source : the age
February 27, 2026 — 3:30pm
Worried about Australia’s future prosperity? Our ability to continue to provide high living standards to our children and those who come after us? Me too. More than ever, with the return of the toxic game of blaming migrants for whatever is wrong this week.
This is a game that apparently wins polling numbers, and certainly wins media airtime, but pity the losers – who are all of us. Even those who are ardently anti-immigration. The world that you are being sold – where migrants are shut out, or they’re here but treated badly – will be a poorer, harder world for you, too.
Let’s go back to some basics. Economic growth per person has slowed across the developed world, with a drop in “dynamism” that has many theorised reasons and one unavoidable one.
In Australia, we are rich and ageing. That means high demand and higher expectations for labour-intensive services – most notably healthcare, where usage escalates dramatically the older people are. That means less dynamism in the economy – fewer new ideas and fewer new businesses. And that means fewer people of traditional working age relative to those who have aged out of the workforce.
Like a person, a population can age poorly or well. To date, one thing that has enabled Australia to age as gracefully, as the Baby Boomers have aged into retirement, is immigration.
Immigration is Australia’s great economic strength. Here, we have increased our population through a mix of babies and migrants, at scale and successfully, for 75 years.
This isn’t just about some abstract number of people added to our population. Migrants are more skilled than those born in Australia, more likely to work full-time, and they pay more in tax than they take in services and transfers over their lifetimes. The evidence shows skilled migration has boosted productivity and created jobs around Australia, with more rapid wage growth for regions with higher numbers.
To boost productivity – to boost living standards – Australia needs to get closer to the global frontier of knowledge, ideas and practices. And you know how you can do that? With migrants – who bring their education and experience to this small population at the end of the world. And as technology develops ever more rapidly, our chance to make the most of it and build our own grows with our ability to attract the world’s best and brightest.
This isn’t a speculative economic strategy. One of the major drivers of the United States’ economic dynamism in the 20th century was its place – particularly its universities – as a magnet for motivated and talented people from all over the world to come together.
But this isn’t only or mainly about economics. The contribution of migration to this country is not just positive, it is formative. Migrants are who we are. It has enabled us to be a country that – while we have our problems – is more peaceful, affluent and less unequal than many of our peers and neighbours. It is the fabric of our society and our values, with strong majorities of Australians approving of the role of immigration in our economic and culture.
More than half of Australians today were either born overseas or have a parent who was born overseas. We live in an integrated way in one of the most urbanised populations on the planet. We go to school together, we work in diverse workplaces, we fall in love, we have children with blended backgrounds. We eat each other’s traditional food, enjoy each other’s festivals. Migrants contribute to communities across this country in myriad, unpaid ways.
Central to this success story have been two things. First, our migration policy is non-discriminatory – that is, we do not apply bigoted notions of superior races, nor do we judge religious belief or lack thereof. Second, Australia was not a “guest-worker” country, unlike many of our peers in Europe. Migrants to Australia were seen as new Australians, with access to the same protections and services. This avoided a two-tier society and it protected wages and working conditions for everyone.
Both of these features are under strain today. Migrants find themselves more likely to be working below their skill level, waiting years for their qualifications to be recognised, facing a longer, more expensive road to achieve permanency, and therefore citizenship, and even then an extended waiting period for access to a safety net.
Our migration system should be improved to produce better outcomes from the limited number of places: simplifying the points test to select the highest-skilled migrants, focusing on medium-term needs, fixing duplicative and cumbersome skills recognition, broadening access to settlement services, and restoring permanency to the centre of the migration program.
Instead, extreme voices cynically target minority ethnic groups as inferior, and more mainstream voices are happy to flirt with global far-right language of “mass migration” or “uncontrolled migration” (both demonstrably untrue of Australia), or peddle the falsehood that big cuts to migration will make Australia better off.
A note of caution before we let this rank opportunism get any more air: the children of migrants of all colours and creeds are as Australian as anyone else. In schools across this country there are children whose parents moved to Australia before or soon after their birth, and who know no other country as home.
When political opportunists come for migrants, it is these kids who bear the scars, who are told they are not Australian, or that their value is to be measured by some yardstick, while their peers of different backgrounds matter more, deserve more.
Our leaders would be wise to think of these kids when choosing their words – for it is here they will leave a lasting legacy.
Dr Aruna Sathanapally is chief executive of the Grattan Institute.
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