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Step 2 in Australia after WW2 was basically: - education - counselling - socialising

It worked well enough for the influx of Vietnamese refugees too.



Vietnamese communities tend to integrate well. At least in Easter Europe, in Poland or Czech Rep they are doing quite well, no issues at all.


In France too. In fact I notice I know many Vietnamese descendents, but I didn't realize it until I counted. They're Frence-rooted to me. Successful integration.


I spent some months in Australia and got a completely different idea: multiculturalism is completely an illusion. It's a "timebomb" slowed down by abundance of resources: while everybody is getting more then they need, everything is ok.

Edit: For half a decade I was an expat in a monocultural country. Being open-minded (giving in more often than demanding) and member of a too small community to be considered a threat I could enjoy peace to a greater extent than everywhere else before - even as a member of the majority group in my own country. Probably that's why I'm very bearish regarding multiculturalism.


Step 2 in Australia now is mandatory detention, and step 3 happens some undetermined time later (if ever). Interesting to see how we've gone backwards.


Well, asylum-seekers are a massive political football at the moment, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to other migration - Australia has 500k in and 300k out for an annual net migration of 200k in. Excluding kiwis, permanent migrants in are about 86k. Asylum-seekers are very much in the media, but they are also very not typical of the usual migrant situation here.

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/3412....

With 28% of our population being born overseas, we're doing integration okay (21% if you discount UK and kiwiland - and our #1 country of import in recent years is China). For comparison, the UK is 12% and the US is 14%. If you look at the current migrant rate (migrants/1000 pop/year), there are only two sizeable western countries higher than Australia, being Norway and Spain. If you exclude conflict areas, there are no other large countries higher than Australia[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...

Basically, the WAP is dead as a dodo as of 40 years ago. The idea that Australia is an insular country afraid of immigration is clearly a myth once you look at the stats. Of course, that doesn't sell newspapers.

In short, no, we haven't gone backwards. We're actually a success story, it's just that we have a very visible wart on our nose at the moment (thank you, politics).

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[1] this data is from 2014, which is before Germany took in 1% of it's population in the form of Syrian refugees




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