Might migration be Albo’s downfall?
There’s a surfeit of vibrant diversity, but a dearth of infrastructure
Britain’s political economy is completely broken. In recent years, under both the Left and Right, we’ve somehow managed to build an economy in which millions of working-age British people have been pushed onto welfare while, like a drug addict, our business and political leaders have become completely hooked on mass immigration, on importing cheap and often low-skilled migrant workers to try and plug the gaps and prop up this broken model.
Professor Matt Goodwin
Some political developments are so unlikely as to be nearly unthinkable.
For instance, you simply don’t expect senior National Party figures to suddenly decry farmers’ knack for privatising their gains while socialising their losses. You don’t foresee the day when a Liberal Party Prime Minister will tell small business owners to stop whinging about the burdens of running a business and to go get a job if it’s all too much for them. Likewise, it’s difficult to envisage a scenario where the ALP announces it’s been far too woke for far too long and is drafting Mark Latham back into the federal leadership. Or a situation where Adam Bandt says nuclear energy will have to be part of the mix if national and international decarbonisation goals are to be met.
Likewise, having everybody from progressive Sydney Morning Herald readers to the flinty economic libertarians at the Institute of Public Affairs demand governments calm down with the mass migration until more infrastructure is built is a turn-up for the books.
Reaping the whirlwind
As I’ve touched on often in these pages, mass migration is pretty much the only issue that now unites both left-wing and right-wing elites. Somewhat inconveniently, it unites them against the non-elite members of their own societies, who’ve long been violently opposed to illegal immigration and, shall we say, not entirely enthusiastic about high levels of legal migration.
(I’ll believe all those surveys showing that 70/80/90/100 per cent of the population is sanguine or even overjoyed about mass migration the second a mainstream politician goes into a campaign promising to significantly increase the migration intake.)
There are two ways you can do immigration – the sustainable way and the sugar-hit way. I’d argue that governments in Australia, and similar nations, used to do it the sustainable way but have been doing it the sugar-hit way in recent decades.
I would further argue that some national governments, and their urgers in the business community, have already paid a heavy price for throwing open the floodgates while skimping on the investments, and dodging the tough political decisions, required to comfortably accommodate a rapidly growing population.
And I would conclude all my arguing by insisting that Albo is playing with fire by inviting 715,000 new Australians to come and make themselves at home over the next couple of years at a time when many old Australians, especially those residing in major cities, are struggling mightily to find affordable housing.
Or often any housing at all.
A nation of immigrants
Paleoconservative Pat Buchanan has a sardonic rejoinder whenever a pro-immigration American solemnly declares, “But we’re a nation of immigrants!”
His stock reply is, “Well, we are now.”
The point he is making is that while the US – like Australia, New Zealand and Canada – has welcomed many millions of migrants over the last couple of centuries, it’s not true that a huge proportion of the population in these nations has always been first-generation migrants.
In fact, between 1921-1965 – when the US was arguably at its zenith – the Americans had their ‘Fuck off, we’re full’ flag unabashedly flying, especially for any would-be Yank who didn’t hail from Northwestern Europe.
As late as the late 1960s, nobody considered it odd that Mexican-American labour leader Cesar Chavez, with the full-throated support of plenty of Mexican-American farmhands, was expressing a Trumpian disdain for the illegal Mexican immigrants who were driving down (already modest) wages. Just like nobody batted an eye when the Eisenhower Administration launched Operation Wetback – yep, that was its official name – in the mid-1950s to expel large numbers of Mexican labourers who had entered the US illegally.
The US abandoned what was essentially a ‘White America’ policy with the passage of the Immigration Nationality Act in 1965. Those inclined to take politicians’ claims about immigration at face value might be interested to know that LBJ stated the Act was “not a revolutionary bill” and “would not affect the lives of millions”. Other prominent figures, most notably Senator Ted Kennedy, also swore blind the Act was no biggie.
"The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants,” Kennedy insisted. “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”
All good then.
While we’re on graphs, here are a couple for the UK and Australia.
(Please note, people both immigrate into and emigrate out of nations. In countries such as Australia and the US, immigrants almost always outnumber emigrants. But the inward and outward flows were more evenly matched in the UK from the end of WWII until the early 1990s. The UK only started welcoming significantly more people than it was farewelling after Tony Blair was elected in 1997.)
Australia
(Source: Wikipedia)
Sustainable vs sugar-hit immigration
This is probably an appropriate juncture to mention I’m the son of a first-generation migrant. When my mother arrived in the Antipodes six decades ago, Australian governments had the quaint notion that if you were going to be welcoming substantial numbers of immigrants every year, it was important to make sure they could readily find a job and a home.
Back then it was also considered the done thing to ensure Australians – both the well-established and recently arrived ones – didn’t have to spend countless hours stuck in traffic jams or waiting to reach the front of the queue at hospital emergency rooms.
