Immigration, population and economics

Below are excerpts taken from chapters 7 and 8 of Mark O'Connor's 1998 book This Tired Brown Land. In these chapters, O'Connor exposes the fallacious economic arguments used to justify high immigration and reveals the real economic costs of immigration.

On the claim that immigration is a great boon for the economy:

The immigration lobby argues that since migrants create a 'demand' for goods and services, they benefit the economy. As one commentator remarked, if things were as simple as that, we could do the economy a power of good by burning down our suburbs at regular intervals. Unfortunately, much of the 'demand' created has been of the sort that sucks in imports rather than generates export industries. The years of high immigration in the late 1980s were plagued by current account problems.

The battle between nations today is to create exports, or import-replacements, not to stimulate internal demand. In a sense we are locked in a friendly but fierce trade war in which our assets are the things we can export (or can do without, or can produce at home) and our liabilities are the imports our population demands.

After years of boosterism by the [former] BIR [Bureau of Immigration Research], the BIR's Lyn Williams finally summed up its research and conceded that the economic advantages of immigration were at best minimal or possibly neutral. Hardly the sort of economic bonanza you'd risk ruining your country for!

***

... boomers often justify high immigration on the grounds that it 'stimulates' the economy. The Sydney Institute, for instance, is a privately funded 'think tank' which is strongly immigrationist. In one guest article in The Canberra Times Anne Henderson, Deputy Director of the Institute, suggested that those who can't see the benefits of higher immigration are irrational Hansonists. By contrast, she tells you, "The rational mind know [that] added numbers of people in a country create jobs in the housing and retail markets, and so on. ... Australia's state premiers (Bob Carr is an exception) are on to this. ...They want immigrant numbers based on population needs (read economic needs) not ad hoc political decisions (read populist prejudice). ...The tide could be turning. Growth in Australia needs people. Industry leaders such as Tony Berg, at Boral, agree. ...National interest in the benefits of immigration in Australia could be making a comeback." Henderson spends half her article 'poisoning the wells' by talking about 'racism'. Replying, in a letter to the editor, the Canberra environmentalist Colin Samundsett remarked "Anne Henderson rides a Trojan Horse constructed out of race to assail her target of having our immigration increased. While wearing the cloak of scholarship woven by the Sydney Institute, in this instance she is attired more like Lady Govina. ...This latest text seems to be a political handout rather than a seriously assembled critique for Australia."

Anne Henderson is only one of many who confuse an increase in 'demand' or in GDP with a better quality of life. In fact, unless a per capita growth in GDP (or better, in real quality of living) can be demonstrated, most individual Australians do not benefit at all financially. In other words, whether we are talking jobs or pay or wealth, few us of benefit from a slightly bigger cake if there are far more people than before to divide the cake up among. This fundamental truth, pointed out repeatedly in the [former] Coalition government's own Mortimer Report, Going for Growth, has been hidden from the Australian people in a propaganda effort supported by sections of the media and by both the major political parties.

On the costs of immigration:

According to Swinburne University's Katherine Betts, the likely negative effects of immigration include:

* Adverse effects on the balance of payments.
* The diversification of resources to infrastructure.
* Diseconomies of scale in the cities that have passed their optimal size (considered to be around 500,000 people).
* Waste of human resources by the neglect of local training.
* Pressures toward capital widening at the expense of capital deepening. (We can ill afford to be a nation that invests mainly in real estate.)

The last point is most important. On average, in all big and small businesses in Australia in 1995, it took about $117,000 of capital to provide one job. This means that billions of dollars of additional capital will be required to get our unemployed into the workforce. As we have no surplus savings in Australia, the capital for new jobs will have to be borrowed from overseas, thus further worsening our balance of payments.

