Asians struggle to fit in: survey
Australians believe Asian immigrants integrate less well into society than Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, a survey has found.
Newcomers from the Middle East were seen as marginally better at integrating than Asians, despite fear and suspicion created by the 9/11 attacks, the Bali bombings and various homegrown terrorist plots.
The survey, to be published next month, found one in eight people felt Asians struggled to fit in, while one in nine felt the same applied to Muslims.
The poll, 'Racism and Intolerance in Eastern Australia: A Geographic Perspective', offered some sobering findings on the general level of prejudice in Australia.
It found that of the 5,056 people questioned in New South Wales and Queensland, half felt some ethnic groups failed to mix with the broader population and 15 per cent were against inter-racial marriages.
One in seven people in New South Wales held 'avowedly racist' views, compared with one in 10 in Queensland. The most intolerant areas were places with the highest number of immigrants, such as the sprawling outer suburbs of Sydney, where new settlers from many different countries jostle together.
One of the survey's authors, James Forrest from Macquarie University in Sydney, said most immigrants who moved to Queensland had already lived in another part of the country and so were already 'Australianised'.
Sydney, in contrast, attracts 40 per cent of Australia's newly arrived immigrants, whose cultural and linguistic differences make them more of a target for racism.
Despite being a nation of immigrants, Australia has agonised for decades over whether it is racist, no more so than in the wake of riots at Christmas between gangs of white and Muslim youths in Sydney's Cronulla beach suburb.
A survey in March found nearly two-thirds of Australians believed there was underlying racism in the country. Four out of five respondents believed immigrants should be forced to adopt 'Australian values' such as respect for the law, fairness and brotherhood.
