We all love multiculturalism, in short, but we do reserve the right to lose our minds every now and again when something in particular riles us up.
Right now, there are two such political hotspots: a) the housing crisis, and b) the crimes allegedly committed by several dozen of the 153 non-citizens who the government was obliged to release following last year's High Court decision that governments did not have the right to detain a person forever.
These "crises" occupy an extraordinary bandwidth in political debate, especially since the budget. Neither of them is a crisis truly generated by immigration. They are, however, crises that push on the always half-open door of anti-immigrant feeling in this nation of people composed — more than 19 in every 20 of us — of immigrants.