From Paul Kelly’s The March of Patriots, page 188:

Bob hawke once argued that the most important decision in Australia’s first hundred years was to become, from the late 1940s, a nation of mass immigration. Since the program’s inception Australia has accepted about seven million migrants, the highest per capita in the world outside of Israel. At the end of the Howard years, one in four Australians had been born overseas compared with a much lower figure of 10 per cent for the United States, testimony to Australia’s remarkable acceptance of people from around the world.