The strange parallels between the UK and Australia on immigration continue. Last week the embattled beleaguered trainwreck Sunak government announced a raft of immigration changes to curb the dramatic surge in immigration — mainly by targeting foreign students and temporary worker visa categories. Here, after foreshadowing by Anthony Albanese at the weekend, yesterday the government announced changes to curb the dramatic surge in immigration to Australia — mainly by targeting foreign students and temporary workers.
In the UK, the much higher-profile immigration issue is the Tory commitment to “stop the boats” of illegal immigrants gaming the European asylum system and crossing the channel in small vessels, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s inability to create a workable “Rwanda solution” due to courts overruling his legislation — much to the fury of his right-wing MPs. Here the focus has been on criminal immigration detainees freed by the High Court. Both are distractions from the more important issue of the impact of large volumes of immigration on housing, inflation and infrastructure.
By coinciding with a period of high inflation and high interest rates, the immigration surge here and in the UK has spotlit the economic effects of immigration in a way previously unseen to such a degree — and far more than cheerleaders for high migration would like. It is no longer about 20th century issues such as the ethnic or racial make-up of our migrant intake, or the extent to which migrants integrate. In fact, such debates look so dated they should be conducted in black and white by Anglo men in hats.
Instead it’s about determining if the effects of high immigration — coupled with long-term failure on housing policy, poor competition policy and a system of federal government designed to enable cost-shifting and blame-dodging — are worth it.
The questions aren’t new. The Productivity Commission (PC) undertook inquiries into the economic impacts of immigration in 2006 and and 2016: in 2016 it concluded that higher immigration led to higher GDP growth but lower productivity growth and lower real wages, while it produced slightly higher revenue for governments. And in any event, “whether a particular rate of immigration will deliver an overall benefit to the existing Australian community will crucially depend on the distribution of the gains and the interrelated social and environmental impacts”.
What’s changed since 2016 is inflation — an issue that the PC showed little interest in back then — and the resulting sense that the community is incurring the costs of immigration and none of the benefits. It is business (including universities selling education services to foreign students) that benefits from immigration through higher demand and lower wages, governments through slightly higher revenue and growth, property developers through the increasingly blunt encouragement from government to build as high as possible, and property owners through higher demand for housing.
In contrast, the costs mainly fall on workers, renters and first-home buyers. Even property owners who face the degradation of their local environment as medium- and high-density housing is allowed around them, and who have to share infrastructure with ever more users, can suffer directly from high migration. This is the sentiment that Pauline Hanson — who for nearly 30 years has made a career from appealing to enough prejudice to hook her to the public teat — intuited when she began using Sky News to argue not her standard racist schtick but that big business and government got the benefits from immigration and ordinary Australians didn’t.
It’s been a recurring feature of neoliberal economic policies of recent decades that the benefits of reform policies sold as good for the economy — deregulation, company tax cuts, privatisation, government spending cuts — accrue more and more to large corporations while the costs fall on workers, consumers and small business.
In that context, immigration is the ultimate connecting issue between neoliberalism and political alienation, generating economic resentment about where the costs and benefits accrue while also carrying an innate tribalism and hostility to “others”. That the political response thus far has mostly focused on providing more housing through higher-density development has, if anything, only exacerbated this: where once Bob “Malthus of Maroubra” Carr railed against John Howard’s high level of immigration and declared Sydney was full, his Labor successor Chris Minns proudly declares himself a YIMBY and bravely identifies whole swaths of Sydney to go high-density.
Unlike other neoliberal shibboleths, there was always a weird ideological tension around immigration: the industrial left saw a threat to wages, the environmental left saw an unsustainable pressure on natural resources, and the reactionary right saw a threat to racial purity and monocultural blandness. The neoliberal right, however, is all in favour of open borders and the free movement of people, like capital, while pro-refugee “Let them all come” progressive purists essentially support open borders for anyone who can get here. In some cases, the latter two fuse into one: former head of the Business Council of Australia Tony Shepherd, doyen of corporate neoliberalism in Australia, is also an ardent supporter of refugees.
