The government is right – immigration helps us rather than harms us

Robert Breunig, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Opponents of Australia’s strong immigration program will be disappointed.

In announcing a cut in Australia’s migration ceiling from 190,000 to 160,000 per year, federal population minister Alan Tudge launched an all-out defence of immigration as a driver of economic prosperity.

It has not only boosted gross domestic product and budget revenue, as would be expected when with more people, but also also living standards – measured as GDP per person. Tudge explained:

This is often not sort of fully understood. Not only does population growth help with GDP growth overall, but it helps with GDP per capita growth too. It’s actually made all of us wealthier.

In fact, Treasury estimates that 20% of our per capita wealth generated over the last 40 years has been due to population factors. How does that come about? In part because when we bring in migrants, they come in younger than what the average Australian is. On average, a migrant comes in at the age of 26. The average age of an Australian is about 37. So it very much helps with our workforce participation, and that’s essentially a big driver of our GDP per capita growth.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison added:

I would also mention from a pensions point of view and social welfare point of view, achieving more of a balance in the working-age population means there’s more people in the working age to actually pay for the pensions and the welfare bill for those who aren’t able to be in the workforce and with an ageing population.

The lower ceiling announced on Wednesday will make little difference to Australia’s migrant intake. It is already close to 160,000, at about 162,000. Other changes will attempt to influence where migrants settle.

Two new regional visas for skilled workers will require them to live and work in less urban Australia (outside of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and the Gold Coast) for three years before being able to become a permanent resident. Of the 160,000 potential places, 23,000 will be set aside for these visa-holders. International students studying outside the big cities will get access to an extra year in Australia on a post-study work visa.

Immigration shouldn’t supress wages

Tudge’s acceptance that migration neither boosts unemployment nor cuts wages is consistent with most evidence from Australia and overseas.

New arrivals increase the supply of workers (such as teachers and house-builders), which might be expected to depress existing residents’ wages. But there are two countervailing forces.

First, migrants also increase the demand for goods and services (as the arrivals’ children get taught and their homes get built), which might be expected to boost preexisting residents’ wages.

Second, if migrants fill jobs that would otherwise go unfilled, they can boost the productivity, and hence the wages, of existing residents.

Most studies of migration shocks, such as the repatriation of more than a million French citizens to metropolitan France after the Algerian civil war, have found that the net effect is close to zero.

There is hardly any evidence that it does

An exception is work in the United States by George Borjas, who found that the boatlift of 125,000 mostly low-skilled immigrants from Cuba to Miami in 1980 did suppress the wages of low-skilled Miami workers, if not Miami workers overall. But this finding has been disputed.

In 2015 Nathan Deutscher, Hang Thi and I set out to replicate his work, using changes in the immigration rates of different skill groups to Australia to identify the effects of immigration on the earnings and employment prospects of particular groups of Australian workers.

Our data came from the Australian Census, the Surveys of Income and Housing, and the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey.

We isolated 40 distinct skill groups at a national level, identifying them with a combination of educational attainment and workforce experience and examined six outcomes – annual earnings, weekly earnings, wage rates, hours worked, labour market participation rate, and unemployment.

We explored 114 different possibilities, controlling for macroeconomic conditions and for the fact that immigrants to Australia are disproportionately highly skilled with higher wages.

In Australia, we found next to none

We found immigration had no overall impact on the wages of incumbent workers. If anything, the effect was slightly positive.

Some of our estimates showed immigration had a negative effect on some groups of incumbent workers, but the positive effects outnumbered negative effects by three to one. The vast majority of effects were zero.

The statistical basis for our finding of no overall effect was incredibly strong. It more than passed the standard tests.

Our research only looked at one, very limited, aspect of immigration. Immigrants can also bring cultural and demographic benefits. And until infrastructure catches up, they can increase congestion.

But immigration doesn’t seem to harm either jobs or wages, a point the Morrison government is right to acknowledge.

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Read more:
Solving the ‘population problem’ through policy

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Robert Breunig, Professor of Economics and Director, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Slimmed-down migration program has regional focus

Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra

The government has announced a reduced annual cap on migration of 160,000 for each of the next four years, as well as measures to stream a greater proportion of migrants to regional areas and boost the skilled component to these places.

The overhaul of the program comes after pressure from various quarters including conservative Liberals for immigration to be lowered, and the government talking up the need for “congestion busting”.

The government said cutting the migration cap by 15 per cent would reduce the maximum intake by a cumulative 120,000 over four years.

But the migration cap, although it is 30,000 lower than the present cap, in fact broadly reflects the actual current level of intake.

Last year permanent migration fell to its lowest level in a decade as a result of visa and other tightening.

Two new regional visas will be introduced for skilled workers, requiring them to live and work in regional areas for three years before being eligible to access permanent residency.

Skilled Employer Sponsored Regional and Skilled Work Regional visa holders will be given priority processing and will have access to a larger pool of eligible jobs.

Some 23,000 places will be set aside for regional skilled visas – this is a rise from 8,534 in 2017-18. This 8,534 represented only 7.7% of the total 111,000 skilled migrants; their visas required them to live and work in regional areas only for two years before being able to apply for permanent residency. The 23,000 will be 21% of the skilled intake.

There will also be new tertiary scholarships for Australian and international students to study in the regions – these will be worth $15,000 and go to more than 1000 local and foreign students annually.

International students studying at regional universities will be given access to an extra year in Australia on a post-study work visa.

The government says the new migration program increases the focus on skills, with the number of Employer Sponsored skilled places rising from 35,528 in 2017-18 to 39,000 in 2019-20. The family stream of the program hasn’t changed with 47,732 places available in 2019-20. The squeeze on the cap comes in the form of a reduction in the independent skilled category.

