By Peter Boyle
Recent attacks on immigration assert that it is costing "the taxpayer" large amounts of money and jobs while living standards are falling and unemployment is above 10% and rising. It appeals at an apparently "non-ideological" level to the large numbers of people who are hurting under the international capitalist recession.
Stephen Rimmer, an economist employed by the federal government's Industry Commission, led the charge on the "cost" argument when he published a monograph, The Cost of Multiculturalism, in June 1991. He claimed that "multiculturalism" costs $7 billion a year, a figure that proved very rubbery but nevertheless was repeated uncritically in the mass media. "Multiculturalism serves as a cloak for the undeclared policy of Asianisation", argued Rimmer.
He was followed by Monash sociologist Robert Birrell, who argued in a paper, "Immigration and the Recession", that non-English speaking migrants who arrived in Australia since 1986 will cost $340 million in unemployment benefits in 1991-92.
But when the results of halving immigration numbers were projected by an Access Economics computer model by academic Robert Ackland, it was found that this would "impede Australia's recovery from the recession". It would reduce growth of gross domestic product and increase the $A value of the foreign debt.
This makes a joke of Australian Democrat leader Senator John Coulter's recent allegation that the cost of immigration is $9 billion a year, which could be better used to repay the foreign debt.
The National Population Council's final report on Population Issues and Australia's Future (whose panel of reporters included Birrell and the Australian Conservation Foundation's Philip Toyne) confirmed what other studies have found, namely that immigration has a positive or at worst neutral impact on the economy. But it also concluded:
"A genuine problem is instead that the existing funding system for the infrastructure and community services associated with growing population may produce inadequate and inequitable supply. These inadequacies and inequities should be addressed directly since they apply for any population growth and not just that deriving from immigration" [emphasis in original].
In other words, the arguments about immigration "costing" through welfare or extra infrastructure blame migrants for the failure of state and federal governments to tackle the real problems facing this society.
The call for a more skills-based migrant entry is a demand that Australia transfer a greater proportion of the costs of training its population onto the source countries of migrants. It fits neatly into the economic "rationalism" that has dictated cuts in social spending and job shedding in Australia over the last decade.