Does it strike you as odd that we keep having anti-immigrant Immigration Ministers? Maybe we should look at changing that.

• Andrew P Street's new book The Curious Story of Malcolm Turnbull: the Incredible Shrinking Man in the Top Hat is out now through Allen & Unwin, and book now for The Double Disillusionists live at Giant Dwarf talking Has Trump Doomed Australia with Fairfax's Jacqueline Maley and BuzzFeed's Mark di Stefano on Thursday 24 November

OK, Duffer. Let's be honest and have that discussion. I'll start: the reality is that's bullshit. 

Australia accepted hundreds of thousands of migrants – sorry, "some people" – in the 1970s because of wars in South East Asia and, notably, in Lebanon. These humanitarian arrivals were fleeing death and destruction and, because we hadn't yet started using "saving lives at sea" as an excuse for avoiding our international responsibilities, we figured that we'd welcome them in. 

At the time there was much talk of the "Asian invasion" that was going to swamp us, but the main effect was that Australian food got orders of magnitude more delicious. And then appealing to racists by making up nonsense about immigration dropped off the radar for almost 20 years, until Pauline Hanson revived it in the '90s in a revival even less welcome than glam metal. 

So we saved well over 250,000 lives in the '70s, thanks to the Fraser government. How many people are we talking about taking up arms in foreign conflicts, Pete?

Well, the total number of passports cancelled for people trying to get to Middle Eastern warzones up until February was 145, and there are currently "around 100 or so Aussies" fighting with Islamic State, according to former army chief Peter Leahy. These are not enormous numbers.

And not all – perhaps not even most – of those people attempting to travel to the Middle East were going there with the intent of fighting for Islamic State. Some of the relatively tiny number of foreign fighters are doing so with the intent of fighting the exact same people that the Australian military are currently bombing. 

The specifics of Dutton's claim aside, we could accurately point out that "we mustn't let these people come in because their children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren might end up being criminals!" is a breathtakingly idiotic thing to suggest, especially for a country whose white population was entirely descended from immigrants – and, in a lot of cases, actual criminals. "Convicts" wasn't an adorable nickname, you know.

But there's a bigger problem which Dutton is merrily attempting to create, along with other conservative groups, and it is this: the notion that there is an Australian society, and also all these groups in Australia which are not part of it. That's just straight up incorrect: society, like it or not, is all of us.

Worse yet, pretending there's an Us and a Them in Australia creates the exact situation which people like Dutton love to pretend to worry about. From a purely strategic viewpoint, if one wishes to preserve peace and stability in Australia, encouraging people to think of themselves as separate from and in opposition to the larger Australian community is incredibly dumb, not to mention dangerous.

If we're going to be be proud of being Australian – and there are plenty of reasons why this is a freakin' great place to live – then we need to encourage everyone in Australia to feel like this is their own bit of the planet and that they have a stake in keeping it awesome. 

You want a teenage immigrant male to join Team Australia? Make him feel like this is his home and his future. Want to help him be radicalised by dangerous online groups? Keep on telling him to go back where he came from and that everyone in his religion is a terrorist. Sooner or later he'll take you at your word.

One day we'll have an immigration minister who cares about celebrating the cosmopolitan nation we've spent two centuries building and doesn't see his or her job in terms of maintaining a dangerous and destructive culture war on behalf of their political ideology.

But in the meantime: man, that Dutton fellow sure says some stupid, hateful, needlessly-inflammatory things. 

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/view-from-the-street/lets-count-the-ways-peter-dutton-is-completely-wrong-about-immigrants-20161118-gsscdp.html