Earlier this year, the poster boy for the globalist ‘Fake Left’, Greg Jericho, penned a drivelling article in The Guardian labelling any discussion of Australia’s reckless ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration program as ‘racist’:
Immigration – because there are many desperate to hate – must be treated with extreme care by politicians and journalists, and certainly with more care than Abbott seems capable. The inherently racist parties will seek to use any discussion and any seeming evidence of the negative impact of migrants as fuel to burn their fires of hate.
This was followed over the weekend with another rant, wherein Jericho spruiked Phil Lowe’s debunked immigration propaganda, while attacking those seeking to lower Australia’s immigration intake as cherry-picking their facts, before doing the very same thing:
Low wages growth, congestion, poor schooling, crime – pretty much whatever you want can fit under the “if only we cut back migration things would improve” argument…
It seems logical, but it really only looks at half of the equation…
Yes, migrants affect the supply of labour, but they also increase the demand for goods and services, which creates a demand for more workers to produce those goods and deliver those services. Yes, they increase the demand for housing…
And were the influx of migrants leading to residents missing out on jobs, you would expect the percentage of adults in work would fall… However, the percentage of 25- to 64-year-olds in employment is higher now than at any time in our past…
Lowe’s speech was a very timely push back to some of the pretty lazy claims against migration, and pointed to the actual economic benefits it brings…
It’s true that our infrastructure has not kept pace… The pressure should not be for governments to cheat the way to improving the situation by cutting migration, it should be on them to actually deliver the services that are needed.
The calls for lower migration (or worse the euphemism of a “sustainable” Australia) often leads to some pretty dark places, but just as bad it lets governments off the hook. Yes the solutions to a growing population might be hard, but finding them is what they are paid to do. If they can’t, then we should elect someone who can, not someone who wants us to re-elect them because they are seeking cover by blaming others.
Advertisement
Jericho’s claim that migrants “increase the demand for goods and services, which creates a demand for more workers to produce those goods and deliver those services” is really just another form of ‘trickle down’ economics.
What Jericho is really saying is that mass immigration allows the wealthy elites who own the means of production to get richer, thanks to increased competition and consumption at the bottom, but that we shouldn’t worry about those already at the bottom of the pile because we can just bring in more people to undercut them and everybody can consume more ‘stuff’.
Moreover, Jericho’s assertion that immigration was not adversely affecting the labour market because “the percentage of 25- to 64-year-olds in employment is higher now than at any time in our past” is the epitome of ‘cherry picking’. As Jericho himself has previously pointed out, it’s not the percentage of persons in employment that indicates the demand for labour, it’s the hours worked. And the average number of hours worked per person has been falling at the same time as wages growth is stagnating.
Annual data from the bureau of statistics on the labour force shows… that the level of workers who are satisfied with the number of hours they are working each week is continuing its 45 year downward trend…
For most job seekers the biggest change since the GFC has been the increase in competition for each job – 17% said in 2018 that was the main difficulty in finding work, compared to just 8% in 2008:
More competition for jobs, hey? Wonder why that would be? It couldn’t have something to do with Australia importing foreign workers hand over fist into an already oversupplied labour market, could it?
Recent migrants accounted for two-thirds (64.5 per cent) of the approximately 850,000 net jobs created in the past five years. For full-time employment, the impact is even more pronounced, with recent migrants accounting for 72.4 per cent of new jobs created.
Various Productivity Commission modelling has also shown that immigration lowers the wages of incumbent workers (see here). These results were confirmed recently by modelling from Victoria University (see here). Several notable Australian economists have noted similar.
Advertisement
International analysis from the Bank of England and Cambridge University also shows that immigration reduces wages growth (see here).
The economics is simple: continually increasing labour supply via immigration necessarily reduces workers’ bargaining power and ergo wages growth. This was explained beautifully by The Australia Institute’s chief economist, Richard Denniss, last year when he noted that the very purpose of foreign worker visas is to “suppress wage growth by allowing employers to recruit from a global pool of labour to compete with Australian workers”. That is, in a normal functioning labour market, “when demand for workers rises, employers would need to bid against each other for the available scarce talent”. But this mechanism has been bypassed by enabling employers to recruit labour globally. “It is only in recent years that the wage rises that accompany the normal functioning of the labour market have been rebranded as a ‘skills shortage'”.
