Do migrants really volunteer less?

Last Monday's Sydney Morning Herald featured a front page story about a study by Melbourne academic Ernest Healy which supposedly shows that migrants from non-English speaking countries are less likely to be volunteers than Australian-born people or migrants from English-speaking nations.

"When you create societies from mixed backgrounds it may not lead to overt violence … but to something scarier, a withdrawal from the civic sphere," Dr Healy said, "a feeling of less connectedness."

While the study was done in Melbourne, Dr Healy said the results were likely to be similar for Sydney. See the full article here.

The story triggered many responses in the Herald's letter page the next day and once again highlighted the dangers of making broad-sweeping statements, which can unfairly prejudice entire communities.

It is open to challenge how the study defined "volunteering". It would appear that the criteria used was one of participating in organised civic, sporting, and welfare organisations. While it may be true that there are less migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds taking part in traditional institutions such as the Salvation Army or Surf Life Rescue, many migrants do regularly volunteer in their local churches, synagogues, mosques, and ethno-specific institutions.

Indeed, the Ethnic Communities Council of NSW itself, which celebrated its 32nd anniversary last year has primarily depended on the work of volunteers in its executive and management committees- and all of these people have been from migrant backgrounds. This is also the case with many of the ECC's organisational members

If truth be told, there has been a general decline in volunteering in Australia in recent decades. That is why the Department of Disability Ageing and Home Care (NSW) is currently funding The Future of Volunteering project, via New South Wales Meals on Wheels to address this issue. Clearly, the blame cannot be laid on any particular communities.

It is instructive to observe that over 80,000 people enjoyed the public celebrations of Chinese New Year over the last weekend in the City of Sydney. No doubt the success of the event came about due to the hardwork of many volunteers. It is not implausible to suggest that most of these will be people from Chinese Australian (and therefore non-English speaking) backgrounds.

Disaster unlikely even if Don dropped from Test

During the last month the Federal Government announced that it would review the questions migrants are asked when sitting the Australian citizenship test amidst figures showing 18 per cent failed on their first attempt, with the highest failure rate recorded amongst refugees and humanitarian entrants.

The Ethnic Communities Council of NSW supports this review and hopes that it will result in a better understanding of why certain groups are failing and what could be done to assist them.

The ECC had in the past consistently questioned the need for the test at the time of its introduction, which some had tried to justify on the basis that Australian immigrants were not sufficiently integrating into the country. That was an incorrect perception because the vast majority of migrants in fact does integrate very well into the country and make significant contributions to our society.

At the time, the ECC had also expressed its concerns that migrants without a good educational background, and those from non-Anglo or European countries will struggle with parts of the test. The statistics now appear to confirm those initial fears.

The ECC maintains that in order for the test to achieve its intended effect of helping migrants to settle into the country, the questions must be more relevant and useful to migrants' every-day lives. It is more useful for migrants to learn for example, the name of particular Government agencies and departments in order to access various services, rather than to know exactly what year the first European settlers arrived in the country.

Of course, sometimes when new laws are introduced, they cannot be easily repealed. The GST is an example. In the case of the citizenship test, millions of dollars have already been spent implementing the test. If the Federal Government is committed to keeping the citizenship test, then the ECC hopes that changes will be made to the test in a fair and non discriminatory way, so that vulnerable groups applying for citizenship will not be excluded.

In the meantime, it would also be helpful if the media did not whip up hysteria over the review of the test. During the last month, mainsteam media reported headlines like "Don Bradman to be dropped from test", calculated to provoke community sentiments. While the topic generated some intense debate, it turned out to be a non-issue as it was soon revealed that Don Bradman was never part of the exam questions anyway (he was just in the booklet). But in any case, even if knowledge about Australia’s greatest cricketer was dropped from the list of things prospective citizens are required to learn, I really doubt migrants will for that reason struggle with life in Australia.