What ‘Skilled Immigrants’ Are We Importing?

When greedy, lazy governments and employers try to defend importing up to a million people a year, we’re told it’s “good for the economy”, and “necessary to fill the shortage of skilled workers”.

Bullshit.

The so-called “economic benefit” works out to barely a couple of hundred bucks per Australian per year. For that princely sum, we get choked cities, collapsing infrastructure, and massive social dislocation. Does anyone think that’s a bargain?

As for the “skills shortage”:

Plumbers, bricklayers, cabinetmakers and other tradespeople needed to tackle Australia’s housing crisis have not yet made the cut on the federal government’s list of core occupations for its new skills-in-demand visa, despite pleas from the construction industry to make it easier to recruit from overseas.

The Age

We can’t build enough houses for the people we’ve already got, let alone cramming in another million or so, year on year. Yet, our great and good leaders don’t think we need more tradies.

So, what do we need so badly, we need to flood the country with millions of migrants?

Yoga instructors.

Seriously.

Yoga instructors, martial artists and dog handlers have beaten some construction trades to a spot on the nation’s draft priority skills list for migrants, despite the dire need for workers to tackle the nation’s housing crisis.

Well, I get the martial artists and dog handlers: we’ll all need to brush up on self-defence as the home invasions and attacks by “youths” continue to increase. Savage guard dogs, for the same reason.

“Does the world really need more yoga instructors at this point in time?” BuildSkills head of research Rob Sobyra said.

Well, we’re going to have to cope with the stress of a country spiralling into a third-world shithole, somehow. Think how much better off the homeless will feel, as they nip in a quick meditation in front of their tents.

By analysing the proportion of migrants who ended up in construction jobs over 10 years, BuildSkills estimates that construction occupations were 1.2 per cent of net overseas migration.

“Migration is supplying fewer workers to the construction trades than it is adding to the broader population,” its submission on the list, lodged last month, said.

That’s assuming, too, that everyone is happy with houses being built by the same folks who built this:

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton used his budget reply speech last month to pledge a dramatic cut in permanent migration figures as a key lever to free up the supply of homes.

Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan told this masthead nearly a million migrants had arrived in the past two years, referring to the 518,000 net overseas migration figure for 2022-23 and the forecast of 395,000 for this financial year. That number is forecast to reduce to 250,000 for 2024-25.

It’s a testament to how out-of-control mass migration really is, that the opposition is talking of “cutting” migration to what would have been record levels just a decade ago.

“A Coalition government will reduce permanent migration from 185,000 to 140,000 for two years, rising to 150,000 in year three and 160,000 in year four,” Tehan said.

The Age

It was way back in 1890 that the folk song, The Old Bullock Dray, opined that:

Now we’ll stop all immigration, we won’t need it any more;
We’ll be having young colonials, twins by the score.

If only they knew.