The program’s composition will be kept at about 70 per cent in the skilled stream and 30 per cent in the family stream.

The reduction in the migration ceiling will have no impact on the budget.

Scott Morrison said the government’s plan “manages population growth by adopting well targeted, responsible, and sustainable immigration policies”.

Morrison said migrants “are an invaluable part of Australia’s economic and social fabric. Our economic strength is supported by a successful migration program that brings skilled people of working age”.

He warned against those who wanted to run scare campaigns as a result of the announcements, saying they would be taking Australians for mugs.

Better targeting the intake would address skills shortages and benefit the whole economy, he said. “It will take pressure off in those cities that are straining, while supporting the cities and towns that are keen to have stronger growth”.

Morrison said managing population growth was not just about the migration intake, but also about infrastructure, city and regional deals, congestion busting projects, removing traffic bottlenecks, funding essential services, and providing key skills to regional to rural areas.

“Our plan marks a turning point in the way population is treated across government, with a move to greater collaboration, transparency and longer term planning. It is a comprehensive plan that engages and partners with our states and territories and local governments.”

Morrison said he wanted Australians to “spend less time in traffic and more time with their families”.

“Meanwhile I know we have rural and regional communities that have plans and opportunities to grow their shires, who are looking for more people to come and settle in their districts to fill jobs, inject more life into their towns, and shore up the important education and health services for the future they rely on.”

Bill Shorten played down the change in the migration cap, saying it was a 1% reduction from the 162,000 actual intake of last year. “That’s fine – I’ll always be guided by the experts”.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why cutting Australia’s migrant intake would do more harm than good, at least for the next decade

It’s easy to blame congestion on immigrants. But it’s really jobs that do it. People flock to where the jobs are, whether they are immigrants or not.
Shutterstock

Peter McDonald, University of Melbourne

Australia’s population is among the fastest growing in the OECD with an increase of 1.7 per cent in 2016-17.

In Sydney and Melbourne traffic congestion has become so intolerable many believe a cut to migration would provide time for infrastructure such as roads and trains to catch up.

Net Overseas Migration was 262,000 in 2016-17, one of the highest levels on record.

They are all compelling reasons to cut the size of the migration program, right?

No, not right. Not at all.

Our migration program is no bigger than it was

Including the humanitarian movement, the government migration program has been set at a near-constant level of a little over 200,000 since 2011-12.

In 2017-18, although the level set in the budget remained above 200,000, the actual intake was 179,000, including an unusually large intake of refugees mainly from Syria and Iraq.

The combined Skilled and Family Streams fell short of the levels set in the budget by 28,000. The reasons for this shortfall are unclear.

‘Net overseas migration’ is different to migration

Net Overseas Migration includes the government program but also other movements in to and out of Australia which both add to and subtract from it.

New Zealand citizens are allowed to enter Australia without restriction. Many people such as international students enter Australia on temporary visas.

Permanent and temporary Australian residents are allowed to leave without restriction.

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FactCheck: is Australia’s population the ‘highest-growing in the world’?

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The net effect of all of these movements can change the recorded “net overseas migration” in ways that are inconsistent with what’s been happening to the migration program.

If, for instance, the Australian economy picked up and fewer Australians decided to leave for better prospects overseas, recorded “net overseas migration” would increase even if the migration program hadn’t.

The two have been moving increasingly independently since mid 2006 when the Australian Bureau of Statistics changed its definition of “resident”, making temporary residents more likely to be counted in the population and their movements counted in net overseas migration.

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Read more:
International students impaled on (illusory) population spike

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Over the past five years, the number of international students arriving has increased every year but there have been few international student departures.

Inevitably, the departures of students will increase in future years and recorded net overseas migration will fall sharply again.

So, forget the near-record official net overseas migration figure of 262,000 – the underlying level of net overseas migration is more likely to be around 200,000. The underlying level of population growth is about 1.4%, and falling.

We’ll need strong migration for at least a decade

A new study by Shah and Dixon finds there will be 4.1 million new job openings in Australia over the eight years between 2017 and 2024.

Over two million of these new openings will be due to “replacement demand”, effectively replacing the retirements from the labour force of baby boomers.

There will not be enough younger workers arriving to fill the gap.

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Read more:
Migration helps balance our ageing population – we don’t need a moratorium

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In the absence of international migration and assuming constant age-specific employment rates, the number of workers under the age of 35 will fall by over half a million between 2016 and 2026, essentially because of the small number of births in the 1990s.

It means that without migration Australia would face a labour supply crunch unlike anything it has ever faced before.

Slowing or redirecting it won’t slow congestion

The mismatch of labour demand and supply makes this an extraordinarily bad time to cut migration.

The labour market is at its hottest in Sydney and Melbourne.

Investment contracts involving new employment are signed and the construction of the new transport infrastructure promised in these cities will only increase the demand.

Logic and economic theory tell us that workers move to where the jobs are, and jobs move to where the investors invest.

If, in some way, official migration into Sydney and Melbourne was restricted, the jobs in Sydney and Melbourne would still have to be filled and would go instead to workers moving from the rest of Australia or New Zealand or temporary skilled migrants.

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Read more:
Three charts on Australia’s population shift and the big city squeeze

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As a result the restriction would do little to reduce population growth in these cities. It would however, strip other states and territories of the workers they need. It would make the flow of the best and brightest from Adelaide and Perth to Melbourne even bigger.

Diverting, say, 15,000 permanent skilled immigrants away from each of Sydney and Melbourne in 2019-20 would have no impact on transport congestion.

Indeed, it might make it harder to build the required infrastructure, making congestion worse.

