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| It aint rocket science | |
The
Australian reports that New Zealand is toughening up on migrant tests. Migrants will
have to pass secondary-school English test, though refugees will be exempt. Of course this issue is not actually new - Australia has given prefence
to people with English skills for many years. The Chinese government used to
discourange their population learning English during the cold war, encouraging
their populations to learn Russian. It was a two-horse race, and they backed
the wrong one. The result? Now Australia has a generation of Chinese immigrants calling
themselves victims of a
policy of deliberately excluding Asians. They prefer to dump on the the country
that they have chosen to adopt rather than the one they fled - it improves
their victim status. But New Zealand's policy may actually be about lowering the number of muslim fundamentalists entering
the country. Unfortunately the government only has a very blunt tool to make
the selection. Anti-discrimination laws prevent discriminating on the
basis of religion, so they have to look for other measurable correlating
factors. The fact that most muslim countries regard 'Islamic Studies' as an education, and try to
discourage learning English because of the risk of corruption by kaffirs
(non-believers). On the other hand, perhaps the NZ government bureaucrats have finally
spotted the correlation between speaking English and functioning in an English
speaking country. Perhaps they have realized that people who are illiterate,
and can't read the sign "HIGHLY FLAMMABLE NO SMOKING" are not employable even
for the most meniable tasks - they are simply a danger to their co-workers.
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