By Lisa Macdonald
The bosses' media have been having a field day since the election of the Coalition federal government. Whether the target is the unemployed or Aboriginal people, the formula is much the same: set up a soft target with a story about so-called abuses of the system; demand, in the name of "all decent Australians", that something be done about it; sit back and watch the government's axe come down.
If the noises that have been made recently by the new minister for immigration and multicultural affairs, Philip Ruddock, are any indication, we can expect migrants, non-English speaking background (NESB) migrants in particular, to be the next focus of media beat-ups.
On April 11, Ruddock began a national tour of consultation with migrant groups and the business sector in preparation for a submission to cabinet in May on the future of Australia's immigration programs. Even before this consultation began, Ruddock was flagging changes to government policy which will further the erosion of migrants' and refugees' rights under the previous Labor government.
The Coalition is proposing that immigration be kept at "about" the same level in the "near future", a formulation which is deliberately vague to give "flexibility". Within the total intake of "around" 83,000 general and 15,000 humanitarian migrants, however, the composition is likely to change to include less family reunion and more independent and employer-sponsored entrants.
This reduction in the family reunion category is to be achieved in a number of ways. First, the Coalition wants to implement a probation system under which people applying from overseas to enter as spouses or de factos would have to wait for two years. In 1993-94, spouses made up 58% of the total family migration intake.
It is also proposing to extend the ALP-introduced six-month waiting period before new migrants can receive social security payments to two years. This change would amount to a $616 million cut in welfare expenditure.
In the humanitarian program, the government has signalled that it may abolish the Special Assistance Program, designed for people who do not meet the technical definition of a refugee. "If they're not refugees, their situation is not as demanding", Ruddock told the Daily Telegraph-Mirror on March 29.
In a direct assault on NESB people's ability to migrate to Australia, the government is proposing an increase in the weighting of work skills and English language skills in migrants' applications, and has indicated that higher charges for English language training will probably be introduced. These measures, it says, will lead to a higher overall skill level in the migrant intake.
To ensure that business is able to extract the maximum possible value from these greater skills, the government is examining the use of a contract or bond system to bind migrants to their prospective employers and ensure that entrants targeted for specific jobs "do not end up on welfare". One option is that migrants entering under the Employer Nomination Scheme would have to sign a contact of up to two years. Either party would have the right to sue if the other side failed to abide by the contract.
The fact that a new migrant is highly unlikely to have the means to take an employer who broke a work contract to court, and is even less likely to win in an industrial relations context weighted heavily against workers, means that such contracts would only guarantee the employers their pound of flesh.
If NESB migrants do manage to make it into Australia, life is likely to be harder in future. Already, NESB migrants suffer the highest unemployment rates after Aboriginal people. Despite this, the Coalition plans to cut $25 million from the Adult Migrant Education Program.
Equally draconian is the government's proposal to "encourage" new migrants to stay out of the major cities — where the overwhelming majority of job and educational opportunities, social services and ethnic communities are located — by giving applicants who agree to live in regional areas extra qualifying points — up to five out of the 90 required to gain entrance.
Ruddock told the Australian on March 21 that the government "is not prepared to entertain measures that are coercive, we live in a free country, we don't restrict people's movements". But offering a greater chance of migrating to someone who is probably trying to escape much worse living conditions is a form of coercion in a world divided into haves and have nots. Ruddock has not yet indicated whether and how migrants who settled in regional areas would be bound to stay there, or for how long, or under what conditions, but the potential for isolation and exploitation that this system would create is huge.
Ruddock and his government are trying to justify their proposals on the grounds that there is a "strong community perception that the intake should not increase in times of high unemployment" (the Australian, March 21). This well-worn argument of the right wing was used by Labor throughout its term in office and was given an extra push by the ACTU in mid-1995, when it publicly campaigned for the freezing of immigration levels until unemployment rates were reduced. But this argument misrepresents past and present reality.
Immigration has already been significantly reduced over the past decade. Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs figures reveal that in 1988-89, 124,700 non-humanitarian migrants were accepted. By 1995-96 that figure had been cut by more than a third, to 83,000. The drop was not made up in the humanitarian category, which increased by only 3600 over the same period.
As in the 1940s and '50s, when the immigration program was based on industry's need for unskilled labourers prepared to do the hardest and dirtiest jobs, today's migrants still do. Any doubts that migrants make up the most exploited section of the work force are being dispelled by the current Senate committee investigation into the garment industry, which revealed last week that most of the roughly 300,000 people employed as outworkers are NESB migrant women. These workers are paid as little as $1 per garment.
Despite this, on March 29, the new minister for industry, john moore, axed a $400,000 program to raise the issue of outwork in the general community and to inform outworkers of their rights.
Numerous studies have shown that migrants create at least as many jobs as they take up — even in recessions. The argument that migrants take jobs away from Australian-born workers is contradicted by the fact that in the last three recessions, the unemployment rate of immigrants has risen more quickly than that of the Australian-born, and has fallen more slowly in the recovery period.
The government's move to restrict new migrants' access to unemployment benefits denies the equal right of all people living in Australia who need it to receive state support. It is also absurd, given that Australian Bureau of Statistics data for the period 1990-94 show that, while NESB migrants are over-represented in the ranks of the long-term unemployed, they are not "over-utilisers" of unemployment benefits. The reverse is the case; immigrants are less likely than their Australian-born counterparts to be recipients of Job Search or Newstart allowance.