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Immigration And Immigrants In Australia

Decent Essays

Immigration can be defined as the action of individuals coming to live permanently or for a period in another country. With a forecasted population of 40 million by 2050 in Australia, the population growth in Australia remains at a steady rate of 1.6%. According to the Bureau of Statistics, each year, Australia's population increases about 350,000 where 190,000 of them are immigrants.

Australia is the currently ranked first amongst the major developed countries for its rapidly increasing population growth rate. Since 1851, when the discovery of gold was found in Bathurst, NSW, a significant number of continental Europeans, North Americans and Chinese migrated to Australia with the hope of making a fortune. Moreover, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the Australian government decided to subsidise migration to increase the immigration of Europeans to Australia. With the "White Australian Policy" in place, in 1938, the Australian Government agreed to accept 15,000 Jewish refugees, as a large proportion of the Jewish community were seeking to leave Germany and Austria due to the forced removal of Jews, "The Nazi policy of Judenrein." The "White Australia Policy" began to be abandoned in 1966, under Prime Minister Harold Holt. The last reside of the system was finally abolished in 1973 under the Government of Gough Whitlam.

Then, in the mid-1940s up to about 1964, during the period of World War II, there was a period of a noticeable growth in birth rate, known as the "baby boomers generation." In this era, these boomers grew up at a time of dramatic social change, where the Australian economy had an unemployment rate of 2% due to the free tertiary education.

Furthermore, during the 1970s and 1980s, around 120,000 southern Asian refugees migrated to Australia, transforming Australia into a "multicultural" nation. As of this period, immigration to Australia in the late twentieth century was influenced by a number of world events, including ( "the fall of Saigon in 1975"; "the fall of East Timor" to Indonesian's troops in 1975; "dictatorships in South America" and "the Lebanese Civil War" of 1975-1990. At that time, in 1977, 20% of the Australian population was born overseas. In the 1990s, the

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