In 1989 Stephen Joske, an economist with the Parliamentary Research Library, estimated that immigration had produced a $7-$8 billion shortfall in investment capital (at then-current immigration levels) for public infrastructure. In other words, the amount of money, which might otherwise have been used to improve existing infrastructure (e.g. schools, public transport) had gone instead into providing basic infrastructure (e.g. roads, sewerage) for immigrants. Joske calculated that the necessary capital investment was some $80,000 (in 1989 dollars) per immigrant. Some of this money the migrants bring with them, but most of it must come either from within Australia or from overseas borrowings. Either way this increases Australia's foreign debt and foreign liabilities. This also puts pressure on interest rates by causing Australia to be seen as a less attractive or riskier borrower, and thus impacts negatively on many sections of the economy.

Properly controlled experiments are rare in economics; but Colin Teese, former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Trade, has pointed out that First World countries over the past forty years have in effect carried out one: a control experiment on the effects of population growth on per capita wealth. The four countries that deliberately sought to increase their populations through immigration - Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S. - all slipped backward badly relative to the rest. A likely reason, Teese suggests, is that too much of these countries' investment has gone into housing, services, and speculative real estate buying (because immigration produces continually rising real estate prices) rather than into capital-intensive production to produce exports and replace imports.

***

In 1996 Oliver Howes revealed in the Canberra Times that the BIR had published, but had failed to publicise the crucial conclusions of two 1992 books which itemised the costs of immigration to federal and state budgets. Despite the expense of these major studies, the BIR (which had never been accused of lack of diligence in publicising research that could justify high immigration) failed to add up the costs itemised in these books and thus show the total average cost per migrant - a figure one might have thought of some interest to taxpayers and government. In particular, the BIR failed to adequately publicise the implications of the study Immigration and State Budgets by Professor Russell Mathews, which painstakingly calculated and disaggregated the various immigration costs to the taxpayer in the average migrant's first five years. When his itemised per capita costs are added up they come to around $16,762 per migrant at state level. When one adds to this the figure of $8,962 at federal level (provided by the other BIR study), the result would seem to be a total cost of $25,724 per immigrant at State and Federal levels combined. Costs at local government (never properly established) may be relatively minor, but an overall cost of $26,000 per immigrant can be considered conservative. The BIR failed to publicise either the total state costs figure or the combined state plus federal figure. It was only some years later that Oliver Howes did this calculation and published the results in the Canberra Times.

The situation then turned out to be even worse. The BIR had failed to ensure the two studies were compatible. In counting all the monies that migrants contribute to state government budgets, Professor Matthews had meticulously included a per capita share of Commonwealth Funding Grants to the States. (These are essentially a return to the states of a share of the income tax which the federal government collects.) But the authors of the study of costs and benefits at federal level had failed to count these payments as a deduction from the federal budget. When adjustment is made for this inconsistency, the per capita cost per migrant turns out to be $34,500.

***

The former BIR conceded that there might be long-term environmental and economic costs (especially with balance of payments) caused by immigration-fed population growth, but it denied that state or federal governments could reap budgetary benefits by cutting immigration. This seems to be completely wrong. Mathews' figures (available to the BIR since 1992, yet oddly neglected by them) leave no doubt that reducing immigration would provide large savings in both the short and medium term to both state and federal budgets. His figures also leave little doubt that to use immigration as, in effect, a form of 'industry subsidy' cannot be defended as being in the public interest.

On the alleged economic benefits of a larger population:

Some have claimed that a larger population is better for the economy. In an 'Occasional Monograph' (May 1993) titled Ten of the Most Dangerous Myths in Australia Phil Ruthven, chairman of Ibis Business Information, commented: "Rubbish! Twelve of the Top 20 standard of living countries have lower population levels than Australia; and Australia once had the world's highest standing of living with four million people."

On immigration, wages and jobs:

Despite the prevalence at its public conferences of people claiming that "immigrants create jobs", even the Bureau of Immigration Research did not normally claim this. Its formal papers usually argued simply that the economy would adjust to an increased workforce. Wages would fall (an assumption that was tactfully not emphasised) and this would enable employers to put on more staff.

