Anti-immigration has become a hot issue. Here’s why it’s wrong

Neo-Nazis standing on the front steps of the NSW Parliament, Pauline Hanson repeating her burqa stunt in the Senate and the Federal Coalition pledging to cut Australia’s immigration intake have ensured immigration remains the hottest and most controversial issue in public discussion.

In the pile-on about “mass migration,” Liberal Senator Jacinta Nampinjinpa Price singled out migrants from India, claiming the Albanese Government preferred them because they overwhelmingly voted Labor – a claim contradicted by the data.

But it would be a mistake to interpret the anti-immigration push as the work of a few right-wing extremists and their fellow travellers in Parliament.

The most recent Essential Media poll finds that just over half the respondents consider the current immigration intake to be too high.

Immigrants are getting blamed for contributing to the housing crisis. And television stories about Middle Eastern crime gangs and knife attacks by overseas-born rival youth gangs create an impression that first-generation migrants are responsible for much of Australia’s violent crime.

Yet a review by the Australian Institute of Criminology suggests migrants have the lowest rates of criminality in Australia.

Why do we want migrants at all?

Apart from pointing out the obvious that, other than First Nations people we are all migrants or their descendants, the case for migration to Australia is based on a reality that rarely gets a mention – Australia’s ageing population.

As pointed out in every Intergenerational Report from its first release in 2002, if we keep going the way we are there will be too few working-age Australians to earn the incomes and pay the taxes to care for Australians who are too old to work.

Remember Peter Costello’s ‘Baby Bonus’, when he implored young couples to have three babies – one for mum, one for dad and one for the country?

Every Intergenerational Report has shown a projected increase in the age dependency ratio – the number of retirees per working-age Australian.

What do the anti-immigration advocates want governments to do about that problem? Answer: make it worse by cutting back on immigration, especially immigrants with different skin colours.

Australia’s fertility rate of less than 1.5 births per woman is now only half that needed to sustain its population without immigration. So, if the anti-immigration mob got its way, our population would start falling swiftly and sharply.

To prevent the anti-immigration forces gaining a sizeable foothold in mainstream Australia and in the Australian Parliament, we need to do what we can to lift the reputation of our immigration program.

This was a major goal of a recent all-day workshop convened by the College of Business and Economics at the Australian national University, to which I was invited.

At our table, we revived the idea of directing immigrants – to the extent possible – to Australia’s more dynamic regional centres such as Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong, Shepparton, Warrnambool, Griffith, Albury-Wodonga, Gladstone and Darwin.

All, or most, of these cities welcome migrants and, unlike the big capital cities, do not suffer from congestion.

My social media post reporting on the workshop was met with a barrage of abuse, some claiming I’ve sat behind a desk all my life and don’t understand that country people reject migrants moving to their towns.

Having grown up in the country town of Baradine in northwest NSW, I know that small towns actively welcome migrants – as they did after World War II when Greek, Italian and Chinese migrants set up cafes and restaurants in them.

A bigger population helps ensure the town keeps its medical services and aged care facilities, a post office, and maybe a bank or two.

Where were these critics when the Queensland townspeople of Biloela welcomed a Tamil couple and their young family, while to Dutton government spent many millions of dollars trying to deport them?

Back to our proposal for migration to regional Australia, the policy lever would be an offer of fast-tracked permanent residency and family reunion if a migrant stayed in a designated regional centre for at least three years, an idea proposed in 2006 in my policy book, Vital Signs Vibrant Society.

Federal, state and territory governments would need to come to an understanding through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) about funding social facilities of these kinds in the designated regional centres.

A proposal along these lines was adopted by the Morrison government in 2019 following variants of it dating back to 1999.

It would be marvellous if overseas tradies were clamouring to migrate to Australia and had the necessary skills and qualifications to do so. The truth is, we are in a tough global market for them.

It’s good to see Sussan Ley pushing back against the hard right of the Liberal and National parties, aspiring leader Andrew Hastie claiming again last Friday that “immigration is out of control and is … destroying our fragile social cohesion”.

By all means, we should have a public debate about the size and composition of our immigration program. But those who seek to advance their political careers by vilifying migrants might ponder this – without a substantial program of attracting young migrants, we will become a nation of retirees grumpily complaining that it’s hard to get help in the aged care residences in which they live.