Let's Stop Picking the Lowest Hanging Fruit
I’m a pretty chill guy. Honestly, not much bothers me. But I have to say, the national conversation around immigration in Australia is getting... spicy. And as an Indian-Australian, I felt like saying something.
I came to Sydney, Australia back in 2007 for university. I’ve worked in various roles, built and eventually sold a business, and am now deep in the trenches of my next ventures. I’m a citizen, I pay my taxes, and I love a good (or bad) Democracy sausage (getting pricey these days!). I consider myself a well-integrated Aussie who deeply values the unique, laid-back, and fair-go culture we have here.
And it’s precisely because I value that culture that I believe it’s on all of us to protect it. Not just from the outside, but from the inside - from ourselves.
Right now, that culture is being tested by a debate that feels less like a discussion and more like a fight.
Let's get one thing straight: conversations about responsible immigration are not only important, they are essential. Any nation needs a plan. Anything done irresponsibly can be harmful - that’s true for national policy, and it's true for eating an entire bag of sugar in one sitting.
My concern is that the current debate isn't about responsible policy. It’s leaning heavily on stereotypes and turning immigration into the "easy" issue to blame for, well, everything. Can't find a rental? Immigrants. Traffic is a nightmare? Immigrants. Your favourite coffee shop ran out of almond milk? Probably also immigrants.
Immigration will always be the lowest-hanging fruit for harvesting clicks and votes. It’s visual, it’s emotional, and it provides a simple "us vs. them" narrative that our brains (and social media algorithms) just love to eat up. The problem is, while we’re all distracted by this political magic trick, our attention is being pulled from the massive, systemic issues that are much harder to solve.
Blaming a new Australian for the housing crisis is a lot easier than having a serious, painful conversation about our decades-long national obsession with property investment over innovation.
It’s easier to point at a person with an accent than it is to challenge corporations that are relentlessly focused on shareholder value at the expense of any real social value.
And it’s much easier to blame international students for "clogging the system" than it is to admit that we have allowed our education sector to become a commercialised, transactional industry, rather than an agent for societal change and integration.
This is the real frustration. We are letting complex, interconnected systems off the hook by blaming simple, visible targets. Looking critically at those systems is hard. Blaming a single group is easy.
But we have to do the hard work.
And this brings me to my next point, which is a bit of a two-way street: integration.
Being an immigrant is hard, trust me. You’re navigating a new culture, new social cues, new rules, and a new sense of humour. There’s a constant, low-level anxiety about "doing it right."
I believe immigrants have a clear responsibility to do more to integrate. You can't just live in a parallel bubble; you have to engage with, respect, and contribute to the society that has welcomed you.
But here’s the part we miss: integration isn't natural. It doesn't just "happen." It requires effort from both sides, and it needs a framework of support.
Right now, that framework is failing.
Look at our universities. They are the primary gateway for hundreds of thousands of people. They are perfectly positioned to be the great integrators of our society. Instead, for many, the value exchange feels deeply unfair. It’s become a simple transaction: "Give us your (very large) tuition fees, and we will give you a degree." Where is the real, funded, and strategic effort to help these students integrate into Australian society? To build bridges between local and international students? To provide the cultural context and support they need to succeed outside the lecture hall?
I say this from personal experience. I managed to integrate well, but I feel it was more by luck than by design. I happened to fall in with social circles from various parts of the world, but this wasn't something the university actively facilitated. It was a happy accident. What about the thousands of students who don't get that lucky break?
The same applies to the government. We have a system that invites people in based on economic or educational needs but then provides very little scaffolding to help them build a life here. When you leave people to fend for themselves, you get isolation. When you get isolation, you get the very social friction that everyone is complaining about.
We need to demand more from these institutions. We need them to be agents of integration, not just processors of transactions.
This whole spicy chat just reminds me of "that" South Park episode. The one where the town's workers go on strike, standing in a field yelling "Dey took our jerbs!" a joke that perfectly captured the absurdity of pointing at the most obvious, least powerful group as the source of all your problems.
We're better than that.
We’re a smart, innovative, and fair country. Let's stop picking the lowest hanging fruit for our debates and falling for the easy answers and start asking the hard questions.