Is the Jewish Democratic Council Really Jewish - or Just Democrats?

by Alan M. Dershowitz
August 3, 2022 at 9:30 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18772/jewish-democratic-council

• This organization -- the Jewish Democratic Council -- is misnamed. It recruits members and solicits money based on false advertising. It promotes itself as comprised of pro-Israel Jews. But the reality is that its leadership consists mainly of progressive Democrats who just happen to be Jewish. For them Israel, Iran and anti-Semitism are peripheral issues.

• That is increasingly true of many Democratic Jewish voters who prioritize other concerns over Israel, over the growing threat of anti-Semitism from the hard left and hard right, and over other issues that directly affect the Jewish people.

• [T]hey obviously do not want to hear the perspective of this Jewish Democrat, because the organization is more united behind social policy issues -- abortion, gun control, the environment and the Supreme Court -- than they are about Israel. I was told by two people who attended the event that the word "Israel" was never even mentioned....

• I shake my head in frustration at why so many left-wing Jewish Democrats are willing to abandon Israel and continue to vote blindly for their grandparents' Democratic Party without demanding that it marginalize its anti-Israel extremists.

• We have no loyalty to the current Democrat Party, just as many of its most prominent officials seem to have no loyalty to so many of their Jewish supporters. We certainly should have no loyalty to organizations such as the Jewish Democratic Council that hides its true priorities behind the misleading label "Jewish." There is nothing Jewish about their agenda, which is to elect Democrats regardless of their views on issues of direct concern to the Jewish community and Israel.

The Jewish Democratic Council is misnamed. It recruits members and solicits money based on false advertising. It promotes itself as comprised of pro-Israel Jews. But the reality is that its leadership consists mainly of progressive Democrats who just happen to be Jewish. For them Israel, Iran and anti-Semitism are peripheral issues. (Logo source: Jewish Democratic Council of America/Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0 with modifications)

As President Joe Biden was returning from his productive trip to the Middle East, the Jewish Democratic Council was holding a fundraiser on Martha's Vineyard to support Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterm elections and to help elect a Democratic president in 2024. Former President Bill Clinton and former Senator Hillary Clinton were the guests of honor and speakers, thus suggesting that this organization purports to represent mainstream Jewish Democrats.

But it does not. It represents the left wing of the Democratic Party. It certainly does not represent mainstream Jewish voters who care about Israel and the growing threat of anti-Semitism.

At this so-called "Jewish" event, there was no discussion of Israel, or the existential threat it faces as Iran comes closer to constructing a nuclear arsenal. Nor was there any discussion of the increasing anti-Semitism within the so-called "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party, or of the decreasing support for Israel among some younger Democrats and among some Democratic office holders.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently predicted that Biden might be the last pro-Israel Democratic presidential candidate. Among those being considered to replace Biden either in 2024 or 2028 are several who are stridently anti-Israel and some who are lukewarm. Current Democratic Members of the House include some who wrongly regard Israel as an apartheid state akin to South Africa until 1993, and others who would cut off military assistance to the nation state of the Jewish people. Still others, including some Democratic Senators, are hyper-critical of Israel and want to see a reassessment of United States policy toward our strongest ally in the Middle East.

Had I attended the Martha's Vineyard event, I would have expressed my concerns about the growing abandonment of Israel by the left wing of the Democratic Party. But they obviously do not want to hear the perspective of this Jewish Democrat, because the organization is more united behind social policy issues -- abortion, gun control, the environment and the Supreme Court -- than they are about Israel. I was told by two people who attended the event that the word "Israel" was never even mentioned, although Biden's recent visit to Israel was headline news. The omission of Israel was confirmed by the organization's own website.

It is difficult to imagine any other ethnic or other group of Democrats -- Blacks, Arabs, gays -- that would not even mention the issues of direct concern to that group at a large fundraiser. Why are Jewish Democrats different?

This organization -- the Jewish Democratic Council -- is misnamed. It recruits members and solicits money based on false advertising. It promotes itself as comprised of pro-Israel Jews. But the reality is that its leadership consists mainly of progressive Democrats who just happen to be Jewish. For them Israel, Iran and anti-Semitism are peripheral issues. That is increasingly true of many Democratic Jewish voters who prioritize other concerns over Israel, over the growing threat of anti-Semitism from the hard left and hard right, and over other issues that directly affect the Jewish people.

I shake my head in frustration at why so many left-wing Jewish Democrats are willing to abandon Israel and continue to vote blindly for their grandparents' Democratic Party without demanding that it marginalize its anti-Israel extremists. I understand the reluctance of some traditional Jewish Democrats to vote for Republicans who oppose liberal social policies. I share that reluctance. Hence my frustration.

More and more Jews are expressing this frustration by voting for candidates who support Israel without regard to their party identification. To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan: they do not believe they have left the Democratic Party; they believe the Democratic Party is leaving the millions of Jews who think more like moderate Republicans such as Mitt Romney than radical Democrats such as Bernie Sanders.

Many, like me, will continue to vote for and contribute to the candidates who we think are best (or least worse) for our country, for the world and for Israel. We expect that these candidates will generally be Democrats. But if they are not, then we will vote for their opponent. We have no loyalty to the current Democrat Party, just as many of its most prominent officials seem to have no loyalty to so many of their Jewish supporters. We certainly should have no loyalty to organizations such as the Jewish Democratic Council that hides its true priorities behind the misleading label "Jewish." There is nothing Jewish about their agenda, which is to elect Democrats regardless of their views on issues of direct concern to the Jewish community and Israel.

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of The Price of Principles: Why Integrity Is Worth Its Consequences. He is the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute, and is also the host of "The Dershow," podcast.

