Daryl wrote:I can't actually find where I commented on US immigration policy on any of these threads. I did comment that it is stupid to tell people to go back to where they came from when they are already there.
Australia did have "The White Australia Policy" more than half a century ago, which we aren't proud of. It hasn't "gradually been repealed", but been gone totally for all that time.
Totally agree that sovereign countries should be able to control their borders, but also accept that no system is perfect. We have about 30,000 a year come in by plane on false papers and disappear.
As to country of origin "Immigrants from the top five countries of origin - the United Kingdom, New Zealand, China (excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan), Italy, and Vietnam - accounted for 45.1 percent of all of the foreign born in Australia.". We do try to get English speaking people but don't always succeed. Our Muslim population is 2.6% compared to about 1.1% in the US.
As an aside, Australia is a continent, but the actual arable land area isn't as big as may be imagined, being confined to near the coast in many cases. There is serious discussion that our 25M population is already stretching our water supplies.
Trump is the reason that we are mildly considering gaining our own nuclear weapon capabilities, as we know that we can't depend on the US while he is President.
In the heat of debate, I might have confused other people's comments on immigration as yours. For that I apologise.
As you say, the "white Australia" laws were repealed over half a century ago. However; your very reasonable policies about education and age of immigrants tends to perpetuate the Caucasian predominance of your population.
Just to put the US immigration debate in perspective, imagine how Australians would feel if they were getting 600,000 illegal immigrants per year rather than 30,000 and none of them were even bothering to get a Visa?
Of course illegal immigration is not so offensive to conservatives such as myself if the immigrants were expressing an unambiguous alliegence to America rather than their home countries. During the last big immigration surge to America about a century ago, the immigrants very proudly waived AMERICAN flags as their ship was docking, not Italian, Swiss, German, Greek, Polish or Norwegian flags. Hell, even those backwards, rude immigrants from Sweden were waiving American flags. (My wife is of Swedish ancestry. Her great, great grandfather who was merely a child was deported along with his mother until health issues were resolved.). Our illegal immigrants from Latin America and their progeny are waiving flags from their home countries while they burn the American flag.
As for Australia and nukes, consider what you just wrote. Is Australia contemplating aquiring a nuclear arsenal because they fear they need to deter Trump from invading or nuking Australia? Nope. Australia is contemplating aquiring nukes because they fear that President Trump will not commit conventional forces much less use nukes to defend Australia from invasion or nuclear attack.
Given the fact that any use of nuclear weapons anywhere by the US is likely to provoke some level of nuclear retaliation against the US, why should America use nukes to defend Australia?