‘Are migrants just a scapegoat?’ Your questions answered

The Coalition announced its immigration policy on Tuesday, promising to reduce net overseas migration to 100,000 people a year, but experts aren’t convinced the numbers add up.

Herald and Age readers on social media have asked dozens of questions about what this announcement means – and why we’re debating immigration in the first place. Joining stand-in host Natassia Chrysanthos and chief political correspondent Paul Sakkal in a new Inside Politics episode with Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the immigration department.

He dissects the Coalition’s policy and answers our audience questions. Click the player below to listen in full, or read on for an edited extract of the Q&A.

Chrysanthos: This issue has captured our readers this week. We’ve collected a bunch of questions that people have left on our pages, and I was hoping you could talk us through them.

One sentiment that comes through is people feel migrants are being made scapegoats for the country’s problems. Are we having this debate because migrants are an easy political target, or are there problems with the migration program?

Rizvi: There are undoubtedly issues with the migration program. The visa system is struggling. It is clogged. Processing rates are slowing. The system is in trouble. So there’s no question things need to be fixed. No question about that.

Having said that, about a week and a half ago, the Australian Bureau of Statistics put out some data that I thought would capture everyone’s attention, but actually ended up being completely ignored. It tracked every single permanent migrant who has come to Australia since 2000.

What it showed was that, on average, a permanent migrant to Australia since 2000 is significantly more qualified in terms of a post-school qualification, far more likely to be employed, far more likely to be earning a higher income, far more likely to have started a business, far less likely to be unemployed, far less likely to be using health services.

From an economic perspective, they have been remarkably successful. The question that you have to ask is: why is immigration being blamed for low productivity if the migrants themselves are performing so well economically?

Chrysanthos: And what is your answer?

Rizvi: The problems with our productivity rate lie elsewhere. We’re blaming the wrong people.

Chrysanthos: So where would you focus the public conversation and the policy conversation when it comes to immigration?

Rizvi: My focus would be on addressing the problems in the system. The first problem is net overseas migration at 300,000 per annum – it’s about 292,000 at the moment [which is] too high if you want to reduce the number of people stuck in immigration limbo.

It is also certainly the case that we can target our program better in terms of the temporary graduates and students who are coming through the system. For example, if a student has done something like nursing, or engineering, that’s in long-term demand, that is a person we want to keep.

Chrysanthos: One of the issues with that ballooning number of temporary migrants is there aren’t enough places in the permanent program for them all to move on to, so you end up with a giant backlog that creates unintended consequences all around the system. The government is copping the heat for this problem. Whose fault is it?

Rizvi: The fault lies in both major parties, which is convenient for One Nation. At the end of COVID, the Coalition government was under enormous pressure from the business community, who were shouting [about] labour shortages from the rooftops.

So the Coalition stomped the foot on the immigration accelerator in a way that no government in Australia’s history has ever done before. They made changes that were just astonishing. Not surprisingly, in a hot labour market, the numbers went up very rapidly, to 538,000 net overseas migration in 2022-23.

The initial response from the Labor government was: “Oh, that’s just catch-up, don’t worry about it.” Another line was: “Oh, that’s just net overseas migration, and we don’t manage net overseas migration, that’s not our job.”

Eventually, earlier this year, the prime minister said: “We’re going to deliver the [net overseas migration] forecasts in the budget”. That changed everything.

Chrysanthos: The general argument we hear for why Australia does have such high levels of migration is that we need people to work. Several questions in the comments get to this. Can Australia’s economy function, can the budget survive, will the country thrive with the lower migration rates that the Coalition and One Nation are proposing?

Rizvi: The big one I would point to over the long term is demography.

Australians need to understand that if you lower the rate of immigration – net overseas migration – and you lower it so far that it becomes negative, what you do is bring forward the point in our future where deaths exceed births. The other thing that happens if you have a really low net overseas migration is that the portion of older Australians relative to working age rises.

In other words, we age faster, and the people available to support that older population becomes fewer, and so you have to take on a greater burden in terms of contribution to the economy over the long term. Every developed nation on the planet is facing the same situation.

On the other hand, you don’t want to run migration at a rate that puts enormous pressure on infrastructure, on housing, on service delivery, etc. So there is a sweet spot here, and I think that’s what we should be talking about.

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