Posts by jh
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Russell Brown,
There were many things about his age that bothered Dickens, from the class system to the power of the church. But London in particular has long reflected the world. It has had succession of prevailing cultures, a Jewish population for nearly 1000 years, etc.
My point was that Dicken's novel's reflect the diversity of characters within the English population.
Multicultural policies[116] were adopted by local administrations from the 1970s and 1980s onwards. In 1997 the New Labour government committed to a multiculturalist approach at a national level,[ WikipediaAnd what of the effects on the culture of New Zealand’s working classes of mass migration. How many people these days have hens or grow their own vegetables?
<p>My elderly Chinese immigrant neighbours do both, and very well. Apart from that I really can’t see what you’re getting at.</p>
80% of population growth over the last 20 years has come from offshore. NZ used to be the Quarter Acre Half Gallon Pavlova Paradise. Location determines the value of land (around jobs and infrastructure). Population pressures have reduced the size of sections. Kind of obvious?
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I’m sure that happens sometimes, but equally, I’ve actually tried when talking with racists to point out mutual acquaintances who break a racist stereotype and the response is usually “oh well he’s different” or “X isn’t a _real_ Maori” or any other nonsense that prevents them acknowledging they are wrong or their head exploding
that sounds like a straw man argument; you are using that to represent those opposed to policies promoting diversity -mass migration. In other words there are no reasonable objections.
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Well, of course. But “since the 19th century” covers an awfully large slice of “back then”, and the tense I used suggests quite strongly “from then up until and including now”. Still, the size, pace and effects of immigration in the 1840s, ’50s and ’60s had a lot of Maori worried about the effects to the point where they concluded the Brits had broken the Treaty and so they were justified in taking up arms. We know what happened after that.
Most of our source countries were European (U.K, Dutch). Policy changed under Labour to take Asians.
Maori were right to be upset over colonisation (in some ways but not in others). The Maori case is used (wrongly) to justify a further colonisation of Pakeha: "you did it to them so it is only fair that it is done to you" (except it is assumed to be beneficial - house prices, congestion, lifestyle aside).
It is Maori who are most concerned about immigration from Asia (I recall Professor Spoonley saying "it leaked out" - don't tell the children)Growing on growth seems to be a rather silly economic policy, sure. But your comments seem to suggest that growing on Asian growth is somehow bad immigration policy. Why is that?
First you could convince me why population increase is good policy and then why I should welcome people with a different culture and language, rather than people who will integrate faster and speak the same language.
" "For migrants from China, issues of access to a vibrant Chinese community were very important.""
http://www.voxy.co.nz/lifestyle/work-deciding-factor-migrating-auckland/5/98537 -
Senior Treasury Economist Michael Reddell:
“Among policy and analytical circles in New Zealand there is a pretty high degree of enthusiasm for high levels of immigration. Some of that stems from the insights of literature on increasing returns to scale. Whatever the general global story, the actual productivity track record here in the wake of very strong inward migration is poor. In an Australian context, the Productivity Commission – hardly a hot-bed of xenophobia or populism – concluded that any benefits from migration to Australia were captured by migrants and there were few or no discernible economic benefits to Australians. And that was in a country already rich and successful and with materially higher national saving and domestic investment rates than those in NZ.”
http://www.treasury.govt.nz/downloads/pdfs/mi-jarrett-comm.pdf
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Way back in 1991 when I was returning to Auckland after five years in London, I fretted that I was leaving a teeming, polyglot city to return to a monoculture. Happily, it turned out not to be that way. The Maori cultural and political renaissance was manifest, and second and third generation immigrant kids had flowed into the central city. It was a better, more vital place.
It didn’t bother Dicken’s that England was a (your word) mono culture.And what of the effects on the culture of New Zealand’s working classes of mass migration. How many people these days have hens or grow their own vegetables?
Accordions, multiculturalism and the evolutionary psychology of Charles Crawford.
http://www.gunghaggis.com/2007/10/21/accordions-multiculturalism-and-the-evolutionary-psychology-of-charles-crawford/
He talks about cultural depth. -
Christopher Hitchens:
"When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain. We saw immigrants – from anywhere – as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.
Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people – usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly ‘vibrant communities’.
If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.
Revolutionary students didn’t come from such ‘vibrant’ areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London).
We might live in ‘vibrant’ places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins.
But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients – not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives.
When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as ‘racists’.
What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?
To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as ‘racist’.
And it also meant cheap servants for the rich new middle-class, for the first time since 1939, as well as cheap restaurants and – later on – cheap builders and plumbers working off the books.
It wasn’t our wages that were depressed, or our work that was priced out of the market. Immigrants didn’t do the sort of jobs we did.”
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/04/how-i-am-partly-to-blame-for-mass-immigration.html -
The phrase “evolutionary psychologists” never inspires much confidence, unfortunately
I find it fascinating and it appears to explain why multiculturalism is a failure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/world/americas/05iht-diversity.1.6986248.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
but I did notice that abstract talked about “in-group” vs. “out-group”, so nothing to do with racism at all, and the principle is likely to apply to political parties or multi-ethnic religious groups as much as to ethnic groups.it depends on your definition of racism ?
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
And yet since the 19th century NZ has had quite a diverse range of immigrants, most (but certainly not all) of them pale-skinned until fairly recently, but all bringing a variety of cultures. Somehow pale-skinned diversity seems to fly under the radar and nobody much worries about “the size, the pace, the rationale and the effects.”
back then the size, the pace, the rationale and the effects.” were different. Diversity wasn't a goal of narcisstic left-wing politicians (for one thing) and we were still developing as we broke in the hill country. Neither did we aspire to the second highest rate of immigration in the OECD. Now we grow on growth.
Somehow pale-skinned diversity seems to fly under the radar as I said above humans have a natural preference for people like themselves, having evolved in small groups where everyone was like themselves, but that doesn't just apply to whites (as other groups are human too).
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Racism at one level is innate according to evolutionary psychologists.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21220339
and the point is that all humans groups are the same. -
Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
for me it is an issue of adding populations to an existing population and culture: the size, the pace, the rationale and the effects.