If the only justification for sky-high immigration is it’s “good for the economy”, it is a policy fundamentally flawed. Judged through the prism of existing citizens’ interests, there is no economic case that can justify the transformative changes current policies are inflicting.
According to recent media reports, President Donald Trump and his team are working with Republican senators on a bill to halve legal immigration – to 500,000 per annum – into the United States. Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Theresa May has vowed to reduce immigration to less than 100,000 a year. In launching the Tory’s recent election manifesto, May said immigration to the UK needs to be brought down to “sustainable” levels. In 2016, she argued that there was “no case, in the national interest, for immigration of the scale we have experienced over the last decade.”
Immigration has also erupted as a major issue in the lead-up to September’s New Zealand election. The country’s main opposition party, Labour, has pledged to slash the migrant intake, which is presently running at record levels. Perhaps more significant is the recent surge in support for the populist New Zealand First, led by the wily Winston Peters. The great survivor of Kiwi politics and known for his colourful utterances, Peters has slammed the government’s unfocused immigration “merry-go-round” and wants permanent visas restricted to 10,000 per annum. With his party likely to hold the balance of power come September, Peters may very well get his way.
Yet, while other Anglosphere countries look to curb immigration, Australia is moving in the opposite direction, with Canberra firmly planting its foot on the mass-immigration accelerator.
The numbers coming in are, quite frankly, insane. Over the last 12 years, annual average net immigration has tripled from its long-term historical average, to 210,000 people a year. Australia is importing a population equivalent to Hobart each and every year or an Adelaide every six years, with this turbocharged intake expected to continue for decades. By way of comparison, Australia’s annual immigration inflow is roughly equal to that of Britain’s, despite Australia only having around a third of the population.
While the populations of most other developed countries have either stabilised or declined, Australia’s population surged by a staggering 21.5% between 2003 and 2015 on the back of Canberra’s immigration-on-’roids policy. If current trends continue unabated, Australia’s population is projected to nearly double by 2050, to over 40 million. Needless to say, this immigration-fuelled population explosion will have a host of far-reaching social, cultural, demographic, economic and environmental consequences. But practically no effort has been expended by governments considering what Australia will look like in 10, 20, 40 or 80 years under this high immigration scenario. Canberra is rushing at breakneck speed while blindfolded towards a big, ultra-diverse Australia. In the long history of human folly, this must certainly be a stand-out.
Nor has the Turnbull government provided an official rationale as to why it is running the largest per capita immigration programme in the world. The entire sum of its immigration policy appears to be to bring in as many people as quickly as possible while assiduously burying any sort of public discussion on the issue. The government didn’t even mention the 2017-18 permanent intake number in the budget papers. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton made no public statement on the matter. Dutton’s position atop a new super ministry, ostensibly to enhance national security, has been pilloried by pundits on both sides of politics as ministerial overreach. Yet, at the same time it has been reported that Dutton is considering outsourcing vast swaths of Australia’s immigration system to the private sector, effectively surrendering control over our borders. Rorters, dodgy middlemen and fifth columnists will be rubbing their hands in anticipation.
There has been a steady stream of puff pieces in the mainly left-leaning media claiming that mass immigration is both necessary and beneficial. However, the arguments proffered tend to be exasperatingly specious and quickly fall apart under scrutiny. Despite the various claims by some business groups and others, Australia does not have a general skills shortage requiring heavy and sustained inflows. Moreover, current immigration policy is, in fact, largely detached from Australia’s labour market requirements. As a recent report by the Australian Population Research Institute found, any relationship that existed between skills recruited under the points-tested visa subclasses and particular shortages in the labour market has eroded under successive governments. This is resulting in large numbers of ‘skilled’ permanent migrants of dubious professional quality and relevance in fields such as IT and accounting, despite these sectors having a significant surplus of workers. In any case, the annual immigration report by the Australian Productivity Commission made it clear that about half of the skilled migrant steam includes the family members of skilled migrants, with only around 30 percent of Australia’s total permanent migrant intake actually ‘skilled’.
Nor can immigration realistically provide a solution to the ‘problem’ of an ageing population, as is frequently claimed by immigration enthusiasts. Again, the Productivity Commission has stated in numerous reports that immigration is not a feasible countermeasure to an ageing population since migrants themselves also age. As migrants grow old, even larger inflows will be required to support them, and so on ad infinitum. In other words, using immigration in an attempt to counter population ageing is the epitome of an unsustainable Ponzi scheme. Cambridge Professor of Economics Robert Rowthorn has memorably compared it to Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory’s insatiable demand for virginal victims. According to legend, the “Bloody Lady of Csejte” used to regularly bathe in the blood of chaste young women in an effort to preserve her fading youth. To stay young, she needed to constantly replenish the supply of virgins. At some point Australia’s Báthoryian policymakers are going to have to bow to the inevitable and deal with the ageing population, as Japan and other smart countries are already doing, rather than trying to delay the day of reckoning through misguided and ultimately counterproductive immigration policies.
