Australia reaffirms high multiculturalism in latest census

Sydney, Australia, Jun 28 (EFE).- More than half of all 25.5 million Australians are first- or second-generation immigrants, the country’s latest census released Tuesday showed.

A total of 27.6 percent of Australians were born outside the country and 48.2 percent have a parent born overseas, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) said in a statement on the census, which was carried out on Aug. 10, 2021.

Although immigrants to this former British colony initially came from the United Kingdom and European countries, and later from China and Vietnam, among other places, the largest increase in foreign country of birth is now India, followed by Nepal.

Teresa Dickinson, the deputy Australian statistician leading the Census & Data Services Group of the ABS, told reporters that the second largest foreign-born population, after England, is from India, which moved past China and New Zealand.

This migration flow means that Australia is a highly multicultural country where 350 languages ​​are spoken, mainly Mandarin and Arabic, with over 250 ancestries.

Australia received more than 1 million immigrants between 2017 and 2021, most of them before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Authorities are trying to promote incentive programs for foreigners to repopulate the central regions of the country since 80 percent of the population lives in the east and southeast. EFE

wat/pd/tw