Does record immigration mean higher unemployment?

Monday 17 April 2023

Matt Cowgill, Senior Economist at SEEK, asked on Twitter last week: why has Australia’s headline unemployment rate remained at only 3.5% when immigration has bounced back to record levels:

In following Tweets, Cowgill used the steady low ABS unemployment rate as a “gotcha” moment to suggest that immigration does not impact the labour market in any negative way.

This is curious to me as nearly all other labour market measures have weakened in the face of the rapid immigration-fuelled rise in labour supply.

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About the author

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.