I recently attended the 75th anniversary of Floreat Athena FC – the oldest Greek-Australian soccer club in the country. I played there in my teens, so the evening was partly nostalgic. But it was also a reminder of something bigger: how migration has made Australia richer, stronger and more interesting.
At my table were the children and relatives of Greek migrants whose family had helped build the club. One father had been club president in the 1960s. He was also a GP and later mayor of Canning, in Perth’s south. His brother was a neurosurgeon. Next to me was the local MLA, the son of Italian migrants. There were prominent Greek-Australians who have built successful construction and engineering businesses. There was my father-in-law, whose parents came from the Greek island of Kastellorizo in the 1920s. He married an Aussie and had two children. Both are lawyers.
And there was me, a first-generation Polish migrant who arrived in Perth at the age of 12 in 1987.
Permanent residents are Australians
The people in that room, and their parents and grandparents, did not simply ‘come here’. They built businesses, staffed hospitals, opened shops and restaurants, taught in schools, raised families, paid taxes, coached junior sport, volunteered on committees and helped turn suburbs into communities.
Many of them were and still are permanent residents.
Floreat Athena itself began with migrants playing soccer in a local park. Seventy-five years later, it’s an institution. It gives children from all backgrounds – children like me – a place to play. It hosts community events. It’s part of the social fabric.
I left the anniversary more convinced that Australia would have been greatly diminished without mass migration.
But I also left thinking about the hostility many migrants faced when they arrived.
I know this from personal experience. People would sometimes shout “speak English” at us in the street.
Dangerous rhetoric
Today, suspicion is directed at newer arrivals – particularly Africa and the Middle East. The targets have changed, but the rhetoric is familiar. Migrants are blamed for overcrowding, housing pressure, cultural change, crime, terrorism – whatever anxiety happens to be politically useful.
Except it’s more vicious, more entitled. What used to be muttered in the street is now said openly – in the media and in Parliament.
The language is dangerous and morally objectionable. Not only are many migrants fleeing political situations created by a century of the West’s geopolitical meddling – we’ve previously seen this rhetoric lead to violent unrest on our shores.
Immigration makes us stronger
But the rhetoric is also wrong on practical grounds.
Migration has not weakened Australia. It has helped build and enhance it. Migrants and their children have contributed to business, medicine, law, the arts, education, sport, science and public life.
They ‘lift’ far more than they ‘lean’ – to borrow Joe Hockey’s infamous expression.
That doesn’t mean immigration policy should be beyond debate. But blaming migrants for policy failures is a dodge.
Australia’s housing crisis, for example, was not caused by arrivals. It was caused by years of policy failure.
In fact, slashing our migrant intake would increase house prices and reduce our prosperity.
But migrants make an easy political target because they are visible, while the true causes of economic stress are harder to fit into a slogan.
We should have learned by now
Pauline Hanson warned in the 1990s that Australia was being “swamped by Asians”. She was dead wrong. Australia has been strengthened, not destroyed, by Asian migration.
But the same politics of fear is now being directed at others.
She’s wrong again. Our own history teaches us that the people being spoken about as threats today are tomorrow’s neighbours, colleagues, classmates, teammates, employers, doctors, builders, volunteers, artists, writers and community leaders. Their children grow up Australian, as previous generations did.
Beating hate requires leadership, investment and institutions that help people belong. And it requires politicians willing to stand up to racism, not harvest it or fail to call out those who indulge in it.
A dangerous genie is trying to escape from its bottle. Letting it out will diminish us as a people and a nation.
Leaders who truly have Australia’s interests at heart should stop indulging the politics of resentment and start defending the country migration helped build.
Luke Slawomirski is the Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Australia Institute.