We’ll need it to ease a painful transition

Migrants will be needed in order to smooth the looming dramatic and uncomfortable changes in the age structure of our population.

Migrants don’t only do this because they are young; they also do it because, before they themselves grow old, they have had children and grandchildren.

Net overseas migration of 200,000 per annum would give us 6.8 million more people of traditional working age by 2051 than would no net migration, but only 400,000 more people aged 65 years and over.

It would place Australia in a better position to support its aged population than any other country in the OECD.

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Read more:
Tasmania can’t only rely on a growing population for an economic boost

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Official studies by the International Monetary Fund, the Productivity Commission and the Treasury find that migration significantly increases income per capita and the government’s budget position.

It does put pressure on Sydney and Melbourne, but some of it can be relieved through diversion of population and investment to the satellites of these cities.

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Read more:
Migration is slowing Australia’s rate of ageing, but not necessarily in the regions

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This has already been happening in Victoria. Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo have each jumped into the list of Australia’s top ten urban growth centres.

The growth of Wollongong and Newcastle has been more sluggish but the NSW Premier has recently announced that NSW will be pursuing a strategy of better linkages between Sydney and its satellites.

Peter McDonald, Professor of Demography, Centre for Health Policy, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why Canada’s immigration system has been a success, and what Australia can learn from it

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called for a rethink of the ‘top-down’ approach to immigration in Australia, allowing states and territories more input.
Shutterstock

Jock Collins, University of Technology Sydney

Immigration policy will be a critical issue in forthcoming state (Victoria, NSW) and federal elections. The disproportionate impact of immigration on population growth and public infrastructure in Sydney and Melbourne is the key issue.

If we look to the example of another immigrant-friendly country, Canada, however, we can see how giving states and territories a greater role in immigration target setting and selection can help take the pressure off major cities without drastically reducing immigration rates.

Immigration certainly impacts on Australia’s population to a greater degree than most Western nations. Among OECD countries, only Switzerland and Luxembourg have a higher percentage of foreign-born people than Australia.

Today, 28% of the Australian population was born overseas. The key issue for Australia is that immigrants are more likely to live in large cities than smaller cities or regional areas. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 85% of immigrants live in major urban areas, compared to just 64% of Australian-born people.

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Read more:
Refugees are integrating just fine in regional Australia

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Indeed, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), Sydney is now equal-fourth in the world (with Auckland and Los Angeles) with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents (39%), while Melbourne is not far behind (35%). Nearly two-thirds of residents in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth have at least one parent who was born overseas.

A new state-based approach?

The stress that rapid population growth has placed on Melbourne and Sydney has recently become a topic of much debate. This week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison pledged to reduce the annual permanent immigration cap of 190,000. Australia accepted just 162,417 immigrants last year, the lowest level in a decade.

Morrison has also called for a major rethink of the “top-down” approach to immigration in Australia, allowing states and territories to request the number of skilled migrants they’d like to admit each year.

The states and territories currently have a limited ability to nominate applicants for certain skilled visas. But state-nominated and regional visa approvals have fallen in recent years to just over 36,000 last fiscal year following tighter restrictions.

Morrison wants to see a bigger role for states and territories:

This is a blinding piece of common sense, which is: how about states who plan for population growth and the Commonwealth government who sets the migration levels, actually bring this together?

What we can learn from Canada

The Canadian government gave provinces a say in setting targets and selecting economic immigrants – similar to Australia’s skilled migration intake – in the early 1990s. Quebec was first to receive a high degree of autonomy in the process – it was given the right to set its own level and selection criteria for all economic immigrants. (The ability to speak French was a must.)

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How Canada is inspiring Scandinavian countries on immigration

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Quebec was also granted the right to set all of its integration programs, funded by Ottawa every year. The payments reached C$540 million this fiscal year, or C$13,500 for each newcomer.

After Quebec was given this authority, the other Canadian provinces demanded the same. But they received far more limited rights than Quebec. They can nominate the number of economic migrants they need as part of the national immigration target set by the federal government, but they can’t independently set their intake target and selection criteria like Quebec.

While provinces nominate – or in Quebec’s case, decide – annual intakes, all cases are still routed through Ottawa for application integrity testing and vetting for criminality, health and security. Ultimately, final approval rests with Ottawa.

Last year, the Canadian government set an ambitious target of admitting 1 million total immigrants from 2018-2020. The target for next year is 330,000 immigrants, of which about 190,000 will be economic migrants. The remainder will enter under the family reunification category and the refugee, humanitarian and protected category.

About one-third of the economic migrants (61,000) will be admitted through the Provincial Nominee Program. This figure excludes Quebec, which will set its numbers separately.

How the Canadian system encourages rural immigration

Giving the provinces a greater immigration policy role has helped to dramatically shift the settlement of immigrants beyond Canada’s biggest cities.

According to immigration statistics, 34% of economic migrants in 2017 landed in destinations outside Canada’s three most populous provinces, Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia – compared to just 10% in 1997.

After immigrants arrive, the key issue for the provinces is retention, since immigrants can leave at any time. The provinces put a strong emphasis on ensuring that economic migrants receive a strong welcome on arrival and are provided with support programs, including education, access to local migrant community networks and assistance finding a job for those who are not sponsored by employers.

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Newcomers find jobs, prosperity in Atlantic Canada — if they stay

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One of the biggest success stories of the Provincial Nominee Program is thinly populated Manitoba, which has added 130,000 migrants since 1998. Ninety percent have gotten a job within a year of arriving and nearly the same number has ended up staying in Manitoba permanently. New arrivals also express some of the greatest feelings of belonging of all immigrants in western Canada.

Most immigrants to Australia end up in Sydney or Melbourne, but other states and territories need them more.
Joel Carrett/AAP

Why this could work in Australia

South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory – as well as other regional and rural areas across Australia – want more immigrants and refugees.

