Australia, explained.
Almost one-third of Australians were not born in the country they now call home (Getty Images Plus)
Why is Australia let off the hook when it presents a bigger target than Europe?
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Immigration: Trump’s puzzling Australia exemptionImmigration: Trump’s puzzling Australia exemption
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a remarkable address to the Munich Security Conference on 14 February, a speech that offered a vision of renewed Western civilisational expansion.
“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War,” Rubio said, “the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe”.
Rubio promised to “again now, together with you” ensure renewed Western dominance.
That the speech was met with a standing ovation (the conference chair remarked that he had heard a collective sigh of relief in the room) speaks to how desperate European security elites are to avoid facing the full implications of the Trump administration’s policies and ideas. A speech laced with visions of domination and demonstrating wilful blindness about the history of European colonialism was met with relief because it was served with a polite veneer of US-European solidarity rather than the insults and hostility Trump himself has offered.
Rubio’s remarks included the now obligatory Trumpian warnings about the existential risk of uncontrolled migration, which he called “an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilisation itself” (my emphasis). The US National Security Strategy, released last November, contained similarly dark warnings. It questioned the durability of the NATO alliance on the grounds that “within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”
One should not lightly pass over the sinister moral vision underlying such statements. But to take a parochial perspective, Australian leaders must also be asking themselves why their nation is exempted from these expressions of prejudice, and how long the nation’s luck will hold.
Immigration is an obvious trigger for a crisis in US-Australia relations of the likes that Canada, Denmark, Ukraine, Panama and others have suffered.
Consider some facts. The percentage of the foreign-born population in Germany is 20.5%, for France the figure is 14% while for Italy it is 11.8%. The consolidated figure for the European Union population born outside the EU is 10.4%. For Australia, meanwhile, the comparable figure is a staggering 31.5% – that is to say, almost one-third of Australians were not born in the country they now call home.
Australia’s population growth is also markedly higher than that of Europe. And because the country’s fertility rate is well below the replacement level, this growth comes entirely from immigration, with eight out of the top ten source countries being Asian. To use the language of the US National Security Strategy, Australia is more likely than any NATO member to become “majority non-European”.
Australians handle all this with a commendable lack of fuss, but one wonders why the Trump administration appears to be doing the same. Why is it not as scandalised by Australian immigration and multiculturalism as it appears to be about the milder version practised in Europe?
One likely explanation is that Trump himself has expressed admiration for Australia’s merit-based immigration system and border control policies. Another possibility is that Australia is not seen as sufficiently “European” in the administration’s eyes. It is an Asia Pacific settler society and thus not framed as part of the cradle of civilisation the administration purports to defend (though it goes without saying that those shouting loudest in Washington about the decline of Western civilisation are likely to know the least about it).
Whatever the reason, the implications are substantial. Given the numbers cited above, immigration is an obvious trigger for a crisis in US-Australia relations of the likes that Canada, Denmark, Ukraine, Panama and others have suffered.
Absent such a crisis, Australian governments can carry on the relationship with Washington almost as if nothing has changed, or at least on the expectation that they can survive this administration unscathed and return to something like “normal” in future. Australian governments have no political incentive to speak forcefully about independence in the way Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did at Davos and as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen did in Munich, proclaiming “Europe must become more independent … in every dimension that affects our security and prosperity.”
But Trump’s sheer unpredictability and the ideological fixations of his advisers impose an urgent need for Australia to plan for the kind of breach European capitals and others have already suffered. Immigration is one possible spark, but only one.
About the author
Sam Roggeveen
Sam Roggeveen is Program Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace (Opens in new window), published by La Trobe University Press in 2023.
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