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Borders for Us, Not for You: Higher Status in the Leftist Grievance Hierarchy Means You Can Invade Others’ Borders

Borders for Us, Not for You: Higher Status in the Leftist Grievance Hierarchy Means You Can Invade Others’ Borders

October 13, 2019/16 Comments/in Featured Articles /by Tobias Langdon

 

 

Sex and race are, to the left, mere social constructs, abstract systems of delusion and injustice that can be overturned by human will and social engineering. It follows, then, that leftists will support and celebrate men who reject the social construct of sex and claim to be women. And leftists do support and celebrate such men.

Triumph of the Trannies

It also follows that leftists will support and celebrate Whites who reject the social construct of race and claim to be Blacks. But leftists don’t support and celebrate such Whites. Quite the contrary. While Bruce Jenner, a man claiming to be a woman, is worshipped and rewarded, Rachel Dolezal, a White claiming to be a Black, is ridiculed and punished. Steve Sailer and others have drawn attention to this contradiction, but I don’t think they’ve properly explained it. Why do leftists cheer when men cross the border between the sexes, but jeer when Whites try to cross the border between the races?

 Rachel Dolezal as White and as Black

I pose those questions deliberately in that form to draw out the links between the left’s love of transgenderism and the left’s love of open borders. The Jewish libertarian Murray Rothbard (1926–95) described this aspect of leftist ideology very well in this passage of an otherwise long-winded and boring essay:

The egalitarian revolt against biological reality, as significant as it is, is only a subset of a deeper revolt: against the ontological structure of reality itself, against the “very organization of nature”; against the universe as such. At the heart of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will — in short, that reality can be instantly transformed by the mere wish or whim of human beings. (Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, Modern Age, Fall 1973)

Rothbard was right in general about leftism, but failed to explain that highly significant exception: why does the “exercise of human will” allow Bruce Jenner and others to become women, but not allow Rachel Dolezal and others to become Blacks? Sex and race are both aspects of reality, but the left believes that only one of those aspects “can be instantly transformed by the mere wish or whim of human beings.” Why so? I would explain it by supplementing Rothbard’s explanation. Yes, he’s right when he says the left have a magical belief in the reality-transforming power of “human will,” but he doesn’t discuss what happens when there is a clash of wills.

The high and the low

Let’s look at transgenderism first. Men like Bruce Jenner and Jonathan Yaniv have “willed” that men can become women and must enjoy unrestricted access to all female spaces. 
At the same time, some women — the so-called Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists or TERFs — have “willed” that men can’t become women and must keep out of female spaces. 
There is a clash of wills that is settled, for the Left, by the status of the opposing sides. In leftist eyes, the men have higher status than the women, which is why the men’s will prevails and the women’s will is rejected. But hold on, you might be thinking: How can the men have higher status than the women in leftist eyes? It’s easy: the transgender men have cleverly aligned themselves not with men in general, who are indeed of lower status than women, but with homosexual men, who are of higher status than women.
Trangendered men are part of the “LBGTQ+ community,” which lifts them above women in the leftist hierarchy. Take Jonathan Yaniv, the perverted and probably Jewish male who claims to be a woman and has been suing female cosmeticians in Canada for refusing to wax his fully intact male genitals. If Yaniv spoke the truth, he would admit that he is a heterosexual male who seeks perverted sexual pleasure by passing himself off as a woman and receiving Brazilian waxes or entering female toilets to share tampon tips with under-age girls, etc. Obviously, then, Yaniv can’t admit the truth. Heterosexual men are wicked in leftist eyes and are well below women in the leftist hierarchy. Heterosexual men definitely cannot pass themselves off as women in pursuit of perverted sexual thrills.

Actual authentic lesbians

Yaniv and other “trans-women” must therefore align themselves with homosexuals to pass leftist purity-tests. As trans-women they claim to be members of a sexual minority, which triggers the leftist love of minority-worship. 
Indeed, Yaniv and some others go further than simply claiming to be women: they claim to be actual authentic lesbians. A pinned tweet at Yaniv’s Twitter account states that he is “One proud lesbian. I’ll never give up fighting for human rights equality. #LGBTQoftwitter.” 
Yaniv isn’t a lesbian, of course. Real lesbians — that is, real women who are sexually attracted to other real women — quite rightly reject fake lesbians like him, so the fake lesbians exploit leftist ideology again and accuse real lesbians of bigotry and hate.

Feminism has the concept of the “glass ceiling,” whereby women are unjustly prevented by sexist men from reaching the highest positions in politics, business and academia. Inspired by this, the fake lesbians have invented the concept of the “cotton ceiling,” whereby men like Yaniv are unjustly prevented by real lesbians from removing the underwear of said lesbians and having sex with them. Here is a trans-lesbian activist lecturing a sceptical TERF (i.e., Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist for those not up on the latest jargon) on the injustices of the cotton ceiling:

Trans women are female. When our female-ness and womanhood is denied, as you keep doing repeatedly, that is transphobic and transmisogynist. As I said earlier, all people’s desires are influenced by an intersection of cultural messages that determine those desires. Cultural messages that code trans women’s bodies as male are transphobic, and those messages influence people’s desires. So cis queer women who are attracted to other queer women may not view trans women as viable sexual partners because they have internalized the message that trans women are somehow male.
The comparison to what cis males say also makes no sense. What trans women are saying is that we are women, and thus should be considered women sexually, and thus be considered viable partners for women who are attracted to women. What cis males are saying is that queer women shouldn’t be exclusively attracted to women, which is completely different. (The Cotton Ceiling? Really?, Femonade blog, 13th March 2012)

It’s not “completely different,” of course. In both cases, people with penises are “saying” (and willing) that real lesbians should have sex with them. In both cases, real lesbians would be encountering the male genitals of real men. But the trans-activist believes in an act of verbal transubstantiation whereby a trans-lesbian possesses a “female penis” that, despite all appearances, is “completely different” to the nasty and objectionable penis of a “cis male.”

