Luke Ford

In all the articles decrying Donald Trump’s attempts to limit Muslim immigration, I didn’t see many arguments for why America benefits from Muslim immigration.

Why don’t minority groups put more effort into making the case that they benefit the majority? I rarely see that. Instead, minorities like to emphasize their rights, but they rarely talk about their obligations to the majority.

I have naturalistic and realistic view of human nature and group competition. If your group, by and large, has a net positive effect on other groups, I expect opposition to your group to be less intense than if your group, by and large, has a net negative effect. If all indications are that your group has a neutral effect on the majority, and your group is under fire for damaging the majority, making the case for your group’s neutral effect seems like a wise thing to do.

Why should we expect other people to celebrate us if we’re not doing more good for them than harm?

I’ve heard good arguments that the more united a country, the stronger, more cohesive and more trusting and more happy it is. I am sure this is true in many cases, and not true in other circumstances. Still, minority groups should strive to contribute more than they take, because on the face of things, their very presence, for a substantial part of the population, reduces social cohesion and social trust.

My view is that everything is contingent. In some circumstances, hating out-groups is adaptive and in other circumstances, it is maladaptive. In some circumstances, Jews and Muslims and Christians exhibit certain generalizable group differences, and in other circumstances, these differences disappear. I don’t think there’s any inherent quality among Jews, Muslims, Christians and other groups.

Osman Faruqi is the culture editor for The Age in Melbourne and for the Sydney Morning Herald. He writes July 31, 2023:

Sonia Kruger’s Logie win wasn’t a shock, but it was still depressing to watch

[A]ccording to comments Kruger made in 2016, where she called for a ban on Muslim migration, people like Khawaja, and people like me, shouldn’t be allowed into this country.

In 2019, the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal found Kruger had vilified Muslims after she made the comments on Today (broadcast on Nine, the owner of this masthead). In response to a column written by Andrew Bolt, Kruger said: “Personally I think Andrew Bolt has a point here that there is a correlation between the number of Muslims in a country and the number of terrorist attacks.

“Personally, I would like to see it [the immigration of Muslims] stopped now for Australia,” Kruger said.

The tribunal said Kruger “made it clear she did not think every Muslim in Australia or overseas was a fanatic”, but taken in context, her comments were likely to encourage or incite “feelings of hatred towards, or serious contempt for, Australian Muslims as a whole” by linking them to terrorist attacks.

Those comments, Kruger’s failure to walk them back, and the fact they weren’t an impediment to her winning the biggest prize in TV are a sad reflection on Australian culture. It’s tempting to say something cliché about how the situation should be a wake-up call to how unseriously Australia, and in particular the entertainment industry, treats issues of race and diversity, but I am under no illusion this will change anything.

Nowhere in his article does he make the case for why Australia, on net, benefits from Muslim immigration.

If people have arguments, normally they make arguments. If they don’t have the facts on their side, they try other tactics.

If it is bleedingly obvious that Muslim immigration benefits Australia, make that case. I’m open to it. I don’t think there’s any inherent quality in Muslims that automatically makes them a bad fit for Australia. The term “Muslim” without further context has almost no meaning. Muslims from Saudi Arabia are very different from Thai Muslims just as German Jews are different from Sephardic Jews.