The BIR's final word was in an in-house publication by Lyn Williams, already referred to. After turning the evidence this way and that she concluded the effects of immigration upon the economy and unemployment are close to neutral (or, as the pseudo-medical jargon of economists puts it, "benign"). Even the distinctly slanted fact-sheets provided by the Department of Immigration merely claim that "Research over recent years shows that immigration does not have an adverse effect on the overall unemployment rate" and "The consistent result of research is that immigration does not adversely impact on thhe aggregate unemployment rate."

The last claim, as we shall shortly see, is untrue. It seems unwise for the present Department of Immigration to lean so heavily on the authority of the former BIR, an organisation which awkwardly combined public relations and research functions. As sociologist and immigration expert Katherine Betts puts it, the BIR commonly assumed that adding to the labour force, even in a time of unemployment, would produce a fall in wages that would lead to more jobs being created and thus to no long-term increase in the percentage of the population unemployed. This logic, she points out, ignored both the long-term disappearance of demand for manual labour (important because so many immigrants seek manual work) and the 'stickiness' of wages which (because of factors like unions and wage agreements) do not automatically fall according to the law of supply and demand.

***

It is claimed that more people (whether immigrants or native-born babies) create 'demand'. But do they create a job's worth of demand each? Perhaps only if their demands become more 'frivolous'. Otherwise economies of scale will mean there is less work to be done. Consider, for instance, how much work it would be in an isolated community of just 1,000 people to provide shoes, boots, sandshoes, sandals and slippers in all the styles and sizes that different men, women and children would require. No wonder that craftnames like Shoemaker, Carpenter, and Taylor were numerous in early communities. A significant proportion of the population would have to be in the footwear trades alone, even with modern technology. But if we scale that population up to 100 million, then only a small proportion of it would need to make shoes. Increasing the population does not necessarily increase jobs at the same rate.

The econometrician Matthew W. Peter has disproved the boomer's claim that for every job an immigrant takes another job is created for the existing population. He showed that this was based on a mis-use of the Orani computer model of the economy. When more fact-based assumptions were fed in, for instance that wages are 'sticky', the same Orani model gave the opposite conclusions: that bringing in immigrants does cause unemployment, as well as problems with balance of payments, and a string of other undesirable effects. Unfortunately, disinterested academics like Mathew Peter did not have the public relations expertise of the BIR, and the BIR's unreliable claims continue to be repeated as gospel by some defenders of existing levels of immigration, and in the media.

A further problem is that many of the jobs migrants do create are unproductive. We pay a fortune for consultants and teachers to ameliorate the linguistic and other problems of immigrants; but only from the perspective of those so employed are these problems a boon. For the taxpayer they are a drain and an expense.*

The Melbourne pyschologist and author Valery Yule has commented: "The jobs immigrants create are mainly ones which are profitable to builders and developers: raising the price of land, requiring more housing, resulting in more medium-density housing replacing our world-famous 'quarter-acre-blocks' and wrecking in Melbourne all hope of a Garden City. Requiring more schools, hospitals etc. is not a bonus because they have to paid for from the public purse. Immigration as a source of job creation is a non-ending job creator - it has to keep running to keep creating, and it puts more pressure on our resources. The way things are today, the more immigrants we take, the more imports we tend to buy, and the greater our foreign debt."

***

Apart from failing to recognise that wages are 'sticky', the BIR's calculations also ignored the fact that the unemployment problems created by immigration are not spread evenly across the spectrum of occupations (which would make them easier to solve). For instance, immigrants help provide a great surplus of skills in areas like engineering and sewing. This does not only lead to massive and expensive unemployment (and disillusion) among recent immigrants, it also threatens the employment and salary prospects of anyone currently employed in these professions. (For some years in the 1980s we were actually importing more engineers than we were graduating.)

***

William Mitchell, Head of Economics at the University of Newcastle, has recently raised a more technical objection. He points out that the claim made by many immigration lobbyists that immigration doesn't cause unemployment "completely ignores the question of whether the growth needed to absorb the higher population is sustainable, given the problems Australia has with external debt."

