Playing the ‘racist’ card

Re: “Refugees enrich the country”, (PostBag, July 29).

David Brown calls Barry Wallace an “ugly racist” because of a remark he made about some Australian immigrants. Barry wrote “But if you look at the people who come to Australia, most only come to get money from the government, and many don’t work and form conclaves. Also, they don’t mix into Australian society”. A racist is a person who shows or feels discrimination or prejudice against people of other races, or who believes that a particular race is superior to another. As there was no mention of Barry’s race or the race of those immigrants in his comment, how on earth could it be deemed racist?

The fact is that whenever someone dares to voice concerns about immigration, to question it or to object to it there is always someone like David Brown who will stand up and shout RACIST in an attempt to shut down the debate.

Many people are concerned about becoming minorities in their own countries. In fact, looking at data from the UK 2011 census, I am now a minority in my home city, London, England. I was born there in the early 1950s and in my lifetime I have gone from being one of the majority white, British, to a minority.

While there are some benefits to immigration, there are also some problems with it, especially if the immigrants are illiterate and uneducated with no work skills or bring with them backward belief systems that discourage or prohibit them from integrating into the host society.

And with more people coming into a country who nearly always head for the major cities you end up with more congestion, more air pollution and economic burdens on the health care system, the education system, and the environment.

Allowing highly-skilled and wealthy immigrants into a country has obvious benefits to the host country. The downside is that you deplete the valuable human resources of the countries that they move from.