Immigration Reform That Isn’t

Waking up to just how cheesed-off the Australian population has grown with massive immigration levels, the Albanese government has announced it will ‘fix’ the ‘broken migration system’ and reduce it to ‘sustainable’ levels.  Selling the new plan as one of the “biggest reforms in a generation”, the government has laboured mightily and delivered a hundred-page door-stopper of reforms. If reform is measured solely by the tonnage of words on paper, this immigration reform is the real deal. If not, it’s a bill of goods.

Plough through the plan’s wordy minutiae, the sort only Canberra bureaucrats can produce (I should know, I once was one of them), and what emerges is a shallow document designed to disguise the reality that, under these purported reforms, the immigration floodgates will remain stuck in the open position.

These reforms are a textbook example of ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’, the practice of deceiving the consumer by emphasising quantity over quality. The package does nothing substantial to actually reduce Australia’s high immigration levels and is primarily aimed at placating an electorate profoundly disillusioned by the pressure that an immigration-driven Big Australia is putting on wages, housing, urban amenity, access to services and the quality of life for average Australians.

The main sleight of hand centres on highlighting proposed cuts to the current and absurdly high post-pandemic intake which will merely return immigration to ‘normal’ pre-Covid levels, already way too high. The Big Australia boosters will continue to get their immigration fix after these ‘reforms’.

The Numbers

In the year to September 2022,  net overseas migration (NOM) topped out at 518,000, an all-time record (and double the usual annual NOM) which was largely driven by the catch-up of returning foreign students following two years of pandemic-closed borders. Relief from this surge is at hand, however, according to the government. The NOM target for the 2023-24 financial year is 375,000, with ‘just’ 250,000 to follow in 2024-25, then 255,000 in 2025-26 and 235,000 in 2026-27. This still represents more than a million new immigrants every four years — this in a nation of just 26 million — and merely returns us to the ongoing high levels of the last decade which (excluding the years of the ‘Zero Covid’ delirium) had been bouncing around 230,000-240,000 a year and even getting as low as 180,000.  The new NOM numbers are actually higher than all of these old numbers.  Some reform!

All these human imports are just what Australia doesn’t need to address our acute housing shortage, pressure on rental affordability, the squeeze placed on access to schools, surgeries, hospitals, public transport and other services.  Nor should we forget the problems of a certain migrant element which contributes disproportionately to gang violence and other criminal behaviours and, just recently, has been making an oversize contribution to that vibrant diversity and cultural enrichment by taking appalling incidents of anti-Semitism to our streets. Even Albanese admitted to the ABC that “some of Australia’s new arrivals aren’t adding substantially to the national interest”, yet we can expect a lot more of the same.

‘Temporary’ Migrant Workers

There are some two million temporary migrant workers already in Australia (including backpackers, other working holiday-makers and international students, who also work) but Albanese’s plan to address this issue is to make these temps permanent by offering the migrant workers “achievable pathways to permanent residency”.  How this enticement is going to help Australians wanting to work is anything but clear, no doubt because immigration, to the incurably woke, must always be about the immigrants’ employment welfare and not that of local Australian workers.  Permanent residency has always been the goal of many ‘temporary’ migrant workers and the new reforms will simply make it easier for their wish to be realised.

The ‘reforms’ include a decoupling of a migrants’ temporary working visas from their sponsoring employer, allowing the migrant a bonus 180 days (up from 60 days) to find a new employer sponsor.  This ‘reform’ has been presented as allowing migrant workers to escape the clutches of evil bosses but will mainly serve to extend working time in Australia.  

The Great Overseas Student Con Game

There are already 860,000 current international students and graduates living and studying in Australia on student visas, over twice what it was (340,000) just a decade ago in 2012.  Many of these students (more than 150,000) cycle through new courses, not because they are polymaths conquering new disciplines, but because this allows them to prolong their (working) stay on renewed student visas. They are a major part of the ‘permanent temporary’ class of working migrants.