Attracting immigrants to less-populated states is the easy part: those willing to settle outside Sydney and Melbourne can receive more points if they are skilled migrants, possibly making the difference as to whether they come to Australia or not. The key issue is retention.

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My fieldwork with refugees in Australia has shown that the majority of these migrants love living in regional communities and have received a warm welcome from locals. Our research also found they are willing to stay in regional areas if they can get jobs there. Another way of encouraging more immigrants to settle in regional areas could be to offer them priority in the family reunion process.

Importantly, Canada also doesn’t politicise immigration policy. Australia should follow Canada’s lead by giving the states a bigger seat at the immigration policy table and resisting the temptation to blame immigration for complex growth problems in our overcrowded cities.

Reducing the immigration intake cap will have no significant impact on reducing congestion or strain on public infrastructure in Sydney and Melbourne, but it could severely constrain economic growth.

Jock Collins, Professor of Social Economics, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The latest citizenship-stripping plan risks statelessness, indefinite detention and constitutional challenge

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and Prime Minister Scott Morrison unveiling tough new proposals to strip extremists of their Australian citizenship.
Joel Carrett/AAP

Sangeetha Pillai, UNSW

This week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton announced the federal government’s intention to introduce changes to Australia’s citizenship-stripping laws. The proposed changes would likely make Australia’s regime for citizenship-stripping the most expansive in the world. I’ll outline how the proposal would change the current law, and analyse its key elements.

What are Australia’s current citizenship-stripping laws?

In 2015, Australia introduced one of the most expansive regimes anywhere for citizenship deprivation on national security grounds. Under the current law, people can lose Australian citizenship against their will in two key ways:

• Conduct-based citizenship deprivation: In certain circumstances, a citizen outside Australia can lose citizenship where the person has engaged in activities defined by reference to national security offences. A person does not need to be convicted of an offence to lose citizenship in this manner.

• Conviction-based citizenship deprivation: The Minister for Home Affairs also has the power to revoke a person’s Australian citizenship where the person has been convicted of particular national security offences, and sentenced to at least six years’
  imprisonment. This is generally the only way in which people within Australia can be stripped of Australian citizenship against their will.

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Read more:
Proposals to strip citizenship take Australia a step further than most

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Currently, it is possible for the government to strip a person of Australian citizenship only if the person is a dual citizen. This means that, at present, Australian law does not allow a person to be deprived of Australian citizenship if this would render them stateless.

Dutton has said that the existing citizenship-stripping laws have been used to deprive nine people of their Australian citizenship. Very little information on the circumstances of these deprivations is available. However, it is clear that at least six of these instances involved citizens outside Australia who lost their citizenship on the basis of conduct committed overseas. There has been no reported instance of a person within Australia being deprived of Australian citizenship, or of the conviction-based ground for citizenship deprivation having been used.

What changes would the proposed laws introduce?

The government’s new proposal would make it easier for people to be stripped of their Australian citizenship in two ways.

Changes to the dual citizenship requirement

If the proposed changes become law, it will no longer be necessary for a person to definitively hold dual citizenship before losing Australian citizenship. A joint media release from the offices of Morrison and Dutton states:

The Government will…change the threshold for determining dual citizenship. This change aims to improve the minister’s scope to determine a person’s foreign citizenship status.

A bill has yet to go before parliament, and it is not clear from this statement exactly what the government envisages. One possibility is the legislation will give the minister the power to decide whether or not a person is a foreign citizen. This is likely to raise constitutional difficulties. As the High Court has made clear on many occasions, whether a person is a foreign citizen is a question determined by the law of the foreign country concerned.

Another possibility is that the legislation will allow a person to be stripped of Australian citizenship where the minister thinks it is reasonably likely, but not certain, the person has dual citizenship. As the recent referrals of multiple federal parliamentarians to the High Court over potential foreign citizenship illustrate, it can often be difficult to conclusively determine when a person has foreign citizenship. However, many people – including those born in Australia to Australian parents – hold dual citizenship as a result of a familial connection to a foreign country.

A change of this nature could also raise constitutional problems. The High Court has not yet determined the extent of the Commonwealth’s power to deprive a person of Australian citizenship. There is a plausible argument that certain citizens, especially those who hold only Australian citizenship or who have no substantive connection to a foreign country, are part of the Australian constitutional community, and are protected against citizenship deprivation.

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Government’s own ‘freedom commissioner’ Tim Wilson questions citizenship plan

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On a practical level, enabling the minister to revoke a person’s Australian citizenship without it being clear the person has citizenship in a foreign country creates a very real risk of rendering the person stateless. This would place Australia in violation of its obligations under Article 8 of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which prevents signatory countries from depriving people of their nationality if it would render them stateless.

Australia has signed up to an international agreement not to render people stateless.
Shutterstock

Where a person inside Australia is deprived of Australian citizenship they become vulnerable to removal from Australia, and immigration detention until removal is possible. Where it is not clear that the person has citizenship in a foreign country, there is a likelihood of such detention being lengthy, or even indefinite.

Changes to the minimum sentence for conviction-based deprivation

The government’s media release also says:

The proposed changes would enable the minister to cease the citizenship of anyone who is convicted of a terrorism offence in Australia, irrespective of the sentence they receive. This removes the current requirement that a terrorist offender must be sentenced to at least six years’ imprisonment.

Currently, the minister has power to revoke a person’s citizenship only on conviction-based grounds where a person is convicted of a select list of national security offences. It is not clear whether the government intends to retain or expand this select list of offences.