Aspects of religious psychology

I use the term “transubstantiation” deliberately. It’s a term from Catholic theology that refers to the supernatural process whereby wafers and wine transform into the flesh and blood of Christ during the celebration of Holy Eucharist by a priest. No physical or scientific test can detect this transformation and to all appearances the wafers and wine remain unchanged. But traditionalist Catholics will insist that the wafers and wine are now truly Christ’s flesh and blood. If you disagree, you’re probably safe nowadays but you wouldn’t have been in the past. It was very unwise to openly deny, let alone ridicule, transubstantiation in Catholic nations during the Middle Ages. And disagreements over the concept were central to the murderous hatreds of the Reformation. Those who believed in transubstantiation got very angry when it was denied.
This anger, which is part of the odium theologicum, is an important aspect of religious psychology, whether overt or covert — leftism can in fact be explained as a mutation of Christianity and Judaism.  

Overt and covert religions gain power by demanding belief in things that defy everyday reality, because such belief is difficult and requires a greater emotional investment.  
When we invest more in a belief, we have more incentive to protect it more strongly. And it is precisely because concepts like transubstantiation and the “female penis” are absurd that they are powerful. 
When we have an emotional investment in something we can’t prove, we react strongly when it is denied or ridiculed. That applies even more when we ourselves are subconsciously aware or afraid that our beliefs are baseless or false. Crushing external heresies can be a way of stilling internal doubts.

The “female penis” vs the “unisex brain”

And so religion and other forms of ideology can gain power by their contradictions and absurdities. However, in the clash between transgenderism and feminism, both sides believe in absurdities: the trannies insist on the concept of the female penis, just as the feminists insist on the concept of the “unisex brain,” namely, that there is no genuine difference between male and female brains. These two concepts are both biologically absurd: there is no such thing as a female penis, but there is such a thing as a female brain. However, if transgenderism and feminism are both powered by absurdities, why have trannies been winning the battle over the TERFs? Well, it’s partly because the trannies have the bigger, and therefore better, absurdities. For example, the “female penis” is an obvious absurdity, the “unisex brain” is much less so. Penises are out in the open, after all, whereas brains are hidden behind the skull.
And there is a continuum between a typically male brain and a typically female brain that doesn’t exist between male genitals and female genitals in the vast majority of cases. The psychological differences between men and women are a question of averages and tendencies, but the physical differences are generally stark and obvious (inter-sex individuals are rare). A certain group of trannies also have the stronger male will-to-power and love of battle, which is another reason they are winning the battle with lesbians. All this explains why the left supports and celebrates trannies as they cross the border between male and female. As a sexual minority, they have higher status than ordinary women. As a novel and exhibitionist sexual minority, they also have higher status than lesbians, who also have less will-to-power.

Better than Black

Indeed, as I pointed out in “Power to the Perverts!,” transgenderism has allowed some White heterosexual men to leap above the Black-Jewish lesbian feminist Linda Bellos in the leftist hierarchy. The White men are “transgender” and Bellos, although Black, is a TERF. In current leftism, transgender trumps TERF. Leftists therefore support the border-abolishing White men and not the border-erecting Black woman.

However, leftists would instantly support Bellos if those White men were claiming to be Black rather than female. Leftists want the border between male and female abolished, but not the border between Black and White. Why so? 

Again I would argue that higher and lower status settle the clash of wills. Rachel Dolezal “willed” that she was Black, while Blacks “willed” that she wasn’t. Dolezal was trying to abolish a border, Blacks were trying to maintain one, so a naïve reading of leftism would say that leftists should support “trans-racialists” like Dolezal just as they support transgenderists like Bruce Jenner. But leftists didn’t support Dolezal, and Blacks easily won the battle of wills. The border between Black and White stayed up, and Dolezal was ridiculed and punished, despite being more convincing as a Black than most transgenderists ever are as women.

High and low again

Why did this happen? Because Dolezal, as a White, had lower status than the Blacks whose territory she wanted to enter. When you have higher status, leftists allow you to control your borders. Their cry of “No borders, no nations!” only applies to those of low status. The Black nation is allowed to have borders against non-Black infiltrators, just as Israel is allowed to have borders against non-Jewish infiltrators. There was no way for Dolezal to align herself with a minority with higher status than the Blacks whose territory she wanted to enter. She had to pretend to be truly Black in a way that Bruce Jenner and Jonathan Yaniv don’t have to pretend to be truly women. And so Dolezal could be exposed as a fraud in a way that Jenner and Yaniv can’t.

Hey, haters: Karen White is a woman!

For example, a review of a film about Dolezal in the Guardian says that Dolezal “has become a pariah in Spokane, Washington” after she was exposed as having “appropriated blackness and then lied about it.” The film-reviewer, the stereotypically leftist non-White Arwa Mahdawi, says that this deception “seems like peak white privilege.” And that’s exactly what it is, in Mahdawi’s eyes: she thinks that the film “prioritizes a white woman’s feelings over the damage she has caused.” 
But what “damage” has Dolezal actually caused? None whatsoever by comparison with what transgender men have caused. In 2018 the heterosexual male David Thompson (born Stephen Terence Wood) already had “convictions for indecent assault, indecent exposure and gross indecency involving children, violence and dishonesty.” He was on remand for rape in a male jail, but claimed to be a woman called Karen White and was transferred to a female jail. He then sexually assaulted two real women. But Mahdawi would not say that White had “appropriated femaleness” and would not condemn his behaviour as “peak male privilege.” That would be transphobic!