Labor’s belated commitment to getting immigration “under control”, on top of its integrity measures to fix the mess inherited from Peter Dutton’s loss of control of our borders, is thus as much about a political task of addressing a nebulous community resentment regarding a failure to distribute costs and benefits properly, as it is about fixing the mechanics of a complex demand-driven visa system. A failure to prioritise the former by focusing only on the latter will be politically costly for Labor.
This neatly summarises the problem. It is the why Right’s greatest trick was to make immigration about race, not economics or the environment. Because it turned the Left into well meaning allies for the destruction of the working class.
So right.
“…Pauline Hanson — who for nearly 30 years has made a career from appealing to enough prejudice to hook her to the public teat — intuited when she began using Sky News to argue not her standard racist schtick but that big business and government got the benefits from immigration and ordinary Australians didn’t.”
Yes. True. Yet she votes with the Liberals and Nationals about all the time and every time these conservative political parties that constitute the coalition get in, they slowly but surely increase immigration to unsustainable levels. They talk big but every time they increase it more than Labor did if truth be told. Howard did it and now the 3 PMs of the coalition that constituted those 9 lost years did the same. Only the composition of immigration varied. They might cut it for 2 or 3 years after they get in but ramp it up after that. Business and farmers are too addicted to the cheap labour that immigration provides and the larger scale market that an increased population which immigration provides.
Yep. PHON are a bunch of PHONIES. Will happily demonise migrants but never once actually force change when they have power. Just Malcolm Roberts tilting at windmills.
Bernard Keane’s two decade journey away from neoliberalism is a fascinating thing. From denying that neoliberalism exists to questioning the business case for high immigration has been special to watch, all with barely any sense that he would admit his past failures.
Immigration is an issue which has always cut across party and political and ideological lines. In 1998 both the communist Socialist Workers Party, now renamed Socialist Alliance and the Greens at their federal and state branches rejected restricting population numbers and cutting immigration numbers on the spurious basis of rejecting eugenicism and racism. They basically said anything goes but look out if it gets too big, without going anywhere near specifying any number or level or percentage AND that it was the direction of immigration that as just as important as the number of immigrants. As Orson Wells said in one of less than notable ads, “Poppycock”. As if immigrants are going to flock en masse to areas which can barely support animal life let alone human. As if immigrants are willing to settle in large numbers in regional and rural areas where there are few to no jobs, little to no future, little to no public facilities and social infrastructure and where nature would impose its own limits if numbers got too big.
To me this was one of the Left’s own goals. They got scared by the population question. They felt they would be lumbered in with the racists of One Nation if they showed concern for population growth and such growth being driven largely by net immigration. The Left went about face, abandoned science and economics and, I would say, social justice and threw in their lot with Business and Agriculture. Shame on them for such intellectual paucity. I know this. I was a member of the Greens and they are communists ‘lite’. They and the remnants of the communist and socialist movements and groups that survived the fall of the Iron Curtain became captured not by Marxists Hard economics of his latter works bur pretended to discover his earlier works AND became captured by 3rd World left wing thinking that population numbers don’t matter and everything is all the fault of Whities in the 1st World.
Concern for population is now the concern of weak, pathetic, wealthier north shore types who proclaim to be Captain Sensible of the Sensible Centre. They fail to flourish there though that is where they now call home. The only other complaints of population and excess immigrations come from, well, many of those same immigrants themselves as they whine and moan to their Labor MPS, quite rightly I might add, and remind them of the congestion and costs of this population growth. That is why these same Labor MPs are running scared. Nothing else. People power seems to be working in a way that the efforts of the SPA and the Sustainable Australian Party cannot.
What a time to be alive. Everyone is being ‘mugged’ by reality.