HOW DO YOU UNDO THIS? Since coming home from the UK there is one question I haven’t been able to get out of my head. If a country allows migration to move faster than integration for decades, and eventually parts of that country lose the common identity that once held people together, how do you undo it? One of the most important conversations I had in London was with an Uber driver who was himself a migrant. He had arrived around 20 years ago, made Britain home, integrated, worked and built a future for his family. He wasn’t anti-immigration—he was immigration. Yet he was deeply concerned about the scale of migration today and what he saw as the loss of the England he had embraced. That conversation matters because it destroys the simplistic argument that this is migrants versus locals. I have friends in Australia from all over the world. They came here because they wanted what Australia offered. They worked, started businesses, raised families, contributed, learned our way of life and became Australians while still retaining their heritage. That is migration at its best. The problem isn’t somebody eating different food, practising a different religion or remembering where they came from. Integration doesn’t require somebody to erase their history. The problem comes when enough people live within a country without developing enough connection to the country around them. If communities increasingly speak different languages, live separately, hold conflicting expectations and have little shared national identity, eventually you have to ask what still binds everybody together. And this is where the debate becomes incredibly difficult. If governments eventually decide migration has been too high or integration has failed, what exactly do they do? You cannot turn around and blame the migrant who arrived 20 years ago, obeyed the law, worked, contributed and built a family. He did exactly what the country invited him to do. You cannot judge somebody’s loyalty by their skin colour, birthplace or religion either. That would catch the very people who have embraced their new country and contributed enormously to it. So prevention matters. Before bringing people into a country, government should be asking more than whether there is another visa available. Can we house them? Can our hospitals cope? Can our schools cope? Do we have the infrastructure? And just as importantly, are we successfully integrating the people already here? Because integration isn’t just the migrant’s responsibility. Government has to create the conditions for it, and the host country has to be confident enough in its own identity to explain what people are being invited to join. Keep your heritage. Keep your traditions. Keep your faith. Bring the best of where you came from and add it to Australia. But there still needs to be an Australia underneath all of us. That is what Britain made me think deeply about. The question isn’t simply how many people should we let in. The much harder question is: how many can we successfully welcome, house and integrate while keeping the common identity that makes us one country? Because if we get that wrong for 20 or 30 years, I genuinely don’t know how you undo it. And that’s exactly why Australia should be talking about it now. What’s your thoughts…? Peter Lyndon-James 🇦🇺