Similarly, the Guardian has ignored the damage done by Jonathan Yaniv as he tries to destroy the livelihoods of real women by dragging them before a Human Rights Tribunal in British Colombia. 
And those real women are non-White. Why have Mahdawi and her anti-racist feminist sisters not leapt to their defence against the “male privilege” and “white privilege” of a White male predator? 
I think I’ve explained this above: it’s because transgender men like Yaniv, by aligning themselves with homosexuals, have won higher status than all ordinary women, even non-White ones. The men can therefore cross the border between male and female, while TERFs who try to defend the border are accused of hate and bigotry.

Parallels with mass immigration

This analysis obviously also applies to mass immigration by non-Whites into Western nations. 
To leftists, Whites have low status and therefore cannot maintain physical borders against non-Whites, who have high status. 
Nor can Whites maintain abstract borders of political identity. In leftist eyes, a Somali, Iraqi or Chinese who emigrates to Britain, America or France thereby becomes just as British, American or French as native Whites whose ancestors have lived there for centuries or millennia and who created the institutions, culture and history of those nations. 
Non-Whites can enter and occupy all White spaces, which is why we now have absurdities like Sir Lancelot, “The Most Gallant Knight,” being played by a Black actor:

A Black Sir Lancelot, courtesy of two Jews

Gallantry is not a Black concept — or a Jewish one. As the image above reveals, the Black Lancelot has been created and imposed on White audiences by the Jews Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. 
This behaviour represents the later stages not simply of the culture of critique but also of a campaign of dissolution. 
Jews want to destroy all the borders and boundaries, physical, cultural and ideological, whereby Whites maintain their distinct identity and defend their own interests. 
That’s why Jews have long promoted the idea that America is a “nation of immigrants” and a “proposition nation” defined by ideas and ideology, not by the racial identity of its inhabitants.

In a way, characters like the Black Lancelot are a jeer of triumph over Whites, who are being told that they now no longer have the status or the power to maintain the borders of their own identity and culture. 
 All White roles are now open to non-Whites, but non-White roles are closed to Whites. 
It would now be absolutely “unacceptable,” in leftist parlance, for a Black character like Othello to be played by a White. 
The Jewish role in this “appropriation” of White culture is obvious and was condemned by the late Larry Auster, himself a Jew, in his remarkably honest and clear-sighted article “Jews — The Archetypal Multiculturalists”:

Eastern European Jews, with their discontented, irrepressible temperament, were admitted as equals into a culture that had been formed by Anglo-Saxons and other northern European-origin people, with their pacific, self-controlled temperament. The former outsiders then proceeded to make their own sensibility the center of the culture, while diminishing and demonizing the Anglo-Saxon. … To seek to transform America into a Messianic project, to identify with the Other (whoever the Other may be) at the expense of the native majority, to deny to the native majority its ethnic identity while indulging in one’s own ethnic identity — this is not just a bad agenda, it is a Jewish agenda, and it is entirely moral for citizens of a free country to criticize it as such. (See Lawrence Auster on the Role of Jews in Disestablishing White, Christian America, The Occidental Observer, 13th March 2013)

Auster also condemns the “all-consuming narcissism” and “unmitigated, brazen arrogance” of Jews like the “attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz.” 
Such Jews have conducted both the culture of critique and the campaign of dissolution, striving to throw down all borders and barriers with which Whites have defended their own interests and maintained their own identity. 
And that “all-consuming [Jewish] narcissism” and “arrogance” identified by Auster have never gone away. They have recently been on display in Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Mass Immigration (2019), created by the Jewish economist Bryan Caplan and the Jewish illustrator Zach Weinersmith, who “make a bold case for unrestricted immigration in this fact-filled graphic non-fiction.”

Punims as propaganda: the cover of Open Borders by Jews Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith

You could call the cover of the book “Peculiar Punims as Pro-Migration Propaganda” (punim is Yiddish for “face”). Drawn by Zach Weinersmith, the cover effectively presents migrants of all races as large-nosed Jews overseen by a similarly large-nosed Statue of Liberty. And Lady Liberty is displaying the “glory-hole gape” or “nümale grimace,” that is, the submissive open-mouthed grin identified by hate-thinkers like Chateau Heartiste and Men of the West as characteristic of low-testosterone leftist males (or soy-boys). I find the cover oddly disturbing and unpleasant. The peculiar punims are androgynous and abhuman, like those of robots or people drugged into compliance.

The nümale grimace

But although the diverse migrants to submissive America are presented as Jewish, that isn’t really how Jews regard non-Jewish migrants. 
Rabbi Laura Klausner-Janner, “Senior Rabbi” in British Reform Judaism and daughter of the alleged paederast Greville Janner, has claimed that “When Jewish people look at Calais migrants, we see ourselves.” 
But Rabbi Laura lived in Jerusalem for 15 years and knows perfectly well that Israel does not have open borders for “vulnerable and oppressed” non-Jews. Instead, it has firmly sealed borders equipped with very sturdy fences and very effective surveillance equipment.
It’s a question of high and low status again. As God’s Chosen People, Jews have the highest possible status and are therefore entitled to the best possible borders while being free to invade the spaces of all others. This accounts for phenomena like Jewish anti-White activist Tim Wise titling his book White Like Me and the common Twitter meme in which Jews claiming to be White loudly preach open borders and other liberal pieties that conform to Jewish interests and oppose the interests of Whites.

