Migration has been

an essential part of Downunder's present makeup. 
My great-grandparents were migrants. My great-grandfather was a ship's pilot and marine cartographer. He discovered the city I live in on a trip in which his best friend was washed overboard in a terrifying storm. The experience reportedly left him shattered and seeking quieter waters than the Bay of Biscay. 
He  married his best friend's sister and they made a home for themselves in the port area of the city. He went on working as a ship's pilot and he mapped the waters right along the gulf and a number of other places. Until computers and sophisticated equipment took over his maps were the initial reference point on which all future maps were based. 
Looked at like that his contribution to the economy of the state was enormous. His work helped immensely in getting goods in and out of the state. 
From all accounts I imagine he never saw it that way. He was simply doing his job. His wife did her job - bringing up eleven children and acting as an untrained, unpaid social worker to the maritime community. There was plenty for her to do too.  The Senior Cat remembers people being constantly in and out of her house and his aunts, her daughters, being told to put extra potatoes in the pot because someone who needed a meal would be joining them. They may both have been rather "dour" Scots but they were
apparently extraordinarily accepting of people from different races, religions, and cultural backgrounds. I suspect that, at least on the part of my great-grandfather, it had something to do with the travelling he had done as a sailor.
But I am wondering now how migration and migration patterns have changed since then. My great-grandparents were not well off. They came from fishing and crofting communities in the far north of Scotland. Yes, they probably wanted more than they had and the climate probably seemed far superior to that of the far north. They came prepared to work hard because they had worked hard all their lives and everyone around them worked hard. If you didn't work you didn't eat.There was pretty well full employment there and here at the time.  There were no social services as such. The church or the laird provided help there and the church provided help here.  Now there are government funded social welfare services. All too often they are difficult to access and impersonal. Work is harder to obtain. Jobs that once required little or no training have largely ceased to exist. Those who migrate often come from troubled backgrounds and are seeking to escape conflict.
I thought of all this yesterday when someone phoned me and asked for some advice with respect to a migrant whose papers had landed on his desk. 
     "I don't think he really wants to be here," I was told. 
I wonder if my great-grandparents ever felt like that? They must have felt homesick at times but did they ever regret coming? I'll never know. I wonder how they would feel now. I'll never know that either.