Indeed, he points out that the claim is based on logically incompatible premises: "Unemployment is affected by two factors: increases in the productivity of labour and increases in its supply. Both of these factors could, in principle, be offset by strong economic growth. But, if the economy grows fast enough to accommodate both productivity gains and the addition of migrants to the labour force, it will draw in more imports and the balance of payments will deteriorate. Economic growth of around 2% per annum may be all that we can sustain without increasing our foreign debt. This level of economic growth is not enough to reduce unemployment in the face of any net immigration (or any growth in labour productivity)."

On immigration and socio-economic inequality:

...unemployment is not the only way in which population growth penalises those most vulnerable. As the Sydney University economist Frank Stilwell points out "Economic inequality is fuelled by urban growth, because the inflation in the urban property market benefits existing wealth holders at the expense of new entrants. It also intensifies the fiscal crisis of the state because of the costs of infrastructure - providing the water and sewerage systems, the energy supply networks and so forth. The costs of such infrastructure tend to rise more rapidly than the capacity to fund them through taxation or user charges."

Thus as population grows, whether by immigration or by natural increase, the poor cop it in a variety of ways. Stagnant wages, higher home costs and mortages, less certainty of keeping their jobs (and less chance of changing or choosing where they work). And as government budgets collapse, the social security net is ripped, or unravels.

* Economist Stephen Rimmer noted in 1992, "The lack of English language skills in the workplace imposes substantial economic costs in the form of lost productivity and reduced international competitiveness. For example, in 1989 the OMA estimated the poor English language skills cost Australia A$3.2 billion each year in additional communication time needed in the workplace. This estimate was used to justify more government spending on English language training. In addition, it was claimed in a report published by the Federal government-funded Bureau of Immigration Research that lost output owing to unemployment caused by lack of English language skills could be as high as A$1.6 billion per year. ...In all, the lack of English language skills in the workplace could cost Australia over A$5.4 billion per year - equal to 1.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)." Source: Rimmer, S., "The Cost of Multiculturalism", The Social Contract, Volume 3, Number 1 (Fall 1992).

High immigration pushing out young Australian jobseekers

From The Australian:

THE Rudd government's alarm about retiring Baby Boomers causing economic growth to fall is unfounded and its policy response -- to bring in tens of thousands of overseas workers a year -- is wrong because of the rapid rise in over-55s staying at work.

According to a new report, a sustained increase in the labour force participation rate among men and women aged over 55 since the mid-1990s, continuing even as jobs are shed during the global economic downturn, should put a large question mark over the immigration program.

If immigration continues at current levels, the group most likely to suffer is young Australian jobseekers trying to enter the workforce, it concludes.

The report -- to be published next week by Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research in its People and Place quarterly -- concludes that, even if the net overseas immigration intake were halved from its current 180,000 a year between now and 2018, the labour force would grow by nearly a million workers, about two-thirds of whom would be over 55.

"The Immigration Minister's fear that, without continued, unprecedented high levels of overseas migration, the Australian labour force will soon contract is unfounded," the report concludes. "In the present economic environment of employment decline, sustained high levels of overseas migration are not necessary to ensure adequate labour force growth and such levels are compromising the employment prospects of younger job-seekers."

The report's author, CPUR social researcher Ernest Healy, told The Australian the Rudd government "appears to have been more alarmist than it needed to be in terms of population ageing and labour supply.

"The assumption by the government has been that all these Baby Boomers are going to retire and there will be this crisis of labour growth, but they simply don't seem to be retiring in the numbers the government has been expecting."

Full article

High immigration also adversely affects young Australians by forcing them to compete for entry into the housing market against new arrivals from overseas. Australia already holds the appalling position as the country with the highest house price to income ratio in the developed world, largely due to its massive immigration intake.

