Rethinking CDP Immigration Policy
We have been successful in allowing CDP members to present their views on issues concerning their attitudes to Muslim immigrants. As we expected a majority of members agree with our current immigrant policy, but it was surprising that 95% of respondents wanted a moratorium against Muslim immigrants extended indefinitely. In other words our members do not want any immigrants to our country who are Muslims.
No thinking person can understand how a nation could hold a selective immigration policy based on religious discrimination. One clue may be in the age of those who filled in the CDP forms. The average age of CDP members is well over retirement age. (A close check of our membership records reveals that 23% of all CDP members are over the age of 75 years. A further 25% of all members are between 66 and 75 years. Indeed over half of our membership is older than the retirement age.)
I can understand such people wanting to keep Australia as they think it once was. But we now live in a global village with massive transfers of population. We cannot create by bad policy a situation where one language group, of one colour, with one culture and one religion occupies an entire continent. Such bad policy will never be implemented by any Government in Australia. As we have no CDP member in the Federal Government such CDP policies are totally irrelevant as a policy initiative.
Although it was not a question asked in our survey, some of our leaders have been saying that the Australian Government should also accept as immigrants from Middle Eastern and African countries only those people who are declared Christians. In the whole history of the “White Australia” policy, now totally rejected and discredited, this would be the least thought-out policy ever. It is a dumb immigration policy. Fortunately, no Australian Government would ever consider such a proposal again. Why is this unresearched and ill considered immigration policy so dumb?
ONLY LET THE GOOD ONES IN. Whenever we talk about the 200,000 Muslims in Australia, some Australians argue we must close the avenues of Muslim immigration, and only allow Middle Eastern citizens who are Christians to migrate here. That always wins the applause of some of the audience. But like many other simple answers to complex problems, it creates more problems than it solves.
It is a popular comment: “Why do we let Muslims in when we should only allow Christians from Muslim countries into Australia?” Of course it is good for us in Australia to have more keen Christians to influence the Muslims already here, but what does this policy do to the churches in those countries that face Muslim persecution? The brain drain to the West is now being matched by the faith drain. The brain drain takes doctors (for example) from the Middle East, from India, China and from South East Asia for Australia. Of course we need them. Welcome! But what is that doing to their home countries where doctors are in very short supply? That is the problem with all immigration policies based upon allowing only immigrants who have a skill that we require.
Now consider the faith drain by encouraging only Christians to emigrate. No one knows how many of the Middle East’s 293 million people are Christians, but nearly everyone acknowledges that Middle Eastern Christianity has been in steady decline for decades. In some local areas, officials record declines of 75 percent or more. Recent violence in the region is accelerating that decline. Some observers estimate that the region’s population of 10 to 15 million Christians will continue to spiral downward during the next 50 years due to the exit of the Christians. By then no effective church will remain and we will have helped in that decline.
Egypt is the country with the greatest number of Christians about 8 million of Egypt’s 75 million people. Egyptian Christians suffer oppressive legal restrictions. Muslims who wish to become Christians experience intense persecution. So large numbers of Christians in Egypt are seeking a new future in the West. Up to 1950 Lebanon had a Christian majority. But because of immigration Lebanon’s Christian population has dwindled from around 58 percent at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, to an estimated 39 percent today. Lebanon’s Christians, mostly Maronites (Eastern Rite Catholics), have been traumatized by the killings of Christian politicians and the work of the terrorist group Hezbollah, and have thus fled the country. In the last few weeks in Beirut and Tripoli, Christians have fled from the fighting.
This regional pattern of decline is reflected on both national and city levels, where key Christian populations once thrived. In Bethlehem, now under Palestinian authority, Christians have shrunk from 85 percent in 1948 to about 12 percent today. Soon Bethlehem will not have a Christian community left. In the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian Christians are caught between growing Islamic fundamentalism and Israel’s quest for security so they are leaving in droves. In Palestinian-controlled areas, Christians number about 60,000, less than 2 percent of the overall population. Christians in Iraq are currently at great risk from the sectarian strife between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that has engulfed the country. Without missionary support, the indigenous church has been fleeing as refugees to Syria and then to the West.
Hence, there are many Christians in the Middle East who want to emigrate here. Why not encourage them to come as some people argue? Because this would depopulate the struggling churches in the Middle East. Because this would drain the only generation of leaders they have. Because this would undercut and demotivate the missionaries whom we send to these lands, as we would be encouraging their converts to leave them alone. Because we would be leaving alone and unsupported those faithful elderly Christians whose children and grandchildren have left for the West; because we have learnt from the “rice Christians” era in China, that if you offer benefits to only those who convert to Christianity you get converts in name only, who hurt the church as a whole. Because we know that in the whole of history, the Church has never died out under persecution, but it has when it has been seduced by the easy life.
Taking only Christians as immigrants into Australia would decimate the Christian church and the missionaries and faithful pastors who minister under great difficulties. Fortunately, even secular government immigration Department officials like ours know you cannot have a religious discriminatory immigration policy in Australia. Some church leaders have expressed the view that people wanting discriminatory immigration policies, no matter how sincerely, have possibly moved beyond the boundaries of Christian belief and practice.
I believe no political party can accept a discriminatory policy if it proclaims itself as a Christian party. The Labor Party can, and has, promoted a discriminatory policy in the past because they said they were union-based and this was the best way of protecting unionists’ jobs. However, the Australian Labor Party does not advocate this now. The Liberal Party once advocated a discriminatory immigration policy to have a country for whites only. However, the Liberal Party does not hold to such a discriminatory immigration policy now.
But a party that declares itself Christian, and seeks to follow the teachings of Jesus, can never proclaim a discriminatory immigration policy for our nation. I am sure some people have just repeated what they have read, or heard other people say, without thinking through the ramifications for other Christians, church ministers and missions in Muslim lands. CDP members who hold such beliefs should think carefully about the consequences of their position.
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.