 

Likud celebrates the creation of Fortress Israel

And the borders maintained by Jews in Israel aren’t just physical. The poster above is read from right-to-left because it’s in Hebrew, the artificially revived language of the new Jewish nation. 
As I described in “Words as Weapons,” Hebrew and its script are barriers to entry by non-Jews and to penetration by foreign intelligence services. But Israeli intelligence finds no difficulty recruiting Jewish speakers of any important gentile language. 
The Jewish message to Whites is very simple: Borders for us, not for you. Leftists have the same message. And that’s why Bruce Jenner can become a woman, but Rachel Dolezal can’t become a Black.
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The War on White Australia: Cheap Labor Importation Schemes

 

The War on White Australia: Cheap Labor Importation Schemes

 

February 23, 2020/38 Comments/in Featured Articles /by Brenton Sanderson

 

I have written extensively about the pivotal role played by Jewish intellectuals and activists as ideological and political handmaidens of the demographic transformation of Australia over the last fifty years (see here, here, here, here and here). In this essay I want to explore another key driver of this transformation: business interests fixated on suppressing wages and boosting profits through the expedient of mass immigration and cheap labor importation schemes.

 

The White Australia policy (1901–1973) was, while it lasted, a hugely successful attempt to preserve the genetic and cultural legacy of the founding racial stock of the nation. It was also an industrial relations policy designed to prevent the capitalist class from flooding the Australian economy with cheap labor. This was a key part of the original rationale for the policy as articulated by Alfred Deakin, Australia’s first Attorney-General, who argued that:

a white Australia does not by any means just mean the preservation of the complexion of the people of this country. It means the multiplying of homes, so that we may be able to defend every part of our continent; it means the maintenance of conditions of life fit for white men and white women; it means equal laws and opportunities for all; it means protection against underpaid labour of other lands, it means the payment of fair wages. A white Australia means a civilisation whose foundations are built on healthy lives, lived in honest toil, under circumstances which imply no degradation; a white Australia means protection.”[i]  

 

An analogous view had been expressed as early as 1841 by James Stephen, the head of the British colonial office in London, who warned that large-scale non-White immigration to Australia would inevitably “beat down the wages of poor labouring Europeans … [and] cut off the resource for many of our own distressed people.”[ii] In the four decades before the enactment of the White Australia policy in 1901, some 60,000 South Sea Islanders (called “Kanakas”) were imported and indentured to Queensland sugar plantation owners who built a business model on this ultra-cheap imported labour and who regarded themselves as a “plantocracy” in the manner of the American south. This practice alarmed Australian scholar Charles Pearson who observed in 1893 that: “We know that coloured and white labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us with a single year’s surplus of population; and we know that if national existence is sacrificed to the working of a few mines and sugar plantations, it is not the Englishman and Australian alone, but the whole civilized world, that will be the losers.”[iii]

 

The closing down of this and other cheap labour importation schemes with the enactment of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 hugely benefited White Australian workers. Wages paid by business rose to secure labour. The sugar industry continued to thrive, but without cheap imported labour the plantation model struggled against the family farm model, and the industry came to comprise many smaller-scale enterprises. The White Australia policy was thus a policy of economic protectionism designed to benefit the entire racial group by preventing capitalists from importing cheap labour to undercut the living standards of White Australians. The policy reflected the desire of Australians to build a strong and prosperous society founded upon the principles of racial and cultural homogeneity. Reflecting this view, one commentator noted in 1939 that: “The Australian prides himself on his high standard of living; he wishes to do nothing that will endanger it. Neither does he wish to bring into being a colour problem such as he sees in South Africa.”[iv]

 

 

Advertisement for Australian-made furniture from the early twentieth century

 

 

Since the Jewish-led overthrow of the White Australia policy in the 1960s and 1970s, Australian policymakers have progressively embraced not only the Jewish diasporic strategic imperatives of increased racial diversity and multiculturalism, but also the cheap labor importation schemes prohibited under the White Australia policy. A dramatic increase in cheap labor importation into Australia took place after 1996 when the “conservative” government of Prime Minister John Howard created the Section 457 Visa for temporary workers—a visa program designed to be uncapped and totally driven by the putative needs of the Australian labor market.

 

The 457 Visa led to a massive increase in cheap non-White labor brought into the country, including in industries experiencing flat or no growth, such as cooks in the hotels/restaurant industry and shop assistants in the retail sector. One union noted how there was a 53% increase in the number of 457 Visa holders over a period when total employment in relevant industries fell by six per cent. Many businesses used 457 Visas to replace their existing workforces with cheaper migrant workers. Australia’s peak union body, the ACTU, noted how the proliferation of 457 temporary work visas meant that young people and graduates who previously would have been offered an apprenticeship or other entry-level opportunity have been effectively shut out of a number of industries.

 

Amid growing community anger and a Senate Inquiry into the scheme, the 457 Visa was replaced in 2018 with the Temporary Skill Shortage (TSS) Visa, which, while ostensibly including more rigorous labor market testing and salary assessment requirements, has had minimal effect in limiting temporary migrant numbers. There are currently about 2.2 million temporary visa holders in an Australian workforce of 12.9 million—or about 17 per cent of the total (not including illegal workers). This is a massive 54 per cent increase from a decade earlier. Almost a fifth of the nation’s cleaners, store packers, and food and hospitality workers are on temporary migrant visas—at a time when nearly two million Australians are either unemployed or underemployed.

 

International Student Explosion

 

In addition to creating the 457 temporary work visa, it was the Howard government that, from the early 2000s, encouraged overseas students to apply for permanent residence after completing their courses in Australia. This was partly in response to lobbying from the universities who sought to promote overseas student enrolments as another revenue source. The inevitable result was an explosion in overseas student enrolments, and by 2017–18 overseas students had become the largest contributor to Australia’s very high level of Net Overseas Migration (NOM) which numbered 271,700 people in 2019. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimates, overseas students comprise around 44 per cent of total NOM. Between 2012 and 2017, the share of commencing overseas students of all commencing students in Australian universities grew from 21.8 per cent to 28.9 per cent and to around 40 per cent in Group of Eight (Go8) leading universities. The majority of these students were from China and India.