An anti-terrorism exercise at Cologne Bonn airport in Germany on November 20.
Marius Becker/dpa

Either way, the proposal is concerning. In 2015, before the current citizenship revocation laws were introduced, the Abbott government attempted to attach citizenship revocation to a much wider range of national security offences, with no requirement for a minimum sentence. A number of experts advised that this ran a risk of falling foul of the Constitution.

The more limited current legislation was ultimately arrived at following an inquiry by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. It found that restricting the list of offences and requiring a minimum six year sentence was necessary to “appropriately target the most serious conduct that is closely linked to a terrorist threat”. Since 2015, the national threat level has not changed.

In this context, the government should clearly explain why removing the six year sentence threshold for conviction-based citizenship deprivation is necessary and proportionate. Given that the conviction-based citizenship-deprivation powers have not been used since their introduction, the need for a clear justification is particularly strong. The government’s media release states:

We now need to focus attention on strengthening the citizenship loss provisions which commenced in 2015 as they relate to terrorists within Australia, in order to protect our community.

As the Law Council has stated, this justification is not nearly strong enough.

Sangeetha Pillai, Senior Research Associate, Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW Law School, UNSW

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australian prime minister foreshadows cut to ‘migration settings’

Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra

Scott Morrison has flagged the Australian government will respond to public
pressure and cut the immigration cap, saying he has heard “loud and clear” the protests of Australians about overcrowding in the biggest cities.

“They are saying: Enough, enough, enough. The roads are clogged, the buses and trains are full. The schools are taking no more enrolments. I hear what you are saying,” Morrison said in a speech in Sydney on Monday night.

“That’s why we need to improve how we manage population growth in this country.”

Morrison said he would “move away from top-down discussions about population to set our migration intake caps.

“I anticipate that this will lead to a reduction in our current migration settings.

“This is to be expected since our current permanent intake is almost 30,000 a year below our current cap [of 190,000]. So we will look to make an adjustment as we go forward in to next year and this should not be surprising.”

When federal treasurer, Morrison was reluctant to yield to the strong pressure from the right in the Liberal party about immigration levels, although the government was actually reducing the intake in practice, while the cap remained unchanged.

But as prime minister he has increasingly been reacting to the mounting community pressure on the issue, while foreshadowing a comprehensive population policy, including the involvement of the states.

In his speech, Morrison argued the economic benefits of immigration – including temporary migrants.

But he said that far too often planners had treated population “as one amorphous blob”.

“That doesn’t work for Australia. We’re too big and diverse. Talking about average population growth is like talking about our average rainfall. It fails to recognise the different experiences and outlooks of different cities or regions.”

Morrison repeated his plan for a discussion with the states and territories about local population growth, although the Commonwealth would always retain responsibility for determining the overall intake.

The conversation should be “grounded in data, economics and community sentiment”, he said.

“A responsible population discussion cannot be arbitrarily about one number, the cap on annual permanent migration. It is certainly relevant, but you have to look at what sits behind those numbers.

“For a start, more than half the people who become permanent migrants are already here on temporary visas.

“To contemplate our permanent visa settings would also require upstream changes to how many people are coming in on temporary visas as well. The implications of this need to be understood, including by state and territory governments.”

Morrison said changes must be done in a way that ensured states wanting more people were not disadvantaged and that there were mechanisms to send new migrants to where there were jobs and services.

“Managing population change is a shared responsibility, involving all levels of government,” he said.

“It is the states who build hospitals, approve housing developments, plan roads and know how many kids will be going into their schools in the future.

“The states and territories know better than any what the population carrying capacity is for their existing and planned infrastructure and services. So I plan to ask them, before we set our annual caps.

“The old model of a single national number determined by Canberra is no longer fit for purpose.

“While the benefits of population growth are widespread – in terms of economic growth and a more skilled and enriched society – the pressure points are inevitably local and varied.

“It’s about getting the balance right and understanding there is variation between our cities and regions. So we need a more targeted and tailored approach to conversations about population.”

Morrison said he was writing to state and territory leaders for their input, and putting the population issue on the Council of Australian Governments meeting agenda. The council meets on December 12.

The states’ population plans would “feed into the setting of our migrations caps and policies for next year, ensuring that migrations is finally tied to infrastructure and services carrying capacity”.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia’s dangerous fantasy: diverting population growth to the regions

John Daley, Grattan Institute and Jonathan Nolan, Grattan Institute

This week we’re exploring the state of nine different policy areas across Australia’s states, as detailed in Grattan Institute’s State Orange Book 2018. Read the other articles in the series here.

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A dangerous fantasy is taking hold in Australia: that government policy can divert population growth from our bulging capital cities to our needy regions. It’s a fantasy because a century of Australian history shows it won’t work. And it’s dangerous because it gives governments an excuse to avoid the hard decisions on planning and transport needed to make housing more affordable and cities more liveable.

Since Federation, state and federal governments have tried to lure people, trade and business away from the capital cities. These efforts have mostly been expensive policy failures.

Despite substantial government spending on regional development aimed at promoting decentralisation, Grattan Institute’s State Orange Book 2018 shows the trend to city-centred growth has accelerated in the past decade. Less than a third of us now live outside the capital cities.

Grattan Institute State Orange Book 2018

With the exception of Western Australian and Queensland mining regions, capital city economies over ten years have grown faster than regional economies. That’s mainly because their populations have grown faster.

Incomes per capita, on the other hand, have generally grown at about the same pace. Employment participation for women is similar too, although 25-to-64-year-old men in regions are 7% less likely to work than men in cities.

Grattan Institute State Orange Book 2018

Why do most people choose to live in cities?

These are global trends. Large cities around the world are typically growing much faster than less densely populated areas. Even in Japan, where the national population is declining, Tokyo continues to grow.

