‘What Happens Next?’: Why Do Migrants Matter?

Dr Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?. I’m Dr Susan Carland. In this episode, we’ll be looking at the impact of new policies that will reduce immigration. What happens if we reduce the diversity of our communities? What would we lose? Do we need to worry about a dropping birth rate? Our experts have all the answers.

Sharon Pickering: Hi, my name is Sharon Pickering. I'm a Professor of Criminology at Monash University.

Dr Susan Carland: I want to start by asking you if you think Australia is uncomfortable with diversity.

Sharon Pickering: I think that Australia has somewhat of a Janus face in relation to diversity. I think there are parts of Australia that feel deeply enriched and deeply comfortable, and that we want to be able to talk about that, and celebrate it, and build on it for all the excellence and wonder that it brings. And then at other times we don't want to engage with it, we don't want to think about it. And it brings us a level of discomfort.

And I think that we would like to believe that that's becoming less and less, but what we find often in moments of crisis, we actually have to ask actually, is that diminishing? Is that perhaps creeping back or is that presenting itself in ways that we had not been paying attention to?

Dr Susan Carland: So what do you think migration's done for Australia?

Sharon Pickering: The first thing it's done is, it's put us, I think at the moment, into a deep point of crisis in relation to our relationship with Indigenous Australians and First Nations people. So I think the first thing I would say is that, you know, that really foundational story about a modern Australia sits on an unresolved understanding of what happened in that – what happened in that migration.

But then when you look at – if you chart forward from that very difficult start, there's not a part of Australian life that hasn't been shaped, at an individual level, across our communities, and across the way we live and work. And I think what's really interesting is that we go through parts of our lives thinking that we know what migration looks like. But what we find is relatively quickly, we look in the rear view mirror and we go, “Wow, actually it was more than that. It meant a lot more to us as a nation.” But then I think what we often fail to recognise is the migrations of the moment.

You know, right now with our borders closed, we are really having to face up to how interdependent our lives are with the contours of migration. When we see shops shut, yes, that's about a big thing called the pandemic, but... Where I live – I live quite close to a university campus – every fourth shop is shut on that street because we don't have our international students. We don't have the richness they bring. We don't have the commerce that they bring. We also don't have their labour in many of the places that were – the restaurants, the bars, the cafes – but all kinds of different places there.

And I think had you asked me that question 18 months ago, would I have given you a reference about the little shopping strip that's 30 metres from my front door? No, because I would have attended to a notion of migration that was about, oh, the big cosmopolitan CBD. Actually, it's about our suburbs. It's about our small towns and recognising migration right now, right around us. How does that make us who we are? Unfortunately, I think we often only see it once it's past or once we miss it.

Rebecca Wickes: Hi, I'm Rebecca Wickes. I'm the director of the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre at Monash University.

Dr Susan Carland: Rebecca, what's wrong with how we're thinking about migration in Australia at the moment?

Rebecca Wickes: I think migration is one of the greatest gifts that Australia has in terms of the economic contribution that migration makes, and in terms to the social contributions and the diversity that migration brings. So, to think that migration is something we should be narrowing, reducing, stopping, it's a silly proposition in many respects because we're so entirely dependent on it, and we require it for all aspects of our livelihood. Migration is critical. It's central to who we are.

Dr Susan Carland: So, what could happen if we continue down this path with our reduced migration? We couple that with our declining birth rate, we're losing workers in key areas... What could Australia look like if we keep going in this direction?

Rebecca Wickes: I think we'll lack the innovation that has really characterised Australia for the last several decades in particular. I think we'll look narrow, I think we'll look beige. I think that we will lack the lustre and the cosmopolitanism that I think that diversity brings, especially to our larger cities. We would lose so much innovation and curiosity and creativity.

One of the things I think that makes Australia so unique – I mean, we are one of the most diverse countries in the world – is that diversity brings new ways of thinking about how to be, how to build, how to create, how to develop products, how to market products. Across the range of all of our experiences, diversity, I think, just breeds so much innovation and curiosity. And without that, I think we will be lesser.

Dr Susan Carland: How do you think our relationship with the rest of the world might change with this reduction in immigration?

Rebecca Wickes: If we're thinking about, what would reduced skilled migration look like? Well, that would hurt us tremendously.

