It’s not racist to debate immigration levels

Have you ever wondered why Australia’s immigration levels have gone up and up but we’ve never really had a debate about whether this is in the national inter­est?

The same applies to questioning the extent to which the quantum of immigration should depend on the state of the labour market, the availability of housing and the quality of our infrastructure.

For the record, my view is that current levels of immigration (tipped to be 750,000 over two years) are much too high. Even the levels of the decade before the pandemic (averaging 240,000 a year) were too high, not because those migrants wouldn’t turn out to be good Australians but because bringing in a city the size of Canberra every two years puts downward pressure on wage rates, upward pressure on housing costs and massive pressure on infrastructure. And none of this is being done according to any cogent plan.

So why is that? Why is the issue of population and migration, so critical to our economy and our national character, a no-go zone for debate or proper and rigorous planning even though it’s the federal government that controls the rate of immigration by setting the rules under which people can arrive; and even though the numbers coming affect, at least to some extent, the lives of everyone who’s already here?

Like just about every Australian, I’m pro-immigration. How could we not be, given nearly all of us are migrants or the descendants of relatively recent migrants? Yet being pro-immigrant and appreciating all the ways immigration has created modern Australia doesn’t imply that immigration levels should always be going up.

During the Howard era, immigration averaged about 110,000 a year. Especially after the government brought the first wave of illegal migration by boat under control, immigration mostly had reasonable community support.

In the final Howard years, net overseas migration (the number of people arriving less the number leaving for more than 12 months) started to surge, largely due to universities admitting tens of thousands of overseas students and businesses bringing in more temporary workers, especially as the economy strengthened on the back of improving terms of trade due to China’s booming demand for our resources.

But every person who comes, other than as a tourist, needs a job, a home and a means of getting around. And immigration numbers subsequently kept rising, despite the global financial crisis, despite the growing pressure on infrastructure and despite the Rudd-Gillard government losing control of our borders, so that a significant proportion of our immigration program effectively came to be controlled by people-smugglers.

Meanwhile, as economic reform stalled, Treasury economists pushed ever higher migration as a way for reform-shy governments to keep delivering economic growth.

I will never forget sitting in a discussion with senior ministers hearing Treasury officials explain that the best way to get economic growth over 3 per cent was to boost immigration because each extra worker added to the size of the economy. And the officials’ dismay when the Abbott government engineered some modest (and short-lived) reductions in net overseas migration. Hence the constant official emphasis on how supposedly “skilled” our migration program is because migrants improve gross domestic product per person only if their skill levels, on average, exceed that of the existing population.

That’s despite the reality that most so-called skilled migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds are not working in their area of supposed skills five years after arriving; once here, they often end up working as cleaners, carers, waiters and drivers – all the jobs that Australians born here increasingly refuse to do.

In early 2018, when by then former prime minister Tony Abbott called for immigration to be halved back to the average of the Howard years, treasurer Scott Morrison claimed this would cost the budget $5bn due to reduced tax revenue.

It was a graphic illustration of the reform drought, post the 2014 budget, and an object lesson in the way unelected and unaccountable officialdom could manipulate elected politicians into continuing a policy regardless of its public support.

To this day, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone in authority that higher growth based on higher immigration is an economic mirage unless it’s accompanied by the higher productivity that only efficiency reforms can bring.

Universities are a massive lobby for higher migration via the overseas students who have become their business model.

Big business likewise because higher supply of labour keeps wages lower than they otherwise would be and because a larger population means more demand for goods and services.

For the federal government, at least, higher migration and its boost to overall GDP provides an apparent vindication of its economic management while its costs in extra demand for schools, hospitals, housing and transport infrastructure fall disproportionately on the states.

But what does that matter for a federal government desperate to avoid slow growth on its watch or, god forbid, a recession – officially two consecutive quarters of negative GDP – even if growth per capita is heading south?

But it’s not just the economic data that matters on this issue, it’s public sentiment. And, we now know, significant sections of the public are reluctant to voice their own instincts about ever higher migration lest they be accused of racism.

An important piece of research released on Wednesday by the Australian Population Research Institute shows, says its author, demographer Katharine Betts, that “many Australians feel silenced and afraid to speak on some public matters … because they don’t want to be labelled as racist”.

Her conclusion is based on a detailed survey last year of more than 3000 Australians (weighted to be representative) who were asked: “Do you think that people who raise questions about immigration being too high are sometimes seen as racist?” Only 36 per cent said no and 13 per cent “don’t know”.

The 51 per cent who said yes were then asked to choose between two statements: “This is unfair because very few of them are racist”, to which 33 per cent of the overall sample agreed; or “This is because they usually are racist”, to which 19 per cent agreed.

Betts says this 19 per cent, whom she terms “guardians against racism”, who were disproportionately in favour of high immigration and felt disproportion­ately more free to talk about their views, tended to be “younger, better educated and more financially secure than other voters” and therefore had a “pervasive … role in keeping a lid on open debate”.

“Theirs is a moral position, not a material one” she says, and “because of this they are likely to see those who don’t share their position as morally suspect and to see their shaming as legitimate”.

These guardians against rac­ism, Betts says, have created a “censorious climate” that “mutes public discussion but seems not to have changed the opinions of the majority”.

Overall, 70 per cent thought Australia should have “somewhat lower”, “much lower” or “nil” levels of net migration. Yet thanks to her so-called guardians against racism, Betts thinks, this strong majority is rarely heard in public debate and has almost no impact on public policy.

Is this going to change? As historian Geoffrey Blainey found when his 1984 comments about Australia becoming a “nation of tribes” created a firestorm and cost him his academic position at the time; and as John Howard found in 1988 when his comments about lowering the rate of Asian immigration helped to lose him the Liberal Party leadership, at least for a time, this is a debate that can easily go off the rails.

Yet it’s a debate that should be conducted carefully, rather than avoided, if a key element of public policy is to retain the electorate’s trust. Maybe if the voice referendum is defeated, despite the moral intimidation that voting No is at least implicitly racist, we might be able to have a more honest discussion about other things, too, including the rapid rise in our migration intake.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/its-not-racist-to-debate-immigration-levels/news-story/7814a7d7acb237a382844e48390d7856

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
    
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
 
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