Heck, even left-leaning economist, Stephen Koukoulas, noted similar recently on Twitter:
Advertisement
And the coal-face evidence is simply overwhelming:
For years we have seen Dominos, Caltex, 7-Eleven, Woolworths and many other fast food franchises busted for rorting migrant labour.
The issue culminated in 2016 when the Senate Education and Employment References Committee released a scathing report entitled A National Disgrace: The Exploitation of Temporary Work Visa Holders, which documented systemic abuses of Australia’s temporary visa system for foreign workers.
Mid last year, ABC’s 7.30 Report ran a disturbing expose on the modern day slavery occurring across Australia.
Meanwhile, Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), Natalie James, told Fairfax in August last year that people on visas continue to be exploited at an alarming rate, particularly those with limited English-language skills. It was also revealed that foreign workers are involved in more than three-quarters of legal cases initiated by the FWO against unscrupulous employers.
Then The ABC reported that Australia’s horticulture industry is at the centre of yet another migrant slave scandal, according to an Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into the issue.
The same Parliamentary Inquiry was told by an undercover Malaysian journalist that foreign workers in Victoria were “brainwashed” and trapped in debt to keep them on farms.
A recent UNSW Sydney and UTS survey painted the most damning picture of all, reporting that wages theft is endemic among international students, backpackers and other temporary migrants.
A few months ago, Fair Work warned that most of Western Sydney had become a virtual special economic zone in which two-thirds of businesses were underpaying workers, with the worst offenders being high-migrant areas.
Dr Bob Birrell from the Australian Population Research Institutelatest report, based on 2016 Census data, revealed that most recently arrived skilled migrants (i.e. arrived between 2011 and 2016) cannot find professional jobs, with only 24% of skilled migrants from Non-English-Speaking-Countries (who comprise 84% of the total skilled migrant intake) employed as professionals as of 2016, compared with 50% of skilled migrants from Main English-Speaking-Countries and 58% of the same aged Australian-born graduates. These results accord with a recent survey from the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, which found that 53% of skilled migrants in Western Australia said they are working in lower skilled jobs than before they arrived, with underemployment also rife.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) latest Characteristics of Recent Migrants report, revealed that migrants have generally worse labour market outcomes than the Australian born population, with recent migrants and temporary residents having an unemployment rate of 7.4% versus 5.4% for the Australian born population, and lower labour force participation (69.8%) than the Australian born population (70.2%).
ABC Radio recently highlighted the absurdity of Australia’s ‘skilled’ migration program in which skilled migrants have grown increasingly frustrated at not being able to gain work in Australia despite leaving their homelands to fill so-called ‘skills shortages’. As a result, they are now demanding that taxpayers provide government-sponsored internships to help skilled migrants gain local experience, and a chance to work in their chosen field.
In early 2018 the senate launched the”The operation and effectiveness of the Franchising Code of Conduct” owing in part to systematic abuse of migrant labour.
Then there is new research from the University of Sydney documenting the complete corruption of the temporary visas system, and arguing that Australia running a “de-facto low-skilled immigration policy” (also discussed here at the ABC).
In late June the government released new laws to combat modern slavery which, bizarrely, imposed zero punishment for enslaving coolies.
Over the past few weeks we’ve witnessed widespread visa rorting across cafes and restaurants, including among high end establishments like the Rockpool Group.
When will Greg Jericho stand up for ordinary Australian workers and lobby to lower Australia’s reckless ‘Big Australia’ immigration program, which is not only lowering workers’ wages but also raising their cost of living via housing, as well as eroding their overall living standards?
Advertisement
It is precisely because of the Fake Left’s failure to rationally discuss immigration that ordinary Australians are being pushed to “the inherently racist parties” that Jericho hates so much.
As an aside, below Jericho’s weekend immigration spruik, commenters were broadly opposed to Australia’s rabid population growth policies despite the self righteous posturing of the Guardian itself. Amusingly, the Guardian likes to pick out what it claims are the “best” comments and places them at the top of the comments section, calling them “the Guardian picks”, presumably to direct the debate. Unsurprisingly, the “Guardian picks” were nearly all comments supporting Jericho’s redundant argument that extreme population growth levels were good, rather than reflecting the broader views of the Guardian readership.
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness.
Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.
