It’s an immigration Christmas miracle!

It appears Australian elites no longer want to keep fucking around until they find out

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

Members of the corporate elite have always had strong financial incentives to support a borderless world. In recent decades, the cultural elite has added migrants to their list of sacralised victim groups and embraced a ‘borders are racist’ mindset.

As regular readers will be aware, I’ve devoted more than a few of these Musings to pointing out that while corporate and cultural elites derive either fatter profits or an even greater sense of moral superiority from unsustainably high immigration levels, opening the floodgates has created a lot of issues for those who aren’t members of the corporate or cultural elite. As I and many others have noted, the insatiable appetite for immigrants among global elites, particularly Anglosphere and European ones, has led to the following:

*Brexit

*Trump

*The election/re-election of many other ‘right-wing populists’ such as Giorgina Meloni (Italy), Victor Orbán (Hungary), Mateusz Morawiecki (Poland), Racep Tayyip Erdogan (Turkey) and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil). It would be a stretch to say Modi (India), got elected due to his scepticism around immigration. But it’s reasonable to assume that scepticism is part of his appeal to voters

*The one historical period everyone is an expert on is Germany 1933-1945, so it’s worth pointing out that the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is currently polling around 20 per cent. Of course, no Austrian was ever in any way involved with what went on in Germany circa 1913-1945. Nonetheless, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that the next Austrian Chancellor will probably come from the ranks of the anti-immigrant Freedom Party

*The Irish – the Irish! – are now engaging in race riots because of widespread resentment around immigration  

That is just what has unfolded so far. As I’ve noted previously, if the trends of its past two presidential elections continue, Marine Le Pen will be running France come 2027. Of rather more urgent concern to Anglosphere cultural elites, it’s now looking like Trump has a better than even chance of winning next year’s American presidential election

Australia’s population has grown rapidly in recent years, primarily due to extremely high levels of immigration. But it’s still only around 25 million. In 2023, migration levels topped 500,000. There are also about 650,000 overseas students now in Australia

Do Australian elites punch above their weight with reverse ferreting?
Unless you’re a fellow (serving or erstwhile) journo, you’re probably unfamiliar with ‘reverse ferreting’. Here’s the Wikipedia definition:

In British media, a reverse ferret is a sudden reversal in an organisation's editorial or political line on a certain issue. Generally, this will involve no acknowledgement of the previous position.

This week, I witnessed what must be one of the most majestic reverse ferrets in Australian political history. Having spent decades insisting the migration system was working absolutely brilliantly and that only evil and embittered racists could possibly imagine otherwise, Australia’s political elite – along, it seems, with its media, business and union elite – have now made the shocking discovery that “Australia’s migration system is broken”.

I can only imagine how stunned you will be to learn of the following disturbing facts, dear reader. But former cop Christine Nixon has blown the case wide open and produced a “Rapid Review into the Exploitation of Australia’s Visa System”. I’m yet to plough through the report myself, but based on media reporting, it appears:

*Unscrupulous employers sometimes take advantage of migrants and ‘students’

*Further to the above point, it turns out that not everyone who comes to Australia on a student visa is solely interested in furthering their education. It appears dodgy vocational colleges sometimes join forces with not-entirely-honest migrants to game the system

*Even those who come to Australia with the sincere intention of obtaining a qualification tend to hang around for a long time after they have received said qualification

*Not every migrant who comes to Australia is a heart surgeon, software developer or billionaire entrepreneur. If anything, it appears migrants with rare skill sets find it more rather than less difficult to relocate here

*Despite endlessly warning the economic apocalypse is nigh if hundreds of thousands of migrants with in-demand skills aren’t let into the country immediately, Australian employers often aren’t much interested in employing these skilled migrants once they arrive. (Hands up anyone who hasn’t had a Chinese or Indian Uber driver who wasn’t an accountant or engineer back in their old country?)

