[skissane]

Part of steelmanning / reading charitably is trying to put aside overly emotive/rhetorical/alarmist presentations of an idea and just concentrate on the facts of the matter.

Suppose that Madeupistan is a wealthy developed country with a population of 1 million. Over the next decade, its government has decided to admit 100,000 immigrants. It is evaluating two plans for doing:

Plan A: Admit 100,000 university-educated professionals with established careers and no criminal records

Plan B: Admit 100,000 people at random from all who apply, with no restrictions on who can apply

At the end of the decade, will the people of Madeupistan be happier under plan A or plan B? Almost surely the answer is A: plan B will admit a lot more socially disadvantaged people, worsening crime rates, poverty, social cohesion, violent extremism, etc, compared to A

Now, plans A and B are “ideal types” which don’t correspond to any real world immigration policy - really they represent extremes on a continuum of immigration selectivity, with A being a super-selective immigration policy and B being super-unselective

In the real world, Australia is significantly closer to A and further away from B than France is; and, unsurprisingly, France has significantly greater immigration-related social problems than Australia has.

And the real tragedy of it, is people end up blaming immigration and immigrants in general, when many of the problems they complain about are not inherent to immigration in itself, just to the mismanagement of it by many (but not all) Western nations

The question then is, do the people who “hold a fundamentally different view” agree or disagree with this argument about mismanagement of migration flows - and if they disagree, what is their counterargument to it?

[supplied_demand]

== In the real world, Australia is significantly closer to A and further away from B than France is; and, unsurprisingly, France has significantly greater immigration-related social problems than Australia has.==

Your example completely ignores the facts of history and geography in favor of simplicity and a narrative.

Australia is a former colony, France is a former colonizer. Australia is an island, France is a small part of a much larger continent. Density is considerably higher in France than Australia.

There is a large immigration blowback happening in Australia today, even with your ideal policies.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-27/have-the-political-wi...

[skissane]

> Australia is a former colony, France is a former colonizer

Australia is a "former colonizer" too – the UK transferred the colony of British New Guinea to Australia in 1902; in 1914, Australian troops conquered the colony of German New Guinea to the north; the two thereafter were ruled by Australia until it granted them independence as Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 1975.

One of the major reasons for the British declaring a protectorate over southeastern New Guinea in 1884, and annexing it in 1888, was the British colony of Queensland (now an Australian state) attempted to annex it in 1883 – London opposed that, and declared the annexation attempt unlawful, but felt the best way to respond to Australian demands for colonial expansion to the north was to make the territory a separate British protectorate/colony. In order to convince London to go ahead with the annexation, the Australian colonies had to promise to financially support British New Guinea.

Despite PNG being a former Australian colony, Australia does not give any special immigration preference to people from PNG; so if France has given such preference to people from its former colonies in the past, I think that was a choice France made, not something it was required to do.

> Australia is an island, France is a small part of a much larger continent.

It is true that being an island makes it easier for Australia to have a "hardline" immigration policy, but there are a lot of aspects of Australian immigration policy which could be copied by non-island European nations, except they decide not to – e.g. rebalancing the immigration intake to put more emphasis on skilled immigration and education visas, and less on family reunion or humanitarian/refugee flows; mandatory detention of unauthorised arrivals, including overseas processing; the UK government's controversial Rwanda asylum plan (abandoned by the new Labour government) was in part inspired by Australia's policies.

> Density is considerably higher in France than Australia.

Yes, but what has that got to do with selectivity of immigration policy? Also, population density figures for Australia are somewhat misleading, in that they include massive areas of the country which are borderline uninhabitable; if you restrict yourself to the parts of the country where the vast majority of people live, the density figures are a lot higher, although still lower than much of Europe.

> There is a large immigration blowback happening in Australia today, even with your ideal policies.

Yes, there's an ongoing debate about Australia's immigration levels, but the debate is very different in character from that found in much of Europe. Hard right parties such as Rassemblement national and Alternative für Deutschland both did very well in their respective countries recent national elections, even if RN didn't perform quite as well as many observers had expected – and "immigration blowback" was a big factor in driving that. By contrast, the hard right in Australia (such as Pauline Hanson's One Nation) is in disarray, it had much more success 20–25 years ago, the national government is centre-left and the mainstream centre-right seems to have lost its feet, at least on the national level.

And I wouldn't call Australia's policies "ideal" – very likely there are some areas of immigration policy in which Australia could do better – it is just that on the whole I think it has been more successful than those of many European nations, or that of the US.