This Labor government oversaw the biggest migration blowout in Australia's history.
Now, instead of stopping international students and graduates from bringing their family members over, Labor is cracking down on... backpackers?
Australians are sick of government dodging the real issue. Only One Nation can be trusted on migration.
Show more
Mrs. Nakano runs a twelve-bed guesthouse in an old part of Tokyo. For 19 years, travelers from 112 countries have slept under her roof.
On every guest's last night, she makes tea and asks them one question.
"On all your travels, who was the kindest stranger you ever met?"
She types every answer into an old laptop. The file is called "Kindness." There are about 4,000 entries.
Most of her guests are European. Or Korean. Or Australian. Very few are American.
But Americans keep showing up in other people's answers.
More than any other country. Including Japan. She checked twice, because she didn't believe it either.
She let me read some.
A German engineer. His rental car died in the Nevada desert. The first car that came by was a family of five. They drove him 90 miles to the next town. The kids gave him all their road-trip snacks and apologized that it was only Doritos.
A Korean college student. She lost her passport in Chicago. A police officer drove her to the consulate on his lunch break, then bought her a hot dog and told her that putting ketchup on it was technically legal but morally wrong.
A Swiss grandmother. She slipped on the ice in Minnesota. Three strangers picked her up. One carried her groceries. One drove her to urgent care. One dug her rental car out of a snowbank and refused her money. "Ma'am, this is just January."
An Australian backpacker. Australians do not impress easily. A rancher in Montana fed him for a week, made him work cattle, paid him in cash, and, the Australian said, "cried a little when I left. Please do not tell him I said this."
An Italian chef. At a barbecue in Texas, a stranger gave him his chair and the last rib on the plate. "In Italy," the chef said, "we would never give away the last of anything. I still think about that rib. Six years."
A nurse from the Philippines. She worked two years in a hospital in Ohio. A patient's wife, a farmer's widow, has sent her a Christmas card every year since. Nine years. Always with a five-dollar bill inside. "For coffee."
Mrs. Nakano says the Germans are precise, the Australians are funny, and the Italians are dramatic.
And the stories about Americans almost always end the same way.
"They wouldn't take anything."
Then I asked her why she started asking.
In 1987, when she was 22, Mrs. Nakano backpacked across America alone. In West Virginia, she got very sick. A high fever, alone, on a bench at a small-town train depot, no English, no plan.
A woman she had never met, a retired schoolteacher, saw her, put a hand on her forehead, and took her home.
Four days of soup. Clean sheets. A doctor from church who came on a Sunday. When she was well, the woman drove her to the train with a bag of sandwiches and her address written on the back of an envelope.
They wrote to each other for eleven years. Then the letters stopped.
Mrs. Nakano never got to pay her back.
She has never stopped wondering about one thing. Was that woman one in a million? Did a scared girl from Tokyo just get lucky?
So she opened a guesthouse. And for 19 years, she has asked the whole world.
Four thousand answers.
She wasn't one in a million.
She was one of you.
Show more