘We need to listen more to working class voters’, I would think that was probably a good idea. If a politician said ‘We need to listen more to white working class voters’, I would think that I didn’t know exactly why they were distinguishing white working class voters from other working class voters, but I would know that there are no good reasons for doing that, only bad reasons.
Roughly 30% of the people who live in Australia were born in other countries. That’s a very high figure by world standards. If the way we got to that proportion was not ‘mass immigration’, then I don’t know what would count as mass immigration. In recent times, Australia’s had a lot more immigration than most countries, that’s for sure, and we’re none the worse for it. (Sure, every country has its problems and that has to include Australia, but whatever problems Australia has, high levels of immigration have not made us worse off than countries with lower levels of immigration.)
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Well put, J-D.
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Since J.D. appears to need a Ladybird Book on the Refugee convention, it’s the government that determines if someone is a legal refugee (thus, despite what Shoebridge says in the below, it is not re-foulment to send them back if their claim is rejected or to refuse to accept their claim) and they are not a legal refugee if their claim is rejected. The mention of “arbitrary” detention is clearly intended to capture actions by dictatorships and not legitimate border control measures passed by democratic governments. The Greens and the wider western left tend to lie a lot when treaties and conventions do not match their views. So do the right but the left wing is more irritating because of their intensely smug self-righteousness.
https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/25-billion-force-people-nauru-and-denial-natural-justice-new-labor-law
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Nothing you have written relates to my preceding comments. You had some things you wanted to say, for your own obscure reasons, about topics like refugees, detention, treaties and conventions (topics none of which I mentioned in my comments) but, for equally obscure reasons, you weren’t satisfied with just saying what you wanted to say but had to pretend that your remarks were a response to my remarks and somehow (it’s not clear how) showed that I was wrong about something (it’s not clear what).
Here, in five words, is the main point of my previous comment: immigration has not hurt Australia.
Nothing in what you’ve written has given any indication of how immigration has hurt Australia, so (until you can come up with a minimally relevant response, at least) that main point remains untouched.
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