Unnecessary immigration neutralises economic stimulus

From Immigration Watch Canada:

AUSTRALIA : UNNECESSARY IMMIGRATION NEUTRALIZES ECONOMIC STIMULUS

A recent study by researchers at Australia's Monash University found that the Australian government's $42 Billion economic stimulus will be neutralized by Australia's unjustified and unnecessary high immigration levels. The stimulus is intended to protect Australian workers and their jobs.

Immigration to Australia will mean a total of around 140,000 new job seekers each year---at a time when the government itself is projecting no employment growth. A major reason for the 140,000 figure is that employer-sponsored visas to immigrants are inadequately regulated. Australian employers do not have to prove that Australian workers are unavailable for jobs. Also, Australian employers do not have to pay immigrants as much as they pay Australian workers. As a result, employers are abusing the program.

The Monash University researchers recommended the following:

(1) Priority should be given to how Australian training and mobility incentives can help Australian workers relocate to areas of skill shortages, not to removing obstacles to immigrant recruitment.

(2) Immigration should be strictly limited to those skills where there is a substantiated case that the skill cannot be obtained from within Australia.

(3) The range of occupations eligible for skilled immigration should be curtailed, particularly for employer-sponsored visas.

(4) Employers should have to provide proof that Australians are not available for the jobs in question.

The report was written by Bob Birrell, Ernest Healy and Bob Kinnaird. It is titled , "Immigration And The Nation Building and Jobs Plan": CPUR Bulletin, Centre for Population and Urban Research, Monash University, Melbourne, 2009. It is available at http://arts.monash.edu.au/cpur/index.php

Source

Also see:

Rudd Govt's immigration programme a threat to Australian workers

Isn't it interesting how these findings have been almost completely ignored by the mainstream media here in Australia?

Immigration cutback is pure spin

From WA Today:

Congratulations Immigration Minister Chris Evans for the best spin since Shane Warne was at his peak, but I suspect the Minister himself might be surprised at how easy it's been to befuddle most of Australia's media - they make Mike Gatting look like Don Bradman.

The "leaking'' of the "14% cut" in skilled migration on Sunday worked a treat, capturing all the headlines on Monday and getting a second run with the official announcement that night on the box and in Tuesday's fishwrappers. Oh, wasn't it lapped up, especially by the tabloids - just that little touch of xenophobic nationalism about it that so appeals.

And nearly all of it, as Chris Evans well knows, was misleading nonsense, just throwing the CFMEU a bone to protect a few construction and building tradies, being seen to be doing something about rising unemployment, while actually having no meaningful impact on this year's record migration surge.

Yes, Mr Evans did announce a reduction of 18,500 in the skilled permanent migrant category, "slashing'' the intake by nearly 14% to 115,000.

The Minister might not have mentioned that that still means a 12% increase on the previous year's skilled permanent migrant intake - and that it represents a bare 5% impact on total migration this year, that's running close to 350,000 people. Maybe make that 332,000 now - still a record high.

Full article

There are a couple of things we can deduce from this article.

The first is that Chris Evans is disingenuous.

The second is the vast majority of the journalists who reported the Rudd Government's "immigration cutback" are incredibly obtuse.

And the third is that unemployment levels will inevitably rise as a result of the massive flood of immigrants that the Rudd Government has decided to unleash upon the country.

You can see just how unbalanced federal immigration policy has become against the interests of the Australian people when the immigration doors are opened even wider during the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression.

Gillard: The immigration juggernaut will not be stopped, despite rising unemployment

An update on this story.

From The West:

Govt rejects call to cut immigration

20th February 2009, 10:14 WST

The federal government has rejected research which shows its $42 billion economic stimulus package will not save jobs unless Australia's immigration intake is slashed.

In a paper to be released on Friday, demographic experts warn that new permanent and temporary migrant workers will soak up the 90,000 jobs the package is supposed to support.

That is because the immigration intake will exceed the number of jobs the commonwealth was trying to protect, The Australian Financial Review reports.

