Mass immigration is one of the biggest political topics going, so you just know when the Guardian tries to cover it, they’ll lie through their teeth in order to push the establishment narrative. That narrative, of course, is that mass immigration is a boost to the economy – so shut up, peasant. No one wants to hear about how long it takes you to get to work, how expensive houses are, machete attacks or how long you have to wait to see a GP. We’ve got hipster ethnic cafes to lunch at, while we watch our house value soar.
Yet, even the Grauniad can’t entirely bury the facts. So, despite its headline claim, its own commissioned research shows just what a shitty economic deal mass immigration really is.
The chief economist at KPMG, Brendan Rynne, shares the consensus view among economists that migration has been good for the Australian economy.
So they got him to run the numbers. Bad move.
As a thought experiment, Guardian Australia asked Rynne to model the impact of reducing population growth to just births minus deaths over the coming decade.
In this scenario, the population would grow at about 0.4 per cent a year, instead of the predicted rate of 1.3 per cent with migration.
As a result of this change, there would be 29 million residents by 2035, instead of 31.2 million.
Ok, failing to see the problem so far.
A smaller labour force means employers have to compete harder to attract workers.
That means wages would be 7.5 per cent higher after 10 years of no migration, and the unemployment rate would be 0.2 percentage points lower than the base case.
So, the establishment line that immigrants don’t take jobs or lower wages is exposed as a big, fat lie.
In fact, with Australian women having 1.6 children on average – lower than the replacement rate of 2.1 – the population would eventually begin to shrink.
Stop threatening us with a good time.
Rynne said his modelling suggested “pulling back population growth to just natural increases for the next decade is not a great outcome for Australia”.
No, it sounds like a freaking great outcome.
Halting immigration would slash the growth in house prices by a whopping 95 per cent.
In fact, it sounds so great that the Grauniad has to frantically scramble to recover from their own goal. Hence, what they chose to run with as their lede.
Think closing our borders would fix the housing crisis? Think again.
Eliminating migration for the coming decade would actually leave property prices 2.3 per cent higher by the mid-2030s than would be the case under a “base case” of migration continuing as expected, according to economic modelling by KPMG.
So, in a decade, house prices would rise by just 2.3 per cent without immigration? But with immigration house prices rose by three times as much, every year, since 2015. A staggering 39.1 per cent in the decade to 2025.
In other words, halting immigration would slash the growth in house prices by a whopping 95 per cent.
And that’s even on the heroic assumption that ending mass immigration wouldn’t have any affect on employment and training patterns.
That’s because, Rynne says, the lower demand for housing is overwhelmed by the drop in the number of workers available to build homes.
But would the number of workers drop? Who on earth thinks that, if immigration was cut to net zero, all the other elements of the job market and economy simply stay the same? When it comes to building workers, do they really think employers would simply give up if they couldn’t import easily exploitable labour from overseas? That, dragged kicking and screaming back into employing Australians, the apprentice market wouldn’t bounce back sharply?
In their desperation to try and defend the mass immigration Ponzi scheme, the Guardian has inadvertently made the best economic case for slashing immigration we could hope for.