Is this too good to be true?
I don’t mean to pick on the AFR. It’s hardly the only offender, even if it’s one of the worst. But just to illustrate what an abrupt sea change has occurred among the nation’s political class, business lobby, union movement and commentariat, consider the following timeline:

July 27, 2023: Jacob Greber, the AFR’s ‘Senior Correspondent’, writes an article arguing, in all seriousness, that Australia should aim to sextuple its population ASAP. Here’s the accidentally prescient money quote:

While a fragile major party consensus agrees on the need for a bigger Australia, cracks are emerging. The Albanese government knows it has little choice but to accelerate flows of foreign skilled workers to paper over labour market shortages and fill growing job vacancies in sectors such as aged care. At the same time, the Coalition under Peter Dutton is tapping into community angst by asking where Labor intends to house the expected 1.5 million-head surge in skilled migration over the next five years. This is a fault line that is likely to be exploited during the next election campaign.

November 1, 2023: The AFR runs an article written by Assistant Professor Steven Hamilton and Ryan Edwards (deputy director of the ANU Development Policy Centre). The article is entitled ‘Look at the evidence: Cutting immigration would be a mistake for Australia’. Here’s the, shall we say, now somewhat dated money quote:     

Our record migration intake is claimed by some to put pressure on our already-buoyant inflation rate. Some fear migrants provide unfair competition in the labour market. It’s even been claimed that migration undermines per-capita economic growth. Well, we’re here to report that fearmongering about our migration intake is, variously, straight-up wrong, premised on faulty logic, or at best based on decidedly mixed evidence.

December 11: The AFR runs a Jennifer Hewett article that asks, ‘Will targeting dodgy vocational colleges and fast tracking professionals earning $135,000 satisfy a community unhappy with record numbers?’. Hewett makes the following observations:   

The sharp-edged politics of such high immigration levels has become increasingly dangerous for the government due to community resentment about overstretched public services and a housing crisis, particularly given the impact on soaring rents. The 2.5 per cent increase in Australia’s population over the last year, most of it due to immigration, is also adding to demand in the economy, complicating the efforts of the Reserve Bank to curb inflation.

To be fair, I should point out the AFR ran an editorial the same day insisting that there was ‘No populist overreaction against immigration’ and that “while talking up limiting overseas arrivals, Labour has largely maintained a demand-driven temporary skilled worker program”.

And that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?

Are elites fair dinkum about wanting to bring down unsustainably high levels of immigration, or are they just engaging in a shell game to attempt to take the edge of voter rage? Rage that could contribute to Albo joining the ever-swelling ranks of one-term, or less-than-one-term, PMs.

While I agree with her on little else, I’ve long respected Judith Sloan for banging the drum about Australia’s unsustainably high immigration levels and the recklessness of elites in overriding the wishes of the masses. So, I was crestfallen to see her take on this week’s events was entitled ‘Labor’s migrant ‘reset’ a triumph of smoke and mirrors politics’. The money quote:

The minister reveals that the overall impact of her policy changes across four years will be less than 200,000 fewer migrants – a very marginal reduction under the circumstances.

Let’s not waste this crisis
What if Sloan’s analysis is correct and Australian elites, political and otherwise, aren’t sincere about fixing Australia’s broken immigration system? In that case, there’s no reason to imagine Australia won’t soon be experiencing the same foreboding political convulsions playing out in almost every other nation that accepts lots of migrants.

In this season of goodwill to all men, I’m hoping Australian elites have now woken up and are genuinely committed to pulling back from the brink before shit gets real. For any waverers among the nation’s movers and shakers, I will end by posing the following two questions:

(1)   Will it benefit your bottom line if there’s a Brexit-level reaction against immigration? Possibly one that results in a total freeze on immigration for a prolonged period?

(2)   Do you want Peter Dutton to become PM? And will you feel satisfied if your open-borders virtue signalling ultimately results in the election of an ‘Australian Trump’ who makes Dutton look like a blue-haired Social Justice Warrior?