Hearts, minds and immigration. (Immigration).

I'LL BEGIN by declaring an interest. I am myself an immigrant. Forty-seven years ago, I came as a young man to take up my first ever job, at Sydney University. I came from a monochrome, austere Britain where rationing had only ended the previous year, to a gloriously technicolour Sydney--blue skies, golden beaches, palm and flame trees, and, not least, more red meat than I had seen since 1939.

I came entirely on Australia's terms. Multiculturalism had not been invented and the human rights industry was in its infancy. It did not occur to me that I could make demands on Australia. If I wanted to stay, it was up to me to fit in. This did not involve shedding my past loyalties and affections. They were my business. True to the affinities of my youth, I continued to support Wales in rugby, as I do to this day (and given their recent success rate, a dismal duty it is). But Australia didn't owe me anything; on the contrary, I owed Australia.

I lived in this country for the next twenty-six years. Then I went abroad, first as an employee of the country that had adopted me and then as an editor in Washington DC. Altogether I was overseas for twenty years. Then I came back again last year to live the rest of my life in Australia.

So, in a sense, I am twice an immigrant. But the conditions of my second arrival were rather different. Multiculturalism was now settled bipartisan policy. The culture of human rights--and, it sometimes seemed, of any other rights you could think of--was thriving. Within two months of my arriving home a major political quarrel had broken out over an immigration issue, and while the rest of the world--certainly the Western world--was preoccupied with the terrible drama of September 11, Australia's political and intellectual classes were even more preoccupied and even more emotional over the Tampa affair.

Two things are true about immigration, two things that don't sit particularly well together. First, it is a topic that is capable of generating enormous heat. Sensible and normally civil people can and do divide violently on the subject. It is one that taps deep, visceral feelings-feelings, among others, of possession, identity, solidarity, violation, rejection, exclusion, discrimination and regeneration. In Australia we witnessed the emotive force of the issue some years ago in the reaction to some measured comments by Geoffrey Blainey; and we have witnessed it again in the last year, with extravagant claims of being ashamed to be Australian and a ready resort to charges of racism and concentration camps. But this is by no means an Australian peculiarity. In Washington DC we had highly sophisticated friends who were prepared to argue in a civilised fashion about virtually anything, but who broke off relations with each other because of differences on the subject of immigration.

All the more remarkable, then, that a second thing that is true about immigration is that, in itself, it doesn't make much sense to see it as good or bad. It is surely true that, intrinsically, migration--the process of moving people from one society to another--has no moral quality. Everything depends on the circumstances.

Edmund Burke once insisted that "Circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme either beneficial or noxious to mankind." That is certainly true of immigration. The term can cover everything from tribal wandering, to invasion, to economically-driven movement, to the humane acceptance of refugee people, to entry by a process of moral blackmail. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a kind of immigration program; as was the involuntary transportation of convicts from England to Australia. Circumstances count: who comes, why they come, how they are chosen, the conditions of their arrival, the conditions of their settlement.