The experts advocate cutting the skilled intake to between 40,000 and 50,000 visas - down from a projected 133,500 - and forcing employers who want to import staff to prove that local skills are not available.

"It seems to me that this research could not be right," federal Employment Minister Julia Gillard told ABC Television.

"We are expediting the immigration of people who have the skills that we need."

Meanwhile, a key employer group says the research recommendations amount to a form of protectionism.

"The skilled program... can't be turned off and on," Australian Industry Group (Ai Group) chief executive Heather Ridout told ABC Television.

The government needed to be very careful about "chopping" immigration numbers, she said, adding that employers were committed to current intake.

"If we do not keep the immigration scheme robust our economic growth potential will be much reduced."

Original article

"It seems to me that this research could not be right."

Notice how Gillard dismisses the research out of hand, without even bothering to provide any evidence that the research is "not right", simply because she doesn't like the conclusion. Gillard's comments show that the Federal Government is committed to immigration irrespective of its effects on the existing Australian population. It is not prepared to even consider the possibility that importing record numbers of foreigners during a period of economic contraction and rising unemployment is a bad idea. In Gillard's words, immigration will continue, even if it means large numbers of Australians being forced to compete directly against foreign citizens for a declining number of jobs.

"We are expediting the immigration of people who have the skills that we need."

Oh, like more hairdressers and unemployable non-English speaking accountants?

"The skilled program... can't be turned off and on."

Yes, it can. The Government could slash immigration numbers tomorrow if it wished to.

"The government needed to be very careful about "chopping" immigration numbers, she said, adding that employers were committed to current intake."

I'm sorry, Heather Ridout, but I wasn't aware that Australia's immigration programme existed for the sole benefit of employers who only care about ensuring the uninterrupted influx of cheap labour.

"If we do not keep the immigration scheme robust our economic growth potential will be much reduced."

Wrong. Advances in productivity and technology, not increased labour inputs, are critical to economic growth.

Rudd Govt's immigration programme a threat to Australian workers

From the Herald Sun:

Sponsorship system open to exploitation, say academics

John Masanauskas
February 20, 2009 12:00am

AUSTRALIA must slash migration to protect local jobs, argues a Monash University report.

The report said the Rudd Government was running a record high migrant intake while job prospects for locals were bleak amid the global economic crisis.

"On the face of it, Labor's migration program constitutes a direct challenge to the interests of domestic workers," the report said.

"It will add a huge influx of job seekers at a time when the bargaining power of domestic job seekers has taken a turn for the worse."

The report, Immigration and the Nation Building and Jobs Plan, will be released today by Monash's Centre for Population and Urban Research.

Authors are demographers Dr Bob Birrell and Dr Ernest Healey, and labour market expert Bob Kinnaird.

Last year the Government increased annual permanent migration by 37,500 places to about 200,000 people.

That's about the same number of Australian school leavers and uni graduates who will be looking for work over the next year.

The number of temporary skilled migrants sponsored by employers has also grown rapidly, reaching almost 60,000 last year.

The report said the Government's $42 billion stimulus package to protect Australian jobs was compromised by high migration figures.

"If the migration program is not cut sharply, the growth in migrant job seekers will exceed the number of jobs the stimulus plan proposes to protect," the authors said.

They also called on the Government to crack down on employer sponsorship of skilled migrants, claiming the system was open to exploitation.

"There are no rules stopping sponsors from recruiting migrants instead of locals, or even of retrenching locals ahead of temporary visa holders," the report said.

It also recommends the range of jobs eligible for migrant sponsorship be reduced and that bosses give proof locals can't be found at market rates of pay and conditions.

Original article

No surprises here. Bringing in record numbers of immigrants, many of them with dubious skills, during a period of growing unemployment is sheer stupidity. But, then again, the Rudd Government's immigration policy never made sense in the first place, even before the economy nose-dived.

Economic growth needed to employ immigrants?

