Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s remarks about white South African farmers, including possibly granting them special immigration consideration, evoked charges of “discrimination” and even “racism”. Mind you, the latter epithet is now so shop-soiled by misuse that sensible people no longer usually pay it much attention.

The “discrimination” charge, however, leads to a basic question about our immigration policies, namely: what’s wrong with commonsense policies that discriminate between culturally compatible immigrants (say, Christians) or too often not (Muslims); costly to taxpayers or less so; potential contributors or “victims”; and so on? We discriminate daily in many ways.