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?