From the October 2008 SPA Newsletter:

Economic growth needed to employ immigrants

For some time now we have been told that we need immigrants to this country to fill the enormous number of job vacancies left unfilled. However, it seems we have been fed ‘spin’ by the business leaders and economic consultants.

The story line goes that the gowth in immigration from 171,000 in 2007-08 to a forecast 203,000 in 2008-09 is required to support the economy. The benefits to the country have been modelled and mount into the billions of dollars over 20 years. [Note: these "benefits" are dubious as they do not factor in infrastructure and environmental costs incurred by immigration. Even if one ignores these costs, the "benefits" of immigration are trivial in per capita terms.]

Imagine my surprise when listening to an interview by Fran Kelly (FK) with Shane Oliver [chief economist at AMP Capital Investors] the other day, discussing the economy and in particular the impact of the latest interest rate cut by the Reserve Bank and the expected slowdown in the ABS GDP figures for the April-June quarter on employment. Here we have Shane Oliver telling us that now we have to maintain a high level of economic growth (3.5%) to enable the country to provide jobs to employ the large number of immigrants we have coming into the country. Its the ‘smartest’ about face I think I have ever seen.

FK: If growth has slowed further, if we find that out in the National Accounts today, what will that mean for unemployment?

SO: Well, the bottom line is that Australia needs to have (GDP) growth of between 3 to 31/2% each year to absorb the new entrants to the labour force and those new entrants are coming from natural growth in the population and pretty high immigration levels. So if we’ve got (GDP) growth running way below that and through the first half of this year average growth will be something of the order of about 2% if you average the March and June quarters, then that suggests that unemployment will start to rise and in a year’s time I think we’ll see unemployment well above 5%, maybe 51/2% and even though the labour force figures don’t yet show that, all the labour force figures show is a slowdown in employment growth. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence out there with a whole range of companies over the last couple of months announcing layoffs including Holden, Ford, IAG, Qantas, National Australia Bank, and the list goes on, so I think we will see rising unemployment.

(ABC Radio National “Breakfast” with Fran Kelly (FK), 3rd September 2008)

Read full interview

This blind commitment to maintaining high immigration levels irrespective of labour market conditions simply demonstrates how Australia's immigration program has become divorced from serving the needs of Australia and its existing population. It is an example of immigration for immigration's sake.

As Geoffrey Blainey put it, "an immigration system set up originally to serve the nation has been undermined. Now it is the nation that exists to serve the immigrant."

High immigration to continue despite rising unemployment

From The Australian:

AUSTRALIA'S record high migrant intakes look likely to continue, with Immigration Minister Chris Evans indicating the global financial crisis would result in only modest cuts to next year's program.

As the fallout from the economic crisis continues to spread, Senator Evans is understood to be sympathetic to fears by business groups that drastic cuts could ruin Australia's image in the global skills marketplace.

The West Australian senator said a small cut to the skilled migrant quota was still "more likely than not", but business groups have been lobbying him to hold his nerve in the face of a deteriorating economy.

"What business has been very clear about is that you shouldn't overreact," Senator Evans said.

"It is a global market, so your reputation and your brand is quite important.

"So certainly a lot of the advice is: don't ruin the brand by knee-jerk reactions, because we're going to be wanting to recruit in these areas, if not this year, then the year after."

Australia's immigration program is at an all-time high following an increase of 31,000 permanent migrants, announced in May.

The increase brought the total number of skilled migrants to 133,500, plus 56,500 family reunion places and 13,500 humanitarian visas.

Overall, Australia is taking more than 200,000 new immigrants a year. The largest jump in permanent settlers occurred under the Howard government.

In 1995-96, the year Mr Howard won government, about 99,000 people settled permanently in Australia. By 2007-08, that number had increased to 150,000.

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Peter Anderson cautioned against bowing to growing calls by the union movement to cut the skilled migration program, including the 457 temporary skilled migration program.

"A downturn of 1-2 per cent is not a proper basis for recalibrating a skilled migration program," Mr Anderson told The Australian.