If we're thinking about what would reduced refugee intake look like? Well, that probably wouldn't hurt the economy so much, but it would change who we are as a compassionate people, and I think it would make us look like a populous nation who doesn't really care about what's happening in other parts of the globe. So, being a signatory to the UN, we absolutely should continue to receive those migrants, and I think that those are the numbers that have been reduced as a consequence of COVID-19. And in fact, I think that over time we see refugees making such an incredible contribution, especially as entrepreneurs, to Australian society. I hope that we’ll be reversing that.

Dr Susan Carland: Claudio Labanca is an economist who studies the impact of immigration on the labour market. You might be surprised by some of his findings. Let’s hear from Claudio. Claudio Labanca, welcome to the show.

Claudio Labanca: Thank you, Susan.

Dr Susan Carland: You do a lot of research into migration and labour markets. The effect of migration on labour markets. Tell us what are some of the most interesting things you've discovered recently when you look at the interface of those two factors.

Claudio Labanca: I think there are two main facts which researchers in this topic tend to agree on.

The first one is that migration does not have equal impact on all workers in the labour markets. There are some workers that tend to be more impacted by migration, and those are workers which we usually call “low-skilled workers”. And what I mean by low-skilled workers are workers who usually have a low level of education and tend to work in those occupations which do not require specialised knowledge. These workers tend to be, in some settings, negatively affected in terms of employment opportunities and wages by migration.

On the other end, we have “high-skilled workers”, and those are workers who are highly educated and tend to work in occupations that require more specialised knowledge. These workers tend to be either not affected by migration at all, or they tend to be positively affected.

And these positive effects usually come from what we call in labour economics, complementarity in production, meaning that to produce a certain good, you might need different types of labour. And if immigrants provide a certain type of labour and high-skilled natives provide other types of labour, then they can complement each other. The second fact is that even for those workers for which we observe a negative effect of migration – so what I mean by workers here are native workers, native-born workers – even for those workers, these effects tend to last only for a relatively short time period. They tend to dissipate over time.

Dr Susan Carland: So, it sounds like one of the things you're saying is that, that old trope that “the immigrants are coming and taking our jobs”, is actually true in the short term for low-skilled jobs.

Claudio Labanca: That's not always the case, but that's what many studies indeed find. That these effects are localised to some specific types of workers, and that they do not tend to last for long.

Dr Susan Carland: Given Australia is in the relatively unique position of being able to pretty tightly control its immigration in, from an economic point of view, are high levels of immigration a good idea?

Claudio Labanca: We need to differentiate between types of migration. So, there is what we call high-skilled migration and low-skilled migration.

Now, as countries keep growing and develop, and Australia is a well-developed country, the demand for certain, specific types of jobs, those highly specialised, keeps growing, and sometimes the internal supply of these jobs – okay, so, the number of people who can actually perform those jobs – is not high enough to meet that demand. And therefore we need certain types of jobs from abroad. So, when we talk about increasing migration, we need to think really what type of migration we might want to increase also in light of the overall demand and supply.

Dr Susan Carland: This idea of fear, people have a lot of personal fears about migration. One being this idea that migrants take our jobs. Is there any truth to that idea?

Sharon Pickering: No. Most of the bulk of research has been carried out in Australia and around the world has largely disputed that myth. And of course that myth has come heavily out of the US.

And in fact, there's a huge body of evidence that shows quite the reverse – that if you stop migration, entire industries will grind to a halt. And in fact, just an amazing theoretician and contemporary thinker, Saskia Sassen, always ran the thesis, and was able to show all the evidence to support it, that if the US just stopped migration, full-stop – they just stopped migration. And here, particularly, she was talking about migration from Mexico and Latin America – she said basically the United States would stop. And that is similar to what they find in most places around the world.

So what's really interesting about this pandemic, it's giving us a line of sight on things that we suspected previously, but perhaps in terms of the lived experience of ordinary lay folk was not showing up. And that is actually... We're really dependent on the contributions that migrants make across a whole range of sectors. If you think about the university sector, global universities need to draw on the global talent pool to be the best they can be to innovate, to specialise in areas that will have the big breakthroughs.

We can't do that if we're completely cut off, if that migration – that skilled migration – cannot occur. You've seen they've made particular arrangements for temporary seasonal workers to come in, simply to make sure that crops get picked. Now, if migrants were taking Australians’ jobs, we wouldn't be seeing this tightening around hospitality and tourism. We would not be seeing the special arrangements being put in place in order to be able to harvest the fruit bowls of Australia. We wouldn't be seeing the kinds of fear in the eyes of top-performing companies who are not going to be able to attract the global talent for Australia to be home to places like the leading firms, the leading universities.