This backdoor access to a job in Australia is a renowned scam which the so-called reforms promise to remedy, if you can believe that.  This includes a 48 hour-per-fortnight cap on allowable student work, rather than the unlimited hours now the case. They are here to study, allegedly, and not to work, but 24 hours a week is still pretty generous.

The reforms also promise that the number of foreign students entering low-quality courses, mostly a ruse to allow immediate entry into the workforce without ever going near a lecture room, will be cut. But winning the arms race between government immigration policy and overseas students’ gaming of the system (aided by the rubbish courses of their dodgy providers) would require competence, resolve and real intent by the government. So don’t count on any improvement.

The other major overseas student reform is that of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) which will see the bar for English language proficiency lifted from 5.5 to 6.0. The top score under IELTS is 9.0 (for an ‘expert user’ with full operational command of English) and the middling score is 6.0 (for a ‘competent user’ with ‘generally effective’ command of the language despite ‘some inaccuracies and misunderstandings’).  This new score requirement for a student visa is, however, a bare pass mark, not far above a score of 5.0 for the ‘modest user’ with only partial command of the language.

Last time I looked, higher education courses were delivered in English, meaning understanding and expression would seem rather crucial.  The big reveal, the tacit admission of the proposed IELTS reform, is that overseas students have so far been ushered in with a barely competent command of English. I suppose course money speaks louder and is more persuasive to university administrators than barely intelligible English.

The biggest problem, however, with all these overseas student reforms, even if some of them actually come to fruition, is that there is to be no overall hard cap on the number of foreign students, which makes any target for their intake essentially meaningless.

Exemptions to ‘reform’

Some immigration streams are exempt from even the pretence of reform.  Permanent, high-skilled migrant workers are to remain in favour, as if there are no high-skilled Australians, or those capable of becoming so, able to do the high-skilled work (and receive a fair price for their labour).

‘Family reunification’ will also continue under existing policy settings which means that elderly dependent family members (and any ‘extended family’ grifters) will get free lifestyle upgrades courtesy of Australia’s taxpayers.Refugees (including all the fake ones bluffing their way into Australia) will still have a pretty easy time, with an annual target of 20,000 up by around 2,000 on the current level. This ‘reform’ should keep the Left/Green/Teal ‘refugee’ vote in the bag for Labour thanks to our compulsory preferential voting system.

Get Real With Real Reform

The basic flaw at the heart of this latest iteration of immigration reform is the pretence that immigration is, like a force of nature, something beyond government control and is only amenable to minor policy tinkering by technocrats in Canberra’s bubble.  This assumption is a cop-out because the federal government, should it so desire, has full control over immigration.

Compared to the ‘open borders’ policy that effectively operates now, the government, should it choose, could set hard caps, rather than fluffy ‘targets’, on the numbers of immigrants, including a total immigration moratorium or a steady-state Net Zero immigration (One Nation’s policy). 

They could even base immigration policy criteria on the cultural compatibility of the intending immigrants.  This would drive Australia’s progressives absolutely nuts (‘White Australia Policy’ revisited, do I hear?) but that would be a bonus.  It would be a brave government to go down this latter path but, as the convincing No vote in the Voice referendum showed, the threat of being smeared as a ‘racist’ by the woke has lost a lot of its clout.

Conclusion

This latest suite of immigration reforms will do nothing other than, at best, take us back to ‘normal’ immigration levels which were already, to borrow a progressive buzzword, ‘problematic’. Instead, the real aim of the reform package is to mollify the immigration-weary public with cheap talk of reform whilst keeping the immigration gravy train on track for the property developers, the tertiary sector, the employers of cheap labour and their tame politicians.

Post these reforms, young Australians will still be stretched to rent or buy their own homes and will have go back to living with mum and dad, all the seats on the bus will be occupied by foreign students, the GP surgeries will take a week before they can see you, A&E waiting times will still try one’s soul, and Australia’s road traffic arteries will still be clogged with those immigrants on their way to Australians’ jobs at cut-rate remuneration and conditions.

Instead of just tidying the edges of immigration with a whipper-snipper, a chainsaw is needed.