In reality, there is very little public international “law” let alone any “forcing governments to circumvent international law”. What really gets my goat in this debate is the way the bourgeois left continues to insist the Australian parliament’s “obligations” are to non-Australian outsiders. This is bullshit and needs to be constantly called as such. The Australian parliament’s “responsibilities” are to one body, and one body only.

We, the Australian people.

As much as it was not specifically answered, Im guessing the answer to my original question is that our law requires us to grant residence to as many genuine refugees as land onshore.
Apart from various other reasons, this bothers me from a strictly legalistic point of view. If hypothetically 10 million arrived over the course of one year (not that hypothetical the USA allegedly has 12 million illegals {sorry, undocumented aliens} within its borders) it just goes without saying that the law would not be followed and they would not be granted residence. Perhaps a John Howard trick would be exercised whereby the law would be abolished retrospectively to the day before the first boat arrived.
So what we have done is pat ourselves on the back by declaring this humanitarian law, all the while just knowing that we will only honour it while it makes us look good but not if it causes us too much of a hassle.
Laws are supposed to mean things. They are supposed to have substance and permanence at least for the time of the zeitgeist that they were implemented. There is nothing wrong with changing a law after 20 years if the general beliefs and attitudes of the voters change but at the time of their implementation they are supposed to reflect the attitudes and morality of the times.

P.S. Ken, I do appreciate the trouble you went to explain the whole system to me together with various suggestions, even if I did read a lot of it with developing aversion.
To wit: applicants who enter the country illegally take precedence over those who follow the correct procedures; we should give aid (tribute) so as to stop refugees coming; a commonsense humanitarian imperative : the humanitarian impulse is strictly emotional (not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that), the opposite of rational. Reason cannot be used to defend refugee immigration; it is only what individual Australians want. There is certainly nothing wrong or lacking in common sense for some of us not to wish to allow immigrants who will benefit us the least.

Yes, I agree. They’re all good arguments, especially the effect of remittances on sustaining extended family left behind in an otherwise moribund home economy. The Philippines functions to very significant extent on that basis, not to mention New Zealand (I hope there are some Kiwis reading).

And I agree with everything you say too, Paul. It must be because I got a good night’s sleep.

I agree that there is a lot of circumstancial evidence. Further to your list, you could include the modern findings on social capital where they found that more homogenous communities have higher levels of public good provision, lower crime, etc.
The problem is that this is circumstantial though, i.e. its not proof that there necessarily should be strife. Wildly different communities have coexisted for centuries without much bloodshed. Funnily enough, the Jews in the Arab peninsula used to be a good example of that, with tolerated minorities persisting to this day in places like Iran and Syria. Also, in historical times enormous floods of newcomers have been absorbed in different countries. Just think of the Hugenots when they were kicked out of France and who settled peacefully elsewhere.
More fundamentally, even if there is in-built morality codes, there will always be someone different in one’s surroundings and one could thus alternatively argue that the ability to live with other values is itself something malleable. One might hence venture that a society should choose to be able to live with more ‘true’ diversity. I myself am slightly sceptical of this possibility, but you’d need to disprove such counter-possibilities for the original statement to stand.
Perhaps the answer is that the notion that too much diversity is socially unsustainable fits a shared common ‘theory of how the world works’ which has simply not really been articulated yet but which we nevertheless implicitly share.

Also I think we have to discount, to about zero, the social fabric etc of the countries that people are fleeing. It far too illiberal for me. In effect it is discrimination against poor people from Africa on the basis that they are a) poor and b) smart/desperate/ingeninous to boot. Sure, some are merely ‘connected’, but I expect that this group is underrepresented in refugee applications, and certainly is not sufficiently represented to justify damning the rest and throwing self-determination to the dogs.

Also, although I don’t even get to the stage of balancing these factors, your argument ignores remittances, plus the effect of requiring poor countries to attract their own best and brightest not exploit their industry and creativity to help prop up incompetent and corrupt governments.

I’m not sure that this is correct (I’m not sure it’s wrong either). I wrote a couple of articles some time ago about the cognitive science theories of Jonathan Haidt which he calls “social intuitionism”. Haidt is more or less the Noam Chomsky of cognitive science: he argues that moral values modules are “hard-wired” into the brain just as Chomsky argues similarly in relation to language acquisition.

Haidt argues that there is strong empirical evidence (replicated across cultures and times) that humans possess “moral modules” which include drives towards group loyalty/in-group/out-group as well as purity and authority. These sorts of modules/instincts might be expected to militate powerfully towards group/tribal behaviour and resentment of perceiving that one’s group/society is being “swamped” by outsiders with alien values and practices.

Whether Haidt is right or not is almost beside the point. He’s quite likely to be at least as able to support his theories as economists are able to do by constructs about perfect markets, rational consumers etc.

A rapid Google seach also tells me that there is/was an entire school of sociology known as the Chicago School (not the economists) which specialised in the 1920s and 30s in examining the sociology of integration/absorption/assimilation of migrants into dominant cultures. I know it’s not a science of the brain, it may not even be science at all, but then sociologists might well say the same of economics. We lawyers, on the other hand, mostly don’t give a rat’s whether we’re being scientific. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once famously said: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience”.

However, I think it can probably be demonstrated by various methodologies from a range of human science disciplines that clashes between dominant and immigrant cultures cause social tensions, and logically there must be a point where the economic and other costs of those tensions exceed the value added by migration. The now abolished Bureau of Migration Research did some work on this back in the 1990s and managed to put economic values on the various migrant streams and how quickly they became net economic positives for the dominant society (in this case Australia). The various skilled streams and business migrants predictably came out on top, becoming economic positives almost immediately, whereas refugees on average remained an economic drain for almost 10 years from memory. I can’t recall whether their analyses attempted to factor in economic costs of social tensions, in fact I have no idea how one would even measure that. Perhaps you or other economists might?

It would be hard to disprove by example. I don’t think there are many places where immigration hasn’t occurred to give social scientists a “control group” to work with. Too few, in any case, to adjust for confounding factors.

“However, Australia (like other countries) has a finite limit on our capacity to absorb without major social disruption large numbers of unskilled, traumatised refugees with radically divergent social, political and religious values from the dominant Australian society.”

This is obviously the crucial bit in your argument because it is on that basis that law has to bow to reality, forcing governments to circumvent international law and. It is where the ideal of tolerance and goodwill to all in need runs up against a brick wall of own interest. It is where the economic ideal of labour mobility hits a dead end (at least in the short run).

I find the statement interesting because it is a perfect example of a statement that is almost impossible to defend if you would be asked to prove it beyond doubt (for starters, trying to empirically define ‘social values’ is a nightmare, let alone the notion of distance between values), but yet most people would at some level agree with it. It is the kind of truth that you’d never find hard evidence for in any laboratory or science of the brain. Yet our societies also believe this and act upon it. What is it about our ‘common sense’ that makes us see this truth and act upon it without having irrefutable proof for it?