Indeed, back in those halcyon Keynesian days, politicians of both the Left and the Right apparently believed they would only be able to maintain what we’d now call their social license to keep importing vast numbers of foreigners if they made sure most native-born and new Australians could live out the Australian dream. (In practice, a secure job that paid enough to facilitate marriage and children, home ownership and a comfortable retirement.)
Among the many exciting discoveries politicians and businesspeople made during the neoliberal era (1979 – 2016) was that you could import migrants – lots and lots of migrants from developing nations with modest expectations* of both their employers and elected representatives – without having to stress about all the other expensive or unpleasant stuff.
· No need to worry about local, state and federal governments heavily subsidising the construction of new housing! Just push all those costs onto property developers, who will, in turn, push them onto homebuyers
· No need for local and state governments to stand up to NIMBYs in the nicer areas, just accept cities rigidly stratified along class lines where most of the migrants (and low-to-middle-income native-borns) end up in the boondocks!
· No need to spend too much on new infrastructure, just sweat the existing assets! After all, if they are out in the boondocks, will anybody important notice or care if roads and hospitals are overstretched?
· No need to do anything clever or complicated to create long-term prosperity! Just keep importing more and more people to “grow the economy”. If you’re really lucky, you might even be able to boast about the recession-free miracle economy you’ve created, where strong population growth all but guarantees GDP growth never dips into the red
Of course, the fact a nation’s economy is growing doesn’t necessarily mean that most of the population is enjoying a better lifestyle than they were back when the economy was smaller.
When my mother arrived in Australia in the early 1960s – when both Australia’s population and economy were much smaller – most Australians could live out the Australian dream. That remained the case well into the 1990s. Likewise, a majority of Americans, Canadians and Kiwis could also live out the American/Canadian/New Zealand dream of relaxed and comfortable home-owning affluence during this time frame.
(As more than one amateur anthropologist has observed, when The Simpsons debuted in 1989 nobody found it a laughable notion that a working-class man could support a wife and three children, own a pleasant suburban house, and still have money left over for things such family holidays and big nights out at Moe’s Tavern.)
Back to business
Whatever their public pronouncements, I’d assume that politicians in many countries were secretly delighted that Covid rendered the migration issue a non-issue for a couple of years. In recent times, centre-left parties have found themselves caught in a pincer movement between their working-class and lower-middle-class supporters, who are (typically) opposed to migration, and their university-educated backers who are (typically) diversity-and-inclusion-loving cosmopolitans.
Lots of lower-income voters have drifted to the Right in recent decades, but even before that happened right-wing voters were more inclined towards nativism. That means centre-right parties have faced their own dilemma – do they respect the wishes of their donor class, or do they pander to the prejudices of their base?
Such calculations have become even more fraught since political, business, media and academic elites were blindsided by Brexit and Trump. And as if 2016 wasn’t horrific enough, elites then had to watch unemployment rates fall to record lows, and real wages start to increase for the first time in recent memory, when migrant flows were paused during the pandemic. (Rather unfortunate outcomes if you’ve spent the last 40 years swearing blind that expanding the labour supply via migration has absolutely no impact on unemployment rates or wages.)
For self-evident reasons, workers like tight labour markets but businesspeople hate them. The business lobby realised it would be counterproductive to put too much pressure on either Albo or ScoMo before the last federal election. But they were always going to strong-arm whoever won the election to open the floodgates ASAP.
Albo has now granted the business lobby’s wish. He’s done this at a time when rent and mortgage payments are skyrocketing all across the country and Sydney and Melbourne – where most of the migrants will presumably end up – are in the midst of severe housing crises.
As flagged, the situation is now so bad that even demographics and institutions that have historically been pro-migration – such as highly educated, broadsheet readers and big-business-funded right-wing think tanks – are hoisting the white flag.
I was bemused to see a recent letters page of the Sydney Morning Herald dominated by dire warnings of the likely consequences of putting out the welcome mat. (As the letters page editor delicately put it, “Many readers were unhappy about such a steep rise in arrivals while Australia has a housing and infrastructure shortage”.)
Likewise, the Ayn Randian Institute of Public Affairs not only recently surveyed Australians about migration, it honestly reported the results of that survey (i.e. 64 per cent of respondents weren’t in favour of a tsunami of immigrants turning up). Even more incredibly, one of the Institute’s muckety-mucks told The Australian (paywalled), “While the federal government has committed to a dramatic expansion to the migrant intake, Australians are calling for their political leaders to ensure there is adequate social and economic infrastructure, as well as local work rules in place.”
I never thought I’d type these words, but the leader of the Labor Party really should start paying attention to the eminently sensible arguments the IPA is making.
*Back in the day, you used to hear a lot about Whinging Poms. I’m yet to hear anyone refer to a Whinging Indian or Chinaman.