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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, OCTOBER 25, 1985
PAGE 9
Privately, Australians in and out of government talk of a
possible · threat from Indonesia, to the north.
Australian
relations with the Suharto government are, for the most part,
cordial, but some worry that expansionistic impulses may
develop as Indonesia's population grows to 200 million by the
end of the century.
[Defense Minister Kim] Beazley promises
a ring of air bases around Australia and an electronic
network to monitor against clandestine landings on the coast.
This does not dispel a nightmare commonly shared by the
Australians of massive influxes of boat people seeking refuge
if an ecological disaster should strike Indonesi a or another
Southeast Asian nation.
And it is not only military invasion that worries 46-year-old
sheep farmer Tony Moore and others like him. The Australian
policy that encouraged the immigration of Europeans and
restricted the entry of Asians has been changing since the
early 1970s. · In the last few years, Australia has admitted
88 ,000 Indochinese refugees and some of their families are
now following.
Asians now account for 12 percent of the
population.
Moore, who works a 13,000-acre American-owned
farm on the southern coast, says his children may have a
different view, but he is concerned about Australia's being
"led away from � European�- " ···
'l'he Changing Pace of America In the United States, a somewhat similar
"racial time bomb" is ticking away.
A radically altered post-war
immigration pattern is changing the complexion (no pun intended) of
American society. The United States is becoming, like Australia, more
Asian in its ethnic composition due to waves of Asian immigrants,
mostly legal, during the last decade.
These have come from Taiwan,
South Korea and the Philippines.
They also include ethnic Chinese
expellees from Indochina, and new entrants from all over the Pacific
Island region.
Between 1970 and 1980 the Asian-American population
soared 141 percent.
At the same time, Hispanic Americans are rapidly multiplying (the
Mexican-American population nearly doubled between 1970 and 1980) due
to both legal and illegal inflows. Liberal congressmen have repeatedly
stymied attempts to seal off America's nearly open border, the joke of
the world.
While the illegal problem is an acute one, by far the
greatest numbers of immigrants have arrived by legal means, the result
of far-ranging decisions made on immigration policy after World War II.
Here are excerpts from an article entitled "America's Post-War Immigra
tion Policy," published in the fall 1984 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL, POLITICAL
AND ECONOMIC STUDIES. It was written by Richard F. Batterson.
It is doubtful that an American, leaving this country in 1940
and subsequently returning in 1984, would discover much
similarity between the [country] of forty-odd years ago and
the present nation.
Not only has the geographical face of
the land been changed by those minions of Progress, the
builder and the bulldozer, but more significantly the
composition of the populace has also undergone a remarkable
transformation••••