 

The head of The Australian Population Research Institute, Dr. Bob Birrell, estimates that around one in five overseas students is granted Permanent Residency each year, noting that “Most of these students had been in Australia for years. They had managed to stay here by transferring from one temporary visa to another before eventually finding a PR pathway, mainly by finding an employer to sponsor them or a resident to sponsor them as a partner.” An overseas student studying for a bachelor’s degree typically extends their stay to pursue a post-graduate qualification and then moves on to a 485 visa to work for up to 18 months. Overseas students (especially those from India) show a high propensity to seek and obtain another temporary visa each year, and an equally high propensity to appeal any decision to deny them an additional visa. This enables them to stay in Australia while their appeal is heard by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

 

Overseas students are by far the largest contributors to population growth in inner Sydney and Melbourne. As well as contributing to a collapse in academic standards at Australian universities (who have a vested financial interest in setting low English language standards for their courses), their presence in the labor market actively harms Australian workers:

 

Many thousands of overseas students are being enrolled who do not hold the funds needed to finance their stay in Australia for more than a short period. They have to rely on obtaining employment here. They have created an underclass of workers with little choice but to accept whatever terms employers are prepared to offer. Most of those holding an overseas student visa do not possess professional or trade qualifications accepted in Australia. And, because they hold temporary visas, employers are usually only willing to recruit them on a casual or part-time basis. They enter low-skilled labour markets (notably in hospitality, retail and other service industries). The costs are borne by the many young domestic workers who do not possess post-school qualifications and who are also seeking work in these occupations. These domestic job seekers face ferocious competition from overseas students and other temporary migrants. This has eroded wages and conditions.

 

While this labor supply abundance persists, employers don’t have to raise wages or invest in labor saving capital equipment. Real incomes have, consequently, stagnated in Australia for a decade and in 2018 the labor productivity growth rate fell to zero. Between 2008 and 2016 Australia’s labor market created an extra 474,000 full time jobs but only 74,000 went to people born in Australia. The bulk (400,000) went to migrants (both permanent and temporary)—the vast majority of whom arrived in the country after 2001. Close to 30 per cent of Australian residents are now born overseas.

 

The Scale of Recent Australian Immigration

 

In 2000, the Australian Bureau of Statistics forecast that Australia’s population wouldn’t reach 25.4 million until 2051. As a result of mass immigration and a population growth rate much faster than other developed countries, Australia got there in 2019. Jewish Monash University professor and leading immigration and diversity propagandist, Dr. Andrew Markus, recently enthused: “You have to pinch yourself. In 2006 our population was under 20 million, and now it’s over 25 million. I can’t think of a developed Western country that’s experienced a change of that magnitude.” The Chinese-born population of Australia grew by half to 650,000 in the five years to 2018 (more than eight times faster than the overall population), and by 2023 is on track to surpass the English-born. The Indian-born population grew even faster to 590,000. In 2019 more people from Nepal settled in Australia than from the United Kingdom, mainly due to the high number of students who come here and remain after graduation, and who then use chain migration to bring in their relatives.

 

Australia’s Nepal-born population is now about 95,000, compared with only 1,410 in 1996. Tara Gaire arrived from Nepal as a student in 2008, and now works as a trainer in the vocational education sector. Living with his family in the northern suburbs, Mr Gaire said he felt very at home in Melbourne’s multicultural environment. “We catch up with community members, we go to the temple, it doesn’t feel like overseas,” he said. … Dr Bob Birrell, from the Australian Population Research Institute, said Nepalese students had created a bridgehead in Australia from which the community grew rapidly. “We have former students who got permanent residency through skilled entry and marrying locals, and then inviting relatives from the homeland to join them,” he said.     

 

Pro-immigration political commentator George Megalogenis recently noted that demographic trends in the city of Melbourne point “to a future in which Australia is no longer a majority white nation.” Melbourne is the first Australian city in which the largest ethnic community are migrants born in India, followed by those born in China. “Melbourne’s ethnic face, with the Indians first, the Chinese second and the English [born] third, is” he observes, “expected to become the nation’s before the end of the 2020s, as cities and regions increasingly rely on migration for population growth.” Megalogenis, a leftist with a longstanding animus to Anglo Australia, celebrates the fact “history will be made at the core of our identity. Indigenous Australians will outnumber the English-born for the first time since the 1820s. At that point we can stop pretending we are just a white nation.” While this is obviously a change Jewish intellectuals and activists will be cheering, it’s something unlikely to alarm White Australian business leaders devoid of any racial or national feeling.

 

Scene from Boxing Day sales in Melbourne 2019

 

Despite growing community unease, successive governments have steadfastly refused to reduce Australia’s high immigration intake due to the pleadings of ethnic lobbies, universities, and a business sector that finds it far easier to recruit cheap migrant workers than train locals. A report by the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia recently advocated totally unrestricted inflows of temporary migrants and the abolition of any labor-market testing for positions filled by migrants. Noting that Net Overseas Migration now accounts for about 60 per cent of Australia’s population growth, David Alexander, writing in The Australian, observes that:

Many of the policy themes of recent years echo those of earlier eras. Labour importing businesses argue that they shouldn’t be expected to pay market rates for labour, and on this basis deem there to be labour shortages that government must assist with. These businesses have increased competitiveness against those that do not use cheaper imported labour, and this is contributing to the structure of industries reverting to a more manorial model. Looking across historical episodes, we can identify the economic principles at work; high differentials between wealthy-country wages and poorer-country wages will always create incentives for some businesses to arbitrage away the difference through labour mobility schemes. And, correspondingly, the pressure for wage convergence with poor countries can be expected to elicit opposition from domestic workers.