The economic advantages of cities over regions appear to be increasing as people spend more of their incomes on services rather than goods. Services businesses often prefer to be close to other services businesses, typically in large cities.

Regional growth programs in Australia have a poor record of trying to push economic water uphill against these trends.

Take for example the New South Wales home buyers’ grant of $7,000 for people who move from cities to regions. Some 10,000 people were expected to take up the offer in the first year. In fact, only 4,800 grants were made over three years. Many of those probably went to people who would have moved anyway – perhaps to retire to “the bush”.

The key problem is that people will only move to regions if there are extra jobs. And policies to encourage more jobs in regional areas also have a poor track record. The money on offer from government is rarely enough to outweigh the economic advantages for a business of locating in a city instead.

Most of the time we don’t even know whether regional development programs work because they are so badly administered. Auditors-general in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and WA have all found substantial regional development money being spent with no business case, or poor documentation, or without reference to application guidelines, and with no evaluation of whether the programs achieved the promised outcomes.

Grattan Institute State Orange Book 2018

The overwhelming impression is that governments don’t really want programs evaluated because they know all too well what the answers will be.

What if regional population policies did work?

In the unlikely event that government policy actually succeeded in encouraging many more people and employers to move to regional areas, it would probably slow growth in incomes. Cities are more productive, and this is reflected in higher wages.

Cities are important for innovation and economic growth. Cities offer more opportunities to share ideas, which both attracts skilled people and increases their skills once they arrive. Despite the rise of the internet and reduced telecommunication costs, innovation seems to rely on regular face-to-face contact between people in different firms, which therefore tend to aggregate in large cities.

So pushing extra people to regional areas runs the risk of reducing Australia’s productivity growth and per capita incomes.

So what about regional ‘dormitory’ suburbs?

Another strategy, much discussed in Victoria as it heads into a state election campaign, is to encourage the growth of regional towns as dormitory suburbs for people working in cities. Obviously this only works for regional towns that are relatively close to capital cities, with good transport links. Hence the big-spending promises to upgrade regional rail services.

But it is unclear why regional dormitories should be considered better than building suburbs on the city fringe. These fringe suburbs often provide access to more jobs in the other suburbs nearby.

In any case, the transport infrastructure needed to ferry people from homes in regional areas to jobs in the city is not cheap. Far better to relax planning laws to allow higher-density living where people want to live and can be close to a wide range of jobs – that is, in the established middle and inner suburbs of the capital cities.

The danger of distorted spending priorities

The fantasy that governments can divert population growth from cities to regions is also dangerous because it distorts spending priorities in regions. Government services probably improve regional lives more than government spending that is supposed to promote business growth. Government spending on regional arts and sports facilities probably has a much bigger impact per dollar than an extra kilometre of dual-lane highway.

Government spending per person on education and health is in fact already higher in regions than in cities, even if service levels are often lower because they cost more to deliver. But if governments are going to spend more on regional services, the money may need to be spent differently.

Grattan Institute State Orange Book 2018

Grattan Institute analysis shows that poorer health and educational outcomes in some regional areas are primarily the result of socio-economic status and other risk factors – not remoteness. In health, for example, the substantial gap in mortality between regions and cities appears to result not from more distant hospitals but from people in regions tending to exercise less and have poorer diets.

Economic theory and policy experience, in Australia and other advanced economies, expose the “repopulate the regions” push as wishing thinking. As this series of articles based on Grattan Institute’s State Orange Book 2018 will show, there are better ways for governments to promote a growing Australia.

John Daley, Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute and Jonathan Nolan, Associate, Grattan Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia could house around 900,000 more migrants if we no longer let in tourists

International tourists use many of Australia’s resources, including adding to fossil fuel consumption.
from shutterstock.com

Raja Junankar, UNSW

Many who fear Australia’s population boom believe we should be cutting down on immigration. They blame immigration for congestion and expenditure of environmental and other vital resources. They say Australia’s cities are becoming overcrowded and cannot sustain more people.

But if Australia were to cut down on immigration, it would also then make sense to introduce policies that limit numbers of international tourists and students. Why single out one group of people? If any person living in Australia drains a certain amount of resources, it stands to reason this is also the case with short-term visitors arriving year after year.

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Not only do tourists and international students add to crowded trains, trams and buses, think of all the environmental resources they consume – such as the water hotels spend on frequently washing their sheets.

Just as with migration, tourist numbers are on the rise in Australia. The number of international tourists (blue line) increased from just over 4 million in 1997-98 to nearly 8 million in 2015-2016. Settler arrivals (people living in Australia who are entitled to permanent residence) increased from 81,000 in 1998 to 135,000 in 2016.

Tourist numbers are on the rise in Australia.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Author provided

My crude calculations show that if Australia were to allow zero tourism, it could accommodate roughly 900,000 more migrants. As a comparison, Australia’s total migration intake is around 190,000 per year.

But of course curbing tourism, or immigration, isn’t a feasible option. Tourists, international students and migrants all add positive value to Australia.

Our calculations

As a general rule, the monetary amount spent across a group of people in a population is considered a rough approximation of the amount of resources that have been used. So, to get an idea of the resources short-term visitors to Australia (which includes tourists and international students who stay for less than a year) might use, I extracted data on how much they spend on goods and services.

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Then I calculated the approximate number of migrants who would be spending the same amount of money. This gave me a rough indication of how many extra migrants we could let into the country per drop in tourist numbers.