And so I think we're actually living this at the moment. And I think often in areas like this, the more we can show rather than tell the community, the more convincing that we're going to be.

Marie Segrave: Hi, I'm Marie Segrave. I'm a researcher at Monash with the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre and the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre.

Dr Susan Carland: Marie Segrave, welcome.

Marie Segrave: Thank you.

Dr Susan Carland: What do you think is wrong or not working about the way Australia is thinking about migration?

Marie Segrave: I think there tends to be a focus on what people can do for us. So, there's absolutely a lot of incentive around encouraging people to come who can bring significant wealth, who can come to Australia and perform services for us, be labour in Australia without any pathway to permanency. The seasonal visa is created so that you only ever come and go. Your family can't come. You can never stay. You're never on a pathway to permanency.

All of those kinds of visas are driven to extract things from people, but not to offer very much. And I think this is going to be something that we need to pay pretty careful attention to because conversations around population are driven by the need for us to encourage people to come to Australia. And Australia on the one hand is not a very welcoming place. When we think about visa or migration policy and regulation, some of our attitudes, the ways that we treat asylum seekers, all of those things, send very bad messages.

But I think on the other hand, there's a very different experience for people in communities. And so, I think we do have the ability and the openness to encourage people to come and be a part of the diversity of our cities and our towns, and we benefit from that. I think we only see benefit from that actually in the everyday, but there's an effort to try to control and limit that.

And often, I think, in the space where I work around temporary migration – whether it's to do with people who have been exploited, whether it's trafficking or labour exploitation, or domestic and family violence – there's often a view that the only way to respond to that is to make it difficult for people to come forward as victims because we're suspicious that people will falsely claim in order to remain in Australia. And I think that is a fundamental problem, whether we're talking about modern slavery or we're talking about domestic and family violence, our response should be that this kind of exploitation and abuse shouldn't happen.

People will always falsely claim – whether it's a green card, marriage of convenience – those things happen, but you can actually identify them. I think you can create positive systems that pick up on those things later, as opposed to creating very high bars to be able to access support, which is undoing our commitments to ending abuse and exploitation. They totally undermine those commitments.

Dr Susan Carland: And if Australia continues down that path, if we can continue having that sort of attitude towards any type of migration into Australia, what do we lose? What happens?

Marie Segrave: Well, I think we continue to lose the value of constantly having new people and new ideas and diversity of experience. I think that one of the challenges we have, if we look at the leadership of our country, is not a significant amount of diversity, of experience, of knowledge, of various cultures.

And in many ways, I think COVID has exposed to us in quite a safe way for some of us, what it is to have your life totally disrupted. To have everything that you knew taken away from you. That your life, as it was, is gone. And that's not really the experience of people who've become refugees, but in a small way, it's similar that everything is gone. You still have your home, of course, you're not being made to move, but there's just total disruption to how you live your life and your expectations of what's next.

Dr Susan Carland: Criminologist Rebecca Wickes explains why social inclusion is so important and the impact on all of us if we reduce the diversity of our communities.

Rebecca Wickes: The community can do more. The community wants to do more. When you speak to communities all around Australia, especially communities that are wanting to increase their population, they want humanitarian migrants. They want refugees, they want skilled workers, they want them to come into the regions, they need them. And so there is demand for that. And I feel that we're missing a significant opportunity. One, to be a good and decent nation and to do the right thing for people who are less fortunate than ourselves, but we're also missing opportunities for growth, development, and innovation in so doing.

Dr Susan Carland: Because we are currently at the highest rate of displaced people in the world ever, is that right?

Rebecca Wickes: Yeah, absolutely, and we've been moving in that direction for some time. And I think as we start to see the manifestation of climate change, and as we see the manifestation of populist politics in Western nations, in particular, we'll see that that displacement will only grow. And I really hope that Australia won't be part of that rhetoric, and that we’ll actually be a nation that will warmly receive people and provide them with a chance for a better life.

Dr Susan Carland: Rebecca Wickes, thank you so much for your time today.

Rebecca Wickes: Always a pleasure, Susan.

Dr Susan Carland: That’s it for this episode. We’ll see you next time on What Happens Next? to find the good stuff that’s happening to make our communities more inclusive and diverse – and there’s plenty of it. I’ll catch you next time on What Happens Next?.