 

Clearly racial and cultural imperatives would, in a sane country, override government support for large-scale cheap labor importation schemes. It is disingenuous to declare labor shortages on the basis that businesses decline to pay the market rate, and it is also unfair to give structural advantage to labor-importing firms over local-employing firms. The Indian government recently cited spurious “labor shortages” in Australia (i.e. the unwillingness of businesses to pay market wage rates) to argue for even greater access for Indian workers to “fill the gaps” in the Australian economy, proposing that Indian health workers, infrastructure specialists and security guards be given enhanced access to the labor market. The Indian population of Australia has, as mentioned, exploded in the last two decades: Melbourne and Sydney have been the destination of choice for more than 60 per cent of the 500,000 Indians and more than 70 per cent of the 500,000 Chinese who have migrated here since 2001. The Australian Chamber of Commerce has welcomed this unprecedented surge in permanent and temporary migration, noting “The biggest reason for the growth in our NOM (net overseas migration) is international students [with the right to work], something to be celebrated.”

 

Increased Scope for Worker Exploitation

 

Australia’s extremely high per capita level of immigration, fueled by uncapped temporary work and overseas student visas—where over two million workers in Australia are currently on visas—creates tremendous scope for worker exploitation. In 2015 it was revealed that thousands of workers, generally Indian students on visas, were paid as little as $5 an hour by 7-Eleven and were blackmailed, or threatened with deportation if they spoke up. The company apologized and paid back more than $160 million to thousands of workers in back pay. A long list of companies have since been caught underpaying staff or using fake traineeships to avoid paying workers their entitlements. A recent study found underpayment of wages to temporary workers is rife, with as many as a third being paid less than half the legal minimum wage. The underpayment of workers in the hospitality industry is so widespread as to be standard practice. Most recently, a restaurant fronted by Jewish celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal was found to owe employees at least $4.5 million “in what appears to be the worst case of underpayment yet in the high-end restaurant sector.”

 

Such practices inevitably have a flow on effect throughout the entire economy where high school and university students are widely underpaid and overworked. Business journalist Adele Ferguson noted how “These companies have come to symbolize what is wrong in a number of sectors of the economy, where underpayment or wage suppression is part and parcel of doing business and vulnerable workers are like lambs to the slaughter in this insidious practice. It isn’t an overstatement to say that worker exploitation is widespread and have become entrenched over time.” A lawyer leading a class action of former employees subjected to such practices observes how employers “have been allowed to build empires and expand their business portfolios on the backs of employees being paid less than their minimum award [legal] entitlements.”

 

Stagnant Wages in Australia

 

It is little wonder, in such an environment, that real wages in Australia have stagnated. Wage underpayment fueled by mass immigration (temporary and permanent) has seen Australian wage growth fall off a cliff since 2013 and remain at low levels. Economics professor Roger Wilkins notes over the last decade “the almost complete absence of any growth in household incomes. After tax, the typical Australian household earned $80,600 in 2009. In 2017 the same household earned $80,100. Meanwhile, ultra-low interest rate policies by Australia’s central bank has inflated asset prices, fanning inequality, and supercharged an already high debt burden without much increase in genuine economic activity.” Since 2000 the volume of loans outstanding in Australia—to households, businesses and governments—has soared from $740 billion to 2.9 trillion. The average mortgage on an existing dwelling in New South Wales recently hit an all-time high of $621,500.

 

Australian politicians are fond of boasting that, during a period of time when other major developed economies experienced several recessions, the Australian economy has experienced almost three decades of uninterrupted economic growth. This disguises the fact that, due to record high immigration, Australia’s annual growth in Gross Domestic Product per capita has, in the last decade, averaged less than one per cent, lower than America, Japan, and even the Eurozone. Per capita incomes have gone backwards during 18 quarters of the past 28 years (including two technical recessions). In per capita terms, both the Victorian and Melbourne economies have gone backwards four times in the past ten years. On that measure, it is the worst performing state and city in Australia—despite being the favored destination of new Chinese and Indian migrants. “The population growth has disguised the fact that Victoria has become a poor state,” notes economist Saul Eslake. “Let me put it this way, economic growth that’s only driven by population growth is not really worth having, as it is not improving people’s living conditions.”

 

Mass immigration has so transformed the demographics of Melbourne that more than 40 per cent of residents are now migrants. And this is only the start: if current trends continue a city the size of Brisbane will be piled on top of Melbourne in the next two decades. A consequence has been that house prices have risen to among the most expensive in the world as house size and quality have declined. A 2017 survey of 406 cities ranked Sydney the world’s second most expensive (housing costs against inflation) only behind Hong Kong (which it increasingly resembles). Melbourne came in sixth, more expensive that London, Tokyo and New York. Wage stagnation amid soaring house prices has made shelter a luxury, and priced a generation out of the property market. The amenity of local suburbs is declining, congestion is worse, there are fewer parks and “green spaces” and most modern apartment blocks are cheap eyesores. Meanwhile, Australia’s annual intake of around 20,000 mainly African and Middle-Eastern refugees has fueled a surge in violent crime.

 

Australia’s New Economic Strategy

 

Population growth fueled by mass immigration and the servicing of it with cheaply-built houses, apartments, and supermarkets has essentially become Australia’s economic strategy. Former Australian Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, pointed out that “Australia digs up and sells raw materials. In the cities the economy is based on building apartment blocks and shopping malls. The idea of Australia as a clever country is a myth, it’s an illusion.”

 

Unsurprisingly, surveys have found a steep fall in public support for immigration over the last decade. A 2018 survey found that more than 69 per cent of respondents felt the country didn’t need more people. Community concerns about the deleterious effects of mass immigration are not, however, represented by Australia’s political class. At the 2019 federal election, despite some clear differences between the two major political parties in a range of policy areas, they effectively ran a joint ticket on immigration. Economics journalist Judith Sloan notes that immigration is “a no go subject for many in the political class,” who are “in heated agreement in their support for high migrant intakes, both permanent and temporary, and the associated high population growth.”

