Even the Globalists See the Mass Immigration Powder Keg, While Labor Pretends Human Nature is Optional
Walter Russell Mead, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has just called mass immigration a "global powder keg." The modern era of extraordinary migration levels is beginning to ebb, he argues, and governments that fail to act thoughtfully now risk backlash, including the kind of street violence already visible in places like Thetford, England, where locals attacked buildings believed to house asylum seekers after plans to house more at a nearby RAF site. Similar scenes and political reactions are playing out from Spanish Ceuta to Italy under Giorgia Meloni. History, Mead notes, shows that opposition to immigration rises as the numbers become extreme. Nations should restrict and control it now, or face uglier crackdowns later.
This is not a fringe voice. This is the Wall Street Journal, the paper of global capital, free trade, and open markets stating the obvious: rapid, large-scale demographic change strains social cohesion, and when ordinary people feel their communities, housing, services and safety are being transformed without consent, the keg can explode.
Yet in Australia the Albanese Labor government continues as if the laws of social physics and human nature have been suspended by the miraculous power of "diversity." High net overseas migration, still around 300,000 in 2025 after the post-pandemic peaks, remains the preferred tool for propping up aggregate GDP, filling labour gaps and papering over weak productivity. The RBA's latest forecasts, discussed in another blog piece today, show the cost: subdued growth, rising unemployment, sticky inflation, declining house prices from their recent peak, and productivity so weak that potential growth is capped near 2 per cent. The headline numbers look better than the lived reality for many households precisely because population growth dilutes per-capita outcomes.
Australia was once called the lucky country: high-trust, high-prosperity, with space and resources that made it one of the best places on earth for ordinary people to build a life. That luck was not infinite. It depended on institutions, culture and a rate of change that existing citizens could absorb. What has been done instead is closer to the story of a generous old lady living quietly down the street: kind, open-handed, trusting. Local thugs notice. They move in, take what they can, treat her home as a resource rather than a shared inheritance, and call any resistance "racist" or "xenophobic." The neighbours who point out the pattern are told they are the problem. The old lady's savings, her sense of safety and her future are steadily depleted while the exploiters and their enablers congratulate themselves on their moral superiority.
Diversity is not a magic solvent. Rapid change in the ethnic, cultural and linguistic composition of a society reduces social trust; this is one of the more robust findings in social science, not a Right-wing talking point. Housing shortages, strained infrastructure, competition for jobs and services, and the visible failure of some cohorts to integrate produce exactly the resentments now erupting in Europe. Australia is not immune. It is simply later in the cycle, still protected by geography and the residual goodwill of a high-trust society that is being spent down.
Labor's strategy is hope as policy: hope that the numbers can be managed indefinitely, hope that the public will keep accepting the costs as the price of virtue, hope that human nature will politely decline to assert itself. Powder kegs do not care about official slogans. They respond to pressure, density and perceived unfairness. When even the Wall Street Journal is warning that the modern migration era is ending in backlash, continuing the Australian version of the same experiment is not progressive. It is reckless.
The once lucky country is being asked to absorb transformation without genuine democratic consent or realistic accounting of the costs. That is not compassion. It is the slow exploitation of a generous host. And generosity, when systematically abused, eventually runs out.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/immigration-becomes-a-global-powder-keg-255af6e5
