The fall-back narrative of the pro-mass immigration lobby is ‘…but the economy’. Except that that’s as bogus an argument as the rest of them.
Certainly, it sounds plausible, and at least more defensible than ‘…but the food’ (strictly monocultural Japan has a world-renowned food scene, with none of the mass-migration) or ‘…but who will wipe your bum when you’re old’ (certainly not some unhinged third-worlder who’d kill me if they thought I was Jewish, and, in any case, by the time I’m old enough to be incontinent, the robots will be doing it). That doesn’t mean that it’s not every bit as bullshit as every other excuse from the mass immigration lobby.
Even a few minutes of doing the maths gives the lie. The precious boost to GDP from mass immigration turns out to amount to just a couple of hundreds bucks per Australian. That, in exchange for the collapsing infrastructure, the packed and ever-spreading suburban sprawl, the crime and the tattered social cohesion, just to name a few, doesn’t seem like much of a bargain.
The ‘…but the economy’ argument is so threadbare that even the economic policy wonks at the Australian Financial Review are calling it out.
Politics has finally frogmarched both major parties into promising immigration cuts. Don’t get misty-eyed. On the numbers they’re actually offering, Australia would still run one of the highest per-capita intakes in the developed world, with all its attendant calamities, culminating in the Bondi antisemitic terror attack.
Politicians imagine themselves trapped between an economy needing immigrants and a public wanting fewer. It’s time they questioned their assumptions.
Because the assumption is a con.
Start with productivity. Our dismal productivity record has plummeted in direct correlation with a migration programme that is rather less ‘skilled’ than the press releases. Plenty of arrivals work below their advertised qualifications – many of which are of extremely dubious provenance in the first place. Even so, the so-called ‘skilled’ stream only covers about 12 per cent of migrants. Of that tiny minority, nearly half are in fact spouses and children of the primary applicants.
Across skilled, family and humanitarian visas, Treasury’s lifetime fiscal dividend is a princely $41,000 a head, which doesn’t even begin to cover the infrastructure cost of at least $40,000 to $70,000 per arrival. Or higher: University of Queensland’s Jane O’Sullivan puts the real bill at no less than $100,000 per immigrant. On her numbers, Treasury’s little dividend evaporates, and every migrant is actually costing the national purse up to $60,000.
And that’s just the monetary cost.
The main evidence that Australia’s immigration program makes us more productive is weak: a series of Treasury-funded OECD papers, one of which it headlined as “Migrants boost the labour productivity of Australian-born workers”.
The paper is more circumspect. Immigrants move to places where wages and productivity are already high, making it difficult to tell whether immigration causes prosperity or follows it. The authors try to separate the two, but the result depends heavily on statistical assumptions, and some findings ran opposite to expectations. Taken at face value, the paper’s conclusion states that immigrants are “associated with” higher-wage regions – what you’d expect when they cluster in Sydney and Melbourne.
Frontier research is even ruder to the big-Australia priesthood. Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu finds that “ageing countries have grown faster”, plausibly because scarce labour forces firms to adopt labour-saving technology. China builds robots to do its grunt-work: Australia imports low-IQ Third Worlders. Anyone who has watched an automated car wash replaced by a hand-wash bay stuffed with imported labour already knew this. Our economists, apparently, did not. They have become accidental Luddites.
Even if ageing were a crisis, importing a new underclass is the lazy answer. If employers bothered to train young Australians instead of lazily hoovering up allegedly ‘skilled’ Third Worlders, our supposed ‘labour shortage’ would vanish. Instead, we have a doctor shortage and no shortage of school-leavers who want to become doctors. So we place medical school places out of their reach and import overseas-trained GPs. Meanwhile AI is already beating doctors on diagnostics, which ought to mean nurses doing work currently reserved for the guild. Healthcare needs a kicking that the colleges will never volunteer.
The other ‘labour shortage’ yarns are thinner still. Immigrants are needed to build the houses whose demand immigration creates, yet the programme admits almost no construction workers. Of those they do import, the ‘skills’ are vanishingly difficult to find, judging by the shoddy new builds that resemble the slums of Delhi than the post-war suburbs most of us grew up in.
In aged care, the clients are the richest cohort in Australian history, and Treasury’s own Retirement Income Review found retirees “die with the bulk of the wealth they had at retirement intact”. Australian-born workers were three-quarters of the aged-care workforce in the 1990s. They are now a minority, while the codgers who can’t even understand their new carers’ accents insist on paying them wages designed to protect bequests.
One of the biggest scams, though, is the education-export racket: the ABS spruiks $54 billion, but only $23.5 billion is tuition. The other $30 billion is ‘modelled consumption’: an implausibly fat figure that has students from poor countries dropping 50 grand a year on smashed avo. The bureau also counts $15.6 billion in student wages, two-thirds of the fee take, and cannot see cash-in-hand, hawala, suitcases or crypto. Correct for what’s missing and the ‘export’ vanishes into a vice-chancellor’s million-dollar salary.
For those shrieking that slashing immigration would cripple the nation, we need only look to our close Commonwealth cousins.
Australia and Canada are often compared for our multitudinous similarities. As it happens, since 2024 Canada has cut its temporary immigrant population by nearly 600,000. Asking rents fell 7.5 per cent, investment bounced and real GDP per capita rose even as population fell. The sky didn’t fall.
When even Canada’s milquetoast Liberals have the guts to do what Australia’s uniparty will not, the jig is well and truly up.