 

Conscious of the public’s growing hostility to mass immigration, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a small cut in Australia’s permanent migrant intake (from 190,000 to 160,000) in 2019—while failing to mention the nation’s massive temporary migrant intake wouldn’t be constrained. According to the 2019-20 federal budget, Net Overseas Migration is expected to average 268,600 annually for the next four years—an increase on the 228,700 estimate from the previous budget. A former Department of Immigration bureaucrat notes that “If [Morrison] sticks to that plan [to lower permanent migration to 160,000], then Treasury’s rise in net migration inevitably means a huge surge in long-term temporary migration to more than offset the reduction in permanent migration.” Moreover, the 160,000 permanent immigration figure also does not include the 20,000 people granted permanent residence each year through Australia’s refugee program.

 

The Labor Party opposition in Australia, like its counterpart in the UK and the Democratic Party in the US, has essentially abandoned any pretense of representing the interests of the White working class. Most of the “creative destruction” that followed the economic globalization of the post-Cold War era has been in jobs lost by blue-collar White men. White manual workers across the West now face fewer jobs and, spurred by mass immigration (both legal and illegal) falling real wages and unaffordable housing. Rather than representing these people (their traditional constituency) by supporting immigration restriction, the Australian Labor Party panders to ethnic communities. In the wake of its shock 2019 election loss, the party is “prioritizing engagement with migrant communities” and will focus on “reviewing legislation from a multicultural perspective.”

 

Australia’s Plutocratic Elite and Mass Immigration

 

Noting the reasons for the major parties’ flagrant disregard for wishes of the electorate, Judith Sloan notes that “The lobbying behind immigration is so strong that both parties have concluded the views of ordinary folk can be ignored. These forces include the bureaucracy—check out the Treasury’s reports—big business, property developers, the universities, and various interest groups, some ethnically based.” These business and ethnic groups lobbying for unrelenting waves of mass immigration often overlap. Australia’s largest property developer, the Jewish tycoon Harry Triguboff (known as “high-rise Harry”) is a pro-immigration zealot for ethnic and business reasons. Born to Russian-Jewish parents who fled to China, Triguboff, who came to Australia as a young boy in 1948, pioneered selling apartments to the Chinese, and hopes mass immigration will see Australia’s population soar to 55 million by 2050 and 100 million by the end of the century.

 

 

High-rise Harry Triguboff

 

Fellow Jewish plutocrat, Frank Lowy, is also “an advocate for an ambitious immigration program.” In response to talk of a small cut to the permanent immigration intake in 2018, Lowy, claiming to be “disturbed by the negative tone of the debate over immigration,” protested that “we are moving in the wrong direction. We should bend that curve back upwards. We should be talking about targets, not caps.” Mass immigration proponents like Triguboff, Lowy, and fellow Jewish property tycoon John Gandel, were leading donors to both major political parties in the lead up to the 2019 election. All three, meanwhile, strongly support Israel’s ethnically-restrictive immigration policies, with Lowy recently moving to Israel after retiring from active involvement in his business affairs.

 

Downward Social Mobility of White Australians

 

Pivotal to the growing backlash against neo-liberal economics in the West has been the downward social mobility that has resulted from decades of the kind of plutocratic rentier capitalism championed by Triguboff, Lowy, Gandel and other pillars of Australia’s corporate elite. Analysis by a Harvard economist in 2016 found that just half of children born in the 1980s were better off than their parents, compared with 90 per cent of baby boomers. The downward social mobility of younger generations of White Australians is especially acute because of the crushing rise in house prices and the incredible corruption of the banking and financial systems that has accompanied it. Plutocratic rentier capitalism is an economic system where certain players are able to extract a “rent” from everybody else because they have an excess of economic and/or political power.

 

While these and other business interests are undoubtedly made better off as a result of mass immigration, its negative effects are mainly borne by White working people and taxpayers. Taking just public infrastructure—covering roads, public transport, hospitals, schools, electricity, water and sewage, policing, law and justice, parks and open space and much more—Sustainable Population Australia estimates every extra migrant requires well over $100,000 of infrastructure spending. A failure to make this kind of investment in infrastructure results in growing congestion on roads and public transport. Infrastructure Australia forecast that the annual cost of road congestion will increase from $19 billion in 2016 to $39 billion in 2031. Exacerbating this is the fact two-thirds of migrants settle in the already crowded cities of Sydney and Melbourne—each of whose populations are projected to reach 10 million in the next fifty years. The only way this doubling of the populations of Melbourne and Sydney can be occur so rapidly is by moving to a lot more high-rise living—a fundamental and profoundly negative change to the Australian way of life.

 

It is little wonder that, when asked, Australians feel their living standards are declining, especially those struggling to squeeze into an overheated housing market. Asked how they felt about the level of change during the past decade, more Australians opted for “concerned,” “overwhelmed,” and “fatigued” than “positive,” “empowered” and “energized,” according to research published late last year. These results reflect growing sentiment throughout the West where growing numbers of White working people are becoming heartily sick of plutocratic rentier capitalism fueled by unrelenting waves of permanent and temporary immigration.

 

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[i] Ian Cook, Liberalism in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999), 179.

[ii] Eric Richards, “Migrations: The Career of British White Australia,” In: Australia’s Empire, Ed. Deryck Schreuder & Stuart Ward, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 163-185; 167-168.

[iii] Charles Pearson, National Life and Character: A Forecast, (London: MacMillan & Co., 1893), 16.

[iv] Richards, “Migrations: The Career of British White Australia,” 173.