Another report has emerged on how Australia’s ‘skilled’ visa system is failing, with one-third of migrants found to be underemployed due primarily to a lack of English-language proficiency:
The frustration of not being able to get a professional job is a common thread for many skilled migrants from different backgrounds.
One in three migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds has been found to be overqualified for their job, according to a recent study.
The study, by the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, found 35 per cent of migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds were considered overqualified for their jobs, compared to 10 per cent of people born in Australia…
Report author Alan Duncan from Curtin University said improved skills matching along with better education and training could add $6 billion to Australia’s economy…
Geological engineer Aura Zepeda from Mexico shared the same experience.
The 33-year-old moved to Perth five years ago in search of better career opportunities and a brighter future for her children…
It took years of job hunting and more than 300 applications before Ms Zepeda finally landed a job as an engineer.
She has urged employers looking for skilled workers to give migrants a fairer chance.
The findings of the Australian Bureau of Statistic’s (ABS) latest Personal Income of Migrants survey for 2016-17 supports these findings. It revealed that skilled permanent migrants that have arrived in Australia since 1 January 2000 earned an appallingly low median of only $55,900 in 2016-17:
This is a shocking result given these migrants are purported to be highly qualified and brought into Australia to overcome so-called ‘skills shortages’. Therefore, for them to be paid so low suggests that Australia is instead operating a low-skilled migration program that is undercutting Australian workers.
Indeed, the Department of Home Affairs’ Continuous Survey of Australia’s Migrants revealed that the median full-time salary 18 months after being granted a skilled visa was just $72,000 in 2016, below the population median of $72,900. This is also shocking given the population median includes unskilled workers, which obviously drags the nation-wide median full-time salary down.
As you can see from the table above, migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds earned significantly less that their English-speaking counterparts, with migrants from Ireland ($82,865), the United Kingdom ($70,367) and South Africa ($65,245) having the highest median employee incomes in 2016-17.
The key problem is that Australia’s ‘skilled’ visa program is poorly targeted with the majority of visas granted to professions experiencing an oversupply of workers and not actually in shortage (see here and here).
This is illustrated in the above article with Geological engineer, Aura Zepeda, migrating to Perth despite engineering has not been in shortage since 2013, according to the federal government’s own official skills shortage list. So why was Australia bringing in skilled migrant engineers?
The solution to this problem is not to help these migrants into jobs (which means taking jobs from Australian applicants), but for them not to come in the first place. Obviously, this does not mean abandoning those who are here already – they should be helped, as for any Australian disadvantaged job seeker – but to ensure that this situation does not continue into the future.
This requires Australia’s skilled visa system to be overhauled to ensure that it only brings in migrants to fill genuine skills shortages.
Specifically, all skilled migrants should be employer-sponsored (thus ensuring they come to Australia with a job in hand), as well as required to be paid at the 80th percentile of earnings, or indexed to double the median wage.
Reforms along these lines would ensure that the skilled visa system is used sparingly to import only the ‘best of the best’, not as a general labour market scheme to oversupply the labour market and undercut local workers, as is the situation currently.
