As the economy starts to open up again, senior figures in the Labor party are calling for a rethink of Australia’s migration system.
With a million Aussies out of work, does taking care of ‘our own’ first make sense? Or is this ‘us vs them’ mentality a bit simplistic, or even misleading?
This week on The Case we investigate temporary migration, and whether we need to reduce our migrant intake to prioritise hiring Australians.
Short time and a good time: What is temporary migration?
In January this year nearly two and a half million foreigners called Australia their temporary home, contributing to the second largest migrant workforce in the OECD.
A temporary migrant is anyone who doesn’t automatically have the right to stay indefinitely. They can enter Australia on a range of different visas, from a tourist who can stay for three to 12 months, through to a skilled worker who can stay for up to four years. The bulk of the two and a half million are actually New Zealand citizens, tourists and international students.
An approximate make-up of Australia's temporary migrant workers. Source: The Feed
With people queuing up for the dole, is it time we told those foreigners to go home? Or at the very least to stop coming? To answer that, let’s consider three things: jobs, the economy and population.
Jobs
Ever since John Howard said, “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”, the politics of who comes to Australia has been fraught. Elections are won and lost on the issue.
Which might be why just before last year’s federal election, Prime Minister Scott Morrison capped the number of permanent migrants at 160,000 per year.
Gabriela D'Souza is a Senior Economist at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), and she says the PM left temporary migration uncapped for a reason. Temporary migrants, “help to fill up skill shortages in the economy. They’re crucially important in trying to plug gaps in major projects,” she said.
As an example, Australia needs 18,000 more cyber security workers by 2026. That’s 3,000 more per year from now until 2026. The current number of cyber security graduates in Australia is just 500 per year.
And this isn’t just an issue at the ‘very skilled’ end either. Nearly four in ten aged care workers are born overseas and we’ll need to triple that workforce over the next thirty years.
And while you might ask if Australians could do that work, the government already makes employers look locally, before recruiting from overseas.
“It’s not that easy; people seem to think it's easy to hop on a boat and get there. We have a lot of strict controls in place and a tight hold on level of skills,” Gabriela D’Souza said.
The economy
Migration is so important to our economy that if you took migrants out of the picture, Australia would’ve been in recession last year.
Take international students as an example. After coal, iron ore and natural gas, education is our fourth biggest export.
And the federal government gets the good end of the deal; taxing international students, helps to offset the healthcare, education and welfare we all use.
As we have seen during COVID-19, temporary migrants can’t access government benefits. As Gabriela D'Souza from CEDA says, “the government spends nil on temporary migrants.”
“We see that the net fiscal impact for temporary migrants is actually quite high. So they pay more into the government, into the coffers than they actually take out.”
Our migration program has been so successful that countries from the UK to Canada have taken a leaf out of Australia’s book.
Kareem El-Assal, the Director of Policy & Digital Strategy at CanadaVisa says Canada’s immigration makeup is similar to Australia’s.
“The bulk of our increase is coming from the temporary stream. We’ve seen a 67% increase in temporary immigration, the bulk of which is growth in the international student population.”
“We’ve learned a lot from Australia and so we’ve become very successful ourselves in attracting international students,” he said.
Population
And before you start shouting ‘fuck off we’re full’, have a think about why that might be a good thing.
Firstly, we have an aging population. In 2015, for every retiree hitting the golf course, there were 4.5 working Australians.
By the middle of the century the ranks of retirees will swell, leaving just 2.7 people working for every retiree, spreading our workforce thin. Which is where migrants come in, to restore some balance.
But now, thanks to COVID-19, the days of the fast growing Australia could be over.
This year, 300,000 temporary visitors have already left Australia, and the next financial year will see overall migration fall by more than 80 percent.
Australians aren't rushing to fill the void left by migrants. Our fertility rate is predicted to reduce as coronavirus makes young people decide to put off, reduce, or reject having kids altogether.
Gabriela D'Souza from CEDA says, "It would be silly, I think, to try and say, 'you know that thing that's helped us so far, is something that we're going to turn our backs on'''.
Looking again at Canada, which has a similar ratio of retirees to workers, Kareem Al-Assal says migration will be crucial to Canada's economic recovery post-COVID and well into the future.
"The coronavirus isn't going to change your country's demographic composition," he said.
The Verdict
Putting aside the cold hard economic argument for a moment. Australia is a nation of migrants. Half of us were either born overseas or have at least one parent that was born abroad.
So when I hear Labor figures call for a "rethink", I can't help but wonder if this is less about good policy, and more about winning the next election.
"Rethinking migration" is the kind of 'dog whistle' rhetoric that tears Australians apart, right when we need to come together. Besides, now more than ever, we literally can't afford it.
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