All for Australia

"All for Australia" is a 1984 book by Australian historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey. It criticizes Australian immigration policy and the direction in which it is shaping the nation. In particular, the book is critical of what Blainey views as the disproportionately high levels of Asian immigration to Australia since the mid-1970s.

Overview and main themes

In "All for Australia", Blainey argues:

* Every nation has the right to control its immigration intake. However, Australia is embarrassed to exercise this right, for fear of offending Third World nations, which themselves have no hesitation in exercising immigration controls to preserve their ethnic compositions.

* Every nation relies on a sense of community. That sense of community belonging can easily be eroded by the too rapid entry of foreign peoples who unintentionally challenge a nation's social cohesion.

* Immigration is one of the most important issues facing a nation. The notion that it is too contentious to be publicly debated makes a mockery of democracy.

* Multiculturalism tends to emphasize the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians, thus unnecessarily encouraging division and threatening social cohesion.

* The policy of multiculturalism has tended to be implicitly anti-British, despite Australia's British heritage and the large number of post-World War II British immigrants to Australia.

* Australian immigration policy has moved from one extreme to another, from a policy that sought to encourage European immigration and restrict Asian immigration (White Australia policy), to a policy that now gives disproportionate preference to Asian immigration. Blainey asserts that this preferential treatment of Asian immigrants partly arose from a sense of guilt over the Vietnam War, but also reflected Canberra's misguided view that more trade with Asian countries would come with a larger Asian population.

External links

* [http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=1667 Strangers In Their Own Land] - synopsis of the major points made in "All For Australia"