I was a bit generous in terms of working off the assumption that migrants spend the same amount on goods and services as “native” Australians. I used ABS data for my calculations, which were:

• First, I subtracted the amount international tourists spend (which includes students who stay less than a year) in Australia (this was A$33,917 million in 2015-16) from the total spend in Australia (A$940,822 million in 2015-16). This gave me an idea of the amount spent by Australian residents only (A$906,905 million in 2015-16).
• I then worked out the average consumption of residents per capita by dividing it by the population (around 24 million in 2015-16). This came to A$37,680 million for every 1,000 people.
• Then I divided the total spend of international tourists by the per capita amount (per 1,000 residents) spent by residents. This came to 900,213 in 2015-16.
• I also did similar calculations assuming tourists consumed 10% and 20% more than migrants.

The fact we could have 900,000 extra migrants if we had no tourists is a very rough number. The point is not the exact number. Even if the more accurate number was 400,000, that number is large. The purpose of this exercise is to show that migrants, as one group of people, don’t pose the most significant risk to our population in terms of resources drained.

These numbers are based on crude calculations, and assume that migrants spend the same way as Australian-born residents.
CC BY-SA

It’s a rough guide

As already mentioned, my calculations were crude. More detailed calculation of resources consumed by both groups (immigrants and international tourists) would compare the different impacts on growth and employment of immigration. But for the purposes of this exercise, I’ve carried out more limited calculations.

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‘Sustainable tourism’ is not working – here’s how we can change that

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The demographic profile of immigrants is also different from that of international tourists. And the spending patterns of immigrants would be very different from those of the tourists. Immigrants would be buying white goods, for instance, such as refrigerators, vacuum cleaners. Tourists would be buying these services indirectly through renting rooms in hotels, Airbnb and the like.

But we wouldn’t shut down tourism, as we know it has a positive impact on our economy. And research generally shows that immigration has a slightly positive effect on Australia’s employment rate and gross domestic product (GDP). A recent government report also shows that cutting Australia’s migration rate would cost the budget billions of dollars, lower living standards and reduce jobs growth.

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Both tourism and migration make a positive impact to our economy, and no one group should be blamed for draining our resources.

Raja Junankar, Honorary Professor, Industrial Relations Research Centre, UNSW

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

View from The Hill: A ray of bipartisan good comes out of obscure senator’s hate speech

Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra

Immigration has become one of the most divisive issues in Australian politics. It has created open fractures within government ranks and sparked dog whistling; it’s being exploited to nefarious political ends by fringe and not-so-fringe players.

But an appallingly racist diatribe, by a senator who not one in a thousand Australians would have heard of, on Wednesday brought almost all the parliament together to reassert some core values of Australia’s policy.

Delivering his maiden speech on Tuesday, Fraser Anning called for a ban on all further Muslim immigration and invoked the words “final solution” – the term referring to the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews – when calling for a popular vote on immigration.

Anning arrived in parliament by chance, replacing the equally controversial Malcolm Roberts from One Nation, who fell foul of the citizenship crisis. But Anning immediately parted ways with One Nation, and has recently joined Katter’s Australian Party.

Among much else, the Queensland senator told parliament on Tuesday that “the one immigrant group here and in other Western nations that has consistently shown itself to be the least able to assimilate and integrate is Muslims”.

“The first terrorist act on Australian soil occurred in 1915 – when two Muslim immigrants opened fire on a picnic train of innocent women and children in Broken Hill – and Muslim immigrants have been a problem ever since.”

Such are the rituals of first speeches that many Coalition senators and even crossbencher Derryn Hinch (who has been beating up on himself publicly ever since) went over to pay Anning the traditional congratulations afterwards.

But after that reactions were quick, and by Wednesday morning condemnation was raining down on Anning from almost everywhere.

Labor with the support of the government moved a motion in the Senate and the House; the leaders in both houses spoke.

The motion, which did not mention Anning by name, acknowledged “the historic action of the Holt Government, with bipartisan support from the Australian Labor Party, in initiating the dismantling of the White Australia Policy”.

It gave “unambiguous and unqualified commitment to the principle that, whatever criteria are applied by Australian Governments in exercising their sovereign right to determine the composition of the immigration intake, race, faith or ethnic origin shall never, explicitly or implicitly, be among them”.

The motion was the same (except for the addition of the word “faith”) as the one prime minister Bob Hawke moved in 1988 after opposition leader John Howard had suggested a slowing of Asian immigration. Then, the Liberals voted against the motion, though with three defections.

In our frequently depressing and often toxic political climate, Wednesday’s bipartisanship was a small but significant and encouraging moment of unity on what we stand for as a nation.

Mathias Cormann, an immigrant from Belgium, said: “This chamber in many ways is a true reflection of what a great migrant nation we are.”

“We have … representatives of our Indigenous community. We have in this chamber representatives of Australians whose families have been here for generations, who are the descendants of migrants to Australia of more than 100 years ago.

“We have in this chamber first-generation migrants from Kenya, Malaysia, Belgium, Germany and Scotland. What a great country we are. Where first-generation Australians can join First Australians and those Australians whose families have lived here for more than 100 years and all work together to make our great country an even better country.”

While the mainstream had its act together, on the fringe it was a wild ride.

Hanson denounced Anning’s speech. “I have always advocated you do not have to be white to be Australian,” she said. And “to actually hear people say now that, as Senator Hinch said, it is like hearing Pauline Hanson on steroids – I take offence to that”.

Never mind that in her own maiden speech as a senator Hanson had declared that further Muslim immigration should be stopped and the burqa banned. “Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own,” she said in September 2016.

Later on Wednesday Hanson introduced her private member’s bill “to give voters a say on whether Australia’s immigration levels are too high by casting a vote at the next general election”.

Then there was that force of nature, Bob Katter, who said he supported his new recruit “1000% … I support everything he said”.

It is never easy to navigate one’s way through Katter speak – on Wednesday it was at times close to impossible.

