Garth George: Problems when your home is far from the homeland

Sydney's so-called race riots - which, I think, would better be called culture clashes - are simply the latest episode in a cancer that has been spreading through the Western world for years.

Wherever countries have welcomed large numbers of immigrants of different cultures there have, after a time, been outbreaks of violence, generally between the new and the indigenous races.

Not long ago it was France, with parts of Paris set ablaze by gangs, but much of western Europe - leaving out the Balkans, where ethnic hatred is in the realm of insanity - has seen such troubles, including Britain, Germany and Holland.

Invariably it has been triggered in latter years by young immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, some of whom - like some of those in Australia - were born in the country in which they now live.

So far we in New Zealand have been lucky, although it must be said that conditions exist, especially in Auckland, for some outbreak of cultural trouble as various races make their homes in particular parts of this city.

Our immigrant population is relatively small - Australia's since World War II equals one and a half times our entire population - and I suspect we have a much smaller proportion of the sort of drongos whose subconscious fears lead them to treat immigrants with anger and contempt. We also have a police force which is relatively free of rednecks.

While what has happened in Sydney is only to be expected, the reactions to it leave me in despair of finding effective answers to the integration of large immigrant populations.

Hark at the Melbourne Herald Sun: "Australia is a proudly multicultural nation. People of all nationalities and faiths working together make our country great ... a country that prides itself on understanding and acceptance. We should embrace our differences, learn from one another and celebrate our way of life ..."

Fine sentiments indeed, but in fact hogwash, a rose-tinted view that ignores the reality, the sort of superficial nonsense spouted by politicians and bureaucrats who embrace policies of large immigration.

There seems to be a reluctance to understand that immigration, particularly on a large scale, carries with it myriad human problems for both the immigrants and the people who see their country as their own property.

I wonder how many of us even vaguely understand the frightening sense of dislocation many immigrants must feel when they arrive in a foreign land and are separated from all that which is inherent, known and familiar.

And how many even try to understand how threatening it must be for the insecure in the host nations to be confronted with what they see as hordes of foreigners invading their land.

You would think, for instance, that the Lebanese young people, brought up in a land which has been soaked in the blood of invasions and civil wars for most of the past 1000 years, would revel in the peace Australia provides.

Not so. Rebellion is in their genes, a survival instinct honed over the generations of a millennium, and inherited behaviour such as that is not unlearned in a few decades.

So it is with most people who emigrate from far-off lands, where such basics as language, custom, religion, food and climate are so different as to be seriously discomfiting and probably threatening.

Is it any wonder so many choose to settle with their countrymen and women in what might be called modern-day ghettos?

Yet there seems to be a widely held view among those who promote immigration and deal with immigrants that they will simply integrate into their new society and get on with life. This attitude among the host population that the newcomers should just forget their past and settle down is presumptuous, to say the least.

It is, of course, one of the great fallacies of so-called globalisation - the idea that we are all just one great big happy family and that our historical and lifetime ethnic, spiritual, cultural and nationalistic indoctrination is of little importance and can be set aside at will.

Let me reduce it to the local and the personal.

I was born and raised in Invercargill. I moved to Christchurch where I felt at home, for it was just Invercargill on a bigger scale.

I have lived in Auckland for most of the past 35 years and I have to admit that I have never really felt at home here; rather I have felt like a visitor.

That has come home to me more and more strongly since I retired from the Herald, and I have begun to yearn to return to the South Island where most of the remnants of my family still live.

Silly? Some will no doubt say so, but for all that the thoughts and feelings are real - a sense of dislocation from my roots which I haven't felt so strongly since the last of the four years I spent in Australia.

Just imagine, therefore, how much greater the sense of dislocation suffered by immigrants, no matter how intelligent or committed they are to making a new life.

The vast shift of populations which is taking place throughout the world today must bring with it vast human problems, and the Sydney troubles are simply a small part of them.

Eventually, of course, they will solve themselves as new generations are born in the countries of choice. But I won't live to see it.