Andrew L. Urban
When I arrived in England as a Hungarian refugee at the age of 11, I could not speak English. Four years later I was asked to edit the school magazine. While I’m proud of this factoid, I mention it not to boast but in the context of the current argy-bargy about multi v mono culture, and in particular the issue of integration. Thanks to a Financial Times scholarship, I was enrolled in a Benedictine day school, and boarded full time with a kind and generous English family. In other words, I was immersed in the language. And English became my best subject at school.
Not all migrants to Australia need to be boarded with families in the host country; they have time to learn (at least basic) English prior to arrival, unlike refugees whose status is usually generated by sudden needs.
The subject of learning the language was brought up in the context of integration/assimilation by columnist Nick Cater in The Australian (June 29, 2026), under the headline: “Never mind ‘monoculture’, what about the basics of learning English?”
His column began with an eye popping statistic: “If you were to stop someone on the street in Tony Burke’s electorate, there is a one-in-seven chance they’ll speak little or no English.
“At the time of the 2021 census, some 6,000 residents in the Sydney seat of Watson didn’t speak English. Another 19,000 spoke it poorly. Which means the Immigration Minister should understand better than most the everyday challenges of living in a linguistically fractured community. Never mind the semantic debate about multiculturalism. This is real: English is the medium by which people apply for jobs, understand safety instructions, report a crime or strike up a conversation with a neighbour.” Well, yes, unless their neighbours all speak another language, like they do.
“So Pauline Hanson isn’t the only one to worry about the falling language proficiency. The number of migrants with poor or non-existent English has more than doubled to more than 800,000 since Hanson first raised concerns about the level of migration in her 1996 maiden speech.”
Cater went on to point out that “Australia has been offering free English lessons to migrants for 78 years. Today, the Adult Migrant English Program, the successor to Arthur Calwell’s post-war assimilation scheme, has become another bloated bureaucracy, soaking up around $350m in taxpayer funding ever year.
The Auditor-General blew the whistle on this top-heavy, box-ticking institution two years ago in an excoriating audit. It found there was little oversight over the hundreds of millions of dollars teaching and administrative services outsourced to contractors. There was no way to know whether the 50,000-60,000 migrants on its books were making progress in their language skills.
The only metric contractors were obliged to report was the number of migrants who turned up.”
But the most salient point is the sociological evolution: “It’s tempting to look back at the period of southern European migration as the glory days. Yet there is one important difference. In the 1950s, the benefits of learning English were overwhelming. As migrant communities have become larger and more economically self-sufficient, however, the incentives have diminished.
“While this eases the transition for new arrivals, the evidence suggests that over the long term, proficiency in English is associated with higher lifetime earnings, higher employment rates and greater occupational mobility.”
As Cater says, and as I personally experienced, “language is acquired through immersion – at work, in neighbourhoods and through everyday interactions.” Including school …
The other great negative effect of isolation by language is the very essence of Australia’s multiculturalsim, enabling enclaves of culturally identified tribes to co-exist with the host culture. Co-exist sounds nice, but it is divisive.
And Cater doesn’t miss when he writes: “A modern English-language program should rely far less on Canberra-managed classrooms and far more on employers, neighbourhood organisations, churches, sporting clubs, volunteer conversation groups and other community institutions where English is used because everyday life demands it.
“The damage caused by the politicisation of immigration is considerable. The morally loaded arguments from the left that have turned assimilation into a forbidden word are dressed up with the language of diversity and compassion. Yet they have caused immeasurable harm to the very migrants they claim to support. The greatest cost, however, is borne by the migrant. Limited English narrows job opportunities, suppresses wages, and leaves people dependent on relatives, translators, or government services to navigate everyday life.”
He ends with a common sense observation: “The purpose of integration isn’t to extinguish a person’s original language or culture. It is to enlarge their world. Denying migrants either the opportunity – or the expectation – to acquire it is a barrier to the very opportunity that drew them here.”
But of course common sense does not thrive in an ideological environment.