“Fraser is dead right – we do not want people coming in from the Middle East or North Africa unless they’re the persecuted minorities. Why aren’t you bringing in the Sikhs? Why aren’t you bringing in the Jews?” he told a news conference in Cairns – he could not fly to Canberra and parliament because of a sinus procedure.

As for the “final solution” reference: “Fraser is a knockabout bloke, he’s owned pubs and he’s not stupid – he built his own aeroplane. But he hasn’t read all the history books.

“He didn’t go to university, he was out working building pipelines for the coal and the gas and the oil with a hard hat on. He’s a member of the hard left, not the lily pad left. He didn’t go to university to know the significance of all these words.

“Fraser would have no idea about what that meant. For those of us, like myself that are fascinated by history and have read the history books – it is one of the worst statements in all of human history.”

“He like myself, has had constant meetings and addressed Jewish groups around Australia. We are strongly behind the Jewish people.”

Hanson wasn’t the only one complaining of being insulted. Katter turned on a journalist who referred to his Lebanese grandfather.

“He’s not. He’s an Australian. I resent, strongly, you describing him as Lebanese. That is racist comment and you should take it back and should be ashamed … No prouder Australian than my grandfather.”

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Australia and other countries must prioritise humanity in dealing with displaced people and migration

The United Nations says the number of forcibly displaced persons around the world has risen to 68.5 million.
Shutterstock

Samuel Berhanu Woldemariam, University of Newcastle; Amy Maguire, University of Newcastle, and Jason von Meding, University of Newcastle

After six rounds of consultations, United Nations member states have produced the final draft of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM).

It is preceded by the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, which the UN General Assembly adopted in 2016. This was an intergovernmental declaration to initiate development of two separate global compacts: one on refugees and another on migrants.

This latest global compact document focuses on the latter issue. It lays down 23 objectives in order to establish “a cooperative framework to address migration in all its dimensions”.

Key points include securing the human rights of migrants, reducing vulnerabilities in migration, and the use of migration detention only as a last resort. The global compact also promotes “integrated, secure and coordinated” border management. Its aim is for states to cooperate rather than focus strictly on their domestic priorities.

National responses to the draft global compact

Over the last month or so, states have started to declare their positions on the draft text. Notably, these positions do not always align with how those states have conducted themselves in intergovernmental negotiations. As is often the case, tensions can arise between domestic political priorities and intergovernmental relations.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said Australia would not sign the global compact in its current form. Australia is “happy to negotiate in good faith”, according to Dutton, but it will not “sign its border protection policy over to the UN”.

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The Hungarian government also declared its opposition and officially announced its exit from the adoption process.

These developments follow the high-profile US withdrawal from the drafting process in December 2017. At the time, the Trump administration argued that numerous provisions of the New York Declaration were “inconsistent with US immigration policy”.

As the Global Compact on Migration moves towards finalisation in December 2018, there is a chance these early challenges may snowball.

The key to Australia’s resistance

The grounds for Australia’s particular resistance to the global compact are the provisions relating to migration detention. The compact insists detention should only be used as a “last resort”. Signatories would commit to:

review and revise relevant legislation, policies and practices related to immigration detention to ensure that migrants are not detained arbitrarily, that decisions to detain are based on law, are proportionate, have a legitimate purpose, and are taken on an individual basis, in full compliance with due process and procedural safeguards, and that immigration detention is not promoted as a deterrent or used as a form of cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment to migrants, in accordance with international human rights law.

Critical readings of domestic policy and practice find Australia’s behaviour in violation of some or all of the compact’s checks on migration detention.

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Indeed, Dutton effectively acknowledges that Australia’s practice is out of alignment with international legal standards. He notes that “we’ve fought hard for [our policies]” and “we’re not going to sign a deal that sacrifices anything in terms of our border protection”.

Multiple actors have sought to bring Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers before the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. The Australian government faces allegations including crimes against humanity and torture, arising from the system of mandatory offshore immigration detention it continues to enforce.

Global forced displacement and migration challenges are unprecedented

It is clear that states typically prioritise their national interests in international relations. Arguments are often framed in such a way as to absolve states of responsibility and position vulnerable refugees and migrants as a “problem”. It is past time for this mentality to change.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recently released the 2017 Global Trends Report. It confirms that the number of forcibly displaced persons around the world has risen to 68.5 million. This is 2.9 million more than reported at the end of 2016.

The estimated global migrant population is 244 million.

States’ approaches to challenges of forced displacement and migration often fail to acknowledge a sometimes competing, but always essential, consideration – the basic dignity of the human person.

The agenda of the global compact is to encourage states to prioritise human dignity. This consideration does not have to contravene sovereignty. It does not dictate that a country abolish its borders. Nor is it against measures to protect its security.

To construct a justification for state cruelty based on sovereignty is an affront to the shared objectives of member states of the UN.

The case for greater cooperation

The current scope of forced displacement and migration necessitates more rather than less cooperation. Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN, Maleeha Lodhi, stated that the “success rests on mutual trust, determination and solidarity to fulfil the 23 objectives and commitments contained in the GCM”.

Bonds of solidarity at the international level are heavily strained by the disproportionate burdens borne by a small number of receiving states. Developing countries now host 84% of the world’s refugees.

In this context, the last thing national governments should do is abandon cooperative efforts to build stronger global responses to migration and refugee protection.

The lives and wellbeing of millions of people depend on countries working together and prioritising humanity in their domestic policies.

Samuel Berhanu Woldemariam, PhD Candidate (Law), University of Newcastle; Amy Maguire, Senior Lecturer in International Law and Human Rights, University of Newcastle, and Jason von Meding, Senior Lecturer in Disaster Risk Reduction, University of Newcastle

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.