"It needs to be looked at in the context of emerging gaps in labour market demand. Our caution to the Government is not to jump at shadows or look solely at the macro data."

Mr Anderson said the consequences of a cut would be to place a drag on the productive capacity of the economy at a time when it was most needed.

He said sudden oscillations in the migrant program could damage Australia's reputation as a migrant-friendly country.

Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout said the lead time with assimilating migrants into the economy was years, not months, meaning impulsive cuts to the quota might not be felt until well after the present crisis had passed.

She said the longer-term outlook for the Australian economy - with an ageing population and a generation of Baby Boomers set to retire - was that migrants would be required en masse.

"We'd be disappointed if there was anything other than a shallow cut," Ms Ridout said. "A deep cut would be about politics, not about policy."

Senator Evans indicated he was alive to the political challenges of assimilating large numbers of migrants at a time of rising unemployment.

"There's no doubt in my view that there's a strong link between the economic cycle and people's attitude towards immigration," he said.

"That's something politicians have to be sensitive to."

Original article

"... drastic cuts could ruin Australia's image in the global skills marketplace."

The "global skills marketplace" is a myth - it doesn't exist. Australia is not competing in some sort of global scramble for skilled immigrants. Only Australia and a handful of other Anglosphere countries accept permanent economic immigrants. The rest of the world realised some time ago that immigration was neither necessary nor desirable. It certainly does not make the receiving country any wealthier. If immigration really was the key to economic prosperity, as the open-borders brigade claim it is, then countries such as Switzerland, Norway, Finland and Japan would all be basket cases.

Moreover, the argument that Australia needs to attract immigrants is absurd. The blunt truth is that immigrants from the Third World will flood into any industrialised country which is foolish enough to open its doors. In a world where billions of people would like to migrate into the industrialised West, Australia does not need to worry about its "image in the global skills marketplace."


"It is a global market, so your reputation and your brand is quite important."

Notice how Senator Evans refers to Australia as if it were a company, a mere money-making enterprise, not a nation in the traditional sense.

When Senator Evans talks about marketing Australia's "brand", he is essentially talking about marketing Australian citizenship to foreigners. Whether or not Australians are happy with membership of their national community being treated like a commodity is never taken into consideration.

Not that the opinions or interests of the majority of Australians ever mattered. Senator Evans admits this by limiting the immigration stakeholders, the groups the government consults when formulating immigration policies, to self-interested business groups. The minister doesn't even pretend to care about the interests of the wider Australian community.


"She said the longer-term outlook for the Australian economy - with an ageing population and a generation of Baby Boomers set to retire - was that migrants would be required en masse."

Needless to say, this is absolute rot. It is exactly the kind of specious nonsense we have come to expect from the pro-immigration crowd.

As a 1999 parliamentary research paper stated: "It is demographic nonsense to believe that immigration can help to keep our population young. No reasonable population policy can keep our population young."

More:

... immigration cannot 'solve our ageing problem'. Substantial ageing of the Australian population over the coming decades is absolutely inevitable. To illustrate the lack of power that immigration has in relation to our age structure, we investigate the levels of immigration that would be required to maintain the proportion of the population aged 65 and over at its present level of 12.2 per cent. In doing this, we maintain the fertility and mortality assumptions of the standard but allow annual net migration to change.

To achieve our aim, enormous numbers of immigrants would be required, starting in 1998 at 200 000 per annum, rising to 4 million per annum by 2048 and to 30 million per annum by 2098. By the end of next century with these levels of immigration, our population would have reached almost one billion. ... it is important that the message is heard that our population cannot be kept young through immigration. The problem is that immigrants, like the rest of the population, get older and as they do, to keep the population young, we would need an increasingly higher number of immigrants.

Senator Evans says he is cognisant of the problems associated with absorbing large numbers of immigrants during a period of growing unemployment. Great. So why doesn't he do something about it?

Why doesn't the Rudd Labor Government follow the lead of other countries and reduce immigration?