THE IMMIGRATION PROBLEM.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19970, 11 December 1926, Page 12

THE IMMIGRATION PROBLEM.

The committee of the Imperial Conference entrusted with the question of Empire Settlement recommended that settlers should be persuaded to migrate to those dominions where their presence is most needed in the .interests of development and general security and whore the best opportunities await the newcomer, Australia and New Zealand were among the dominions that were indicated as answering to those conditions. This recommendation lends interest to an article in the Economic Review, by Mr G. L. Wood, of Melbourne University, on the immigration policy in Australia, in which an interesting attempt is made to lift the wbol# problem out of the arena of party politics and analyse it in the laboratory of the scientist. The view generally held in this Dominion is that care must bo exercised in the selection of the migrants and that their number must be regulated by the absorptive capacity of the country. In the. past both selection and computation have been on a rough and ready fashion, based upon, general principles. The value of Mr Wood’s article is that it deals with both selection and restriction on a scientific basis. Inasmuch as conditions in Australia and New Zealand are in the main respects similar, the application of the same principle to the New Zealand problem as is applied to the Australian promises useful results. Mr Wood starts with the assumption that the differences between the settlement policy of a hundred years ago and of the present time are differences of degree rather than of fundamentals. The essence of the problem is familiarly stated as merely mixing the right proportions of land, labour, and capital into the Australian cake, so that the cake shall not emerge merely as dough. There will be little quarrel with the principle laid down that the objective of a rational migration policy must be to secure such adjustment between population and resources as will secure the maintenance of existing economic standards. Here the economist gets to work with his scientific surveys of population, soil, industries, transport, marketing, finance and oven of meteorology. A point is made of the fact that, with the development of mechanical farming, the proportion of labour to capital employed tends to diminish. . Accordingly, Mr Wood holds that the wisest migration policy would emphasise secondary rather than primary industrial expansion. In this relation he roaches a significant conclusion: “In the light of the plea for migration within the Empire, it must further be borne in mind that Britain, our greatest reservoir of population, needs rural labour quite gs urgently as Australia and that her surplus thousands exist, not on her farms, but in her mines and factories.” Those surplus thousands, however, are attracted by the promise which migration to the dominions offers them. Commissioner Lamb, of the Salvation Army, who recently completed. a tour of the dominions in the interest of Empire migration and settlement, was struck by the fact that in every corner of the Empire he found vast tracts of land capable of close settlement which only required the labour of willing workers to develop its potential richness and he is impressed with the belief that an intensive course in farming, by which men who are anxious to migrate might be taught to milk and to plough, would speedily result in hundreds of families being sufficiently equipped to meet with a welcome wherever they went. He puts the case succinctly in its Imperial aspect: “Emigration is not a panacea for unemployment, but it meets the dual test oi labour absorption and creative value. Wisely directed, if affords new opportunities to those who are workless and creates new markets for those who in future must manufacture for exchange.”