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It is true that many immigrants don?t understand what freedom is, or what creates it. And it is true that there is a danger in numbers from the preponderance of anti-freedom values in a culture. If you get enough Afghans in one place, you get Afghanistan.
? On the other hand, many immigrants bring a corresponding credit into the ledger on the value of freedom, for several reasons. The first is that, coming from countries where the machinery of government is far less effectual, and less successful in efficient grasping, their experience of daily life is often significantly freer and far more used to being self-reliant than in Australia, where the people have developed a nasty habit of crying for the government to provide anything and everything. ?
The second reason immigrants may represent a credit of freedom values is that many immigrants from oppressive states have a greater appreciation of freedom than most Australians. They can see immediate parallels between the oppressions of their home governments, and the dangers of statist schemes in Australia, to which Australians may be? naively oblivious. For example, the requirement to carry an ID card in many countries is routinely used as a pretext for governmental abuse of various human rights. Turks, Iranians and Chinese can recognise and oppose it for that reason; Australians are more likely to blithely accept that if government wants it, it must be necessary and good. ?
Libertarians expect that people will pursue their own interest, and exercise their legal rights. The fact that people including immigrants are entitled to benefits from the welfare state, is not the fault of the individual, it?s the fault of the welfare state. These Chinese people are no more to blame for their? entitlements than are individual Australians. ?
If the family you criticise had taught their children to write in Chinese, they would be liable to your criticism that they were resisting integration.? They probably didn?t teach their children to write Chinese precisely because they had no desire or intention for them to learn to write it, nor for them to go back, because they wanted them to stay in Australia, go to school and learn English, and grow up to get a job or have a business and live in Australia. ?
As for the demanding affirmative action stuff, I think that is a bit of a furphy - there is no evidence that they are demanding affirmative action. They should not be blamed for the kind of collectivist policies that come more from left-wing middle-class white Australians, than from Chinese refugees or immigrants. ?
To say they are ?cheating? the system is a bit like saying someone is ?cheating? on their tax. It begs the question of the rightful justification of the laws they are infringing in the first place. For myself, I have nothing against someone coming in to Australia, for no other reason than that they have infringed the insanely complex and arbtirary immigration laws. ?
There are real issues underlying immigration, which go to the very core of the modern state. However it would seem to follow from first principles of liberty that people should be free to come and go as they please, so long as they are not hurting anyone else. Most objections to open borders are in fact based on a fear that they immigrants will make non-viable the handouts of the welfare state. That seems to me to be an argument against the welfare state, not an argument against individual liberty.
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