Migrants work harder

Re: “Playing the ‘racist’ card”, (PostBag, July 30).

Peter Atkinson’s defence of Barry Wallace and the like-minded against the charge that their attitudes are racist is doubtless sincere, as are the attitudes themselves.

To avoid the charge of racist prejudice prompting such accusations, they would have to be backed up by facts. The relevant facts are the statistics comparing Australianborn citizens with immigrants and their children, which show Barry and his sincerely likeminded mates to be wrong. First, immigrants to Australia have higher education levels than the Australian born, with 9.2% having a postgraduate degree compared to only 4.8% for the Aussie-born. More tellingly, the children of migrants have consistently higher educational expectations than those of home-born Australians: 60% of the children of migrants complete at least year 12, compared with only 53% of the children of parents born in Australia. Almost 50% of the children of migrants complete at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to a low 36% for those with both parents born in Australia. These are not the statistics for a group who “only come to get money from the government”.

Naturally, this high motivation to build a better life for themselves and their children is reflected in their substantial contributions to the Australian economy and to Australian society more generally.

Although racial prejudice certainly continues to exist in Australia, with 27% of Australian citizens having experienced personal abuse or discrimination “because of their ethnicity”, 86.8% of Australians think it “a good thing for a society to be made up of people from different cultures”.

FELIX QUI