For years we watched in dismay as the left-leaning Guardian defended Australia’s mass immigration program, arguing that immigration doesn’t suppress wages and doesn’t strain infrastructure, among other things.
The Guardian’s economic poster boy, Greg Jericho, also likened any criticism of Australia’s immigration program to “racism” and “dog whistling”:
“Immigration – because there are many desperate to hate – must be treated with extreme care by politicians and journalists… 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”.
In July 2021, Jericho lambasted the Reserve Bank of Australia for daring to admit that 15 years of mass immigration harmed Australian workers:
Blaming migrants for our economic woes is not new…
Most studies suggest migration has a positive impact on wages growth…
Blaming migrants for lower wages growth is easy but absurdly simplistic.
Yet, only one week later, Jericho posted another article admitting that the collapse in immigration over the pandemic is a key reason why Australia’s unemployment rate had fallen to a decade low:
The number of unemployed obviously did grow, but a massive number of people left the labour force… a mass of people who would normally have come to the country did not because our borders were closed.
As a result the annual growth of working age people plunged from around 1.6% to below 0.2%…
Had the labour force kept growing at around its usual 2% each year, in June there would have been nearly 200,000 more people in the labour force.
Now, if we assume all of those extra people were unemployed, the unemployment rate in June would have been 6.2% instead of the very impressive 4.9%.
In 2014, Jericho also explicitly admitted that the immigration system has been used to suppress wage growth:
The skills shortage in Australia has long been a topic in economic and political circles…
In the past few years much of the debate has centred on the need for migrant workers to come to Australia to fill the gap….
Arguing we need more labour smacks of wanting to purely increase supply of labour in order to further reduce wages growth. This might benefit some businesses but certainly not those trying to find work.
Last week we witnessed a seminal shift in rhetoric at The Guardian when Peter Lewis called for a “sober debate about immigration and [to] consider the reality on workers”, while also calling on Labor to reset the immigration program:
After nearly a decade of Tory rule, the situation has deteriorated to the point where a new class of exploited worker, with no citizen or industrial rights, has been used to systemically drive down wages and permanency. Before the borders closed, there were more than a million people on temporary visas with work rights.
There are hardheads in Labor convinced that these issues are off-limits; that the issue of immigration is so entwined with race that any attempt to open debate will be read as dog-whistling.
This would be the ultimate triumph for big business and their government backers: that in driving down wages and conditions they have assumed the role of woke culture warriors fighting for racial intolerance. Capital is colour-blind when it comes to exploiting workers.
There is an alternate view that this is exactly the sort of issue that could end the identity politics of migration by shifting the focus to the economic impacts on ordinary working people.
What would a policy that prioritised secure Aussie jobs look like? It may increase the income threshold for the skilled migration scheme to ensure it wasn’t just lowballing wages…
More fundamentally, it would recognise those swathes of Labor voters who deserted the party to One Nation weren’t necessarily xenophobic rednecks but people who bore the brunt of the lie that open economic borders would inevitably deliver wealth and opportunity for all. It didn’t then and it still doesn’t today…
Drawing new lines in the sand about the way we engage with global labour markets and supporting local jobs are tangible ways to put the rhetoric of building back better into practise. The political challenge is to take the race out of the debate altogether and make it a question of class.
On Friday, The Guardian’s Van Badham joined the fray calling on employers to “pay more instead of exploiting children and migrants”:
Not only in the US, but also in the UK and Australia, the creative energy found by employers to avoid paying wage rises is reminding working people – yet again – that the promises made to them by neoliberal economics were all a wobbling jelly tower of lies, lies, lies…
The ructions to the economies of the US, UK and Australia in the wake of coronavirus disruption may have led some to believe that the time was – finally – ripe for workers to make their own insistences of value and be paid accordingly.
You’d be wrong. In the US, there is an actual labour shortage… And yet the response to it by employers isn’t to make workplace conditions competitive. It’s to strong-arm legislatures into things like supporting the workplace exploitation of children…
The UK, of course, willingly legislated itself into its own labour shortage. The Brits were warned by militant communist journal, the Financial Times, in 2017 that as British industries were “addicted to cheap labour” shipped in from poorer EU countries, the cold turkey of “getting Brexit done” would provoke some proper jonesing…
Proposed remedies to the [labour shortage] situation from the corporate-loving Tory government have so far included: offering Brexit-hypocritical short-term visas to restore EU workers to the jobs, deploying the army and using prison labour…
Is Australia any different? Only in that our labour shortages are presently more patchy. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry called for the numbers of skilled migrants to be doubled to 200,000 people a year. And a terrifying ABC piece recently celebrated the introduction of a Hunger Games employment paradigm for local strawberry picking. Ten strawberry pickers were to be given a one in a hundred chance of winning a $100,000 bonus in a lottery if they signed on to the job. Employers could have, of course, just paid those people an extra $1,000. I guess they didn’t want the employees to share collective confidence in their own labour value.
That would rather cause the whole rotten system to come crashing down, wouldn’t it? And that – as the neoliberals and employers know – is the truth that lies beneath.
Hallelujah. The Guardian has finally put away the race card and is making rational, commonsense arguments pertaining to immigration.
Now all it needs to do is send the memo to Greg Jericho to put the creepy dog whistle away and represent the working class, rather than be a useful idiot for the business elite.
