The Coalition’s migration policy rests on a series of false premises

Following months of discussions and partial announcements, Liberal leader Angus Taylor has unveiled the Coalition’s migration policy, including the “biggest cut to immigration in the history of this country”. One Nation and the government got in first, announcing their plans last month.

If elected in 2028, the Coalition has pledged to cut net overseas migration (called “NOM”) to 100,000 annually in their first two years of government. Currently, annual NOM is around 292,000.

The Coalition’s plan would also see a crackdown on visa-hopping, the abolition of temporary graduate visas and the number of new arrivals capped by housing approvals – a measure the party had announced previously.

On the whole, the plan is based on a series of false or highly questionable premises. Let’s break down five of them.

Myth 1: Labor has ‘lost control’ of migration

The policy is based on the false premise that Labor has lost control of migration.

Migration globally has been unusually volatile since the pandemic.

But that pattern has been repeated across much of the rich world. Has the Australian Labor government also lost control of migration in Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, the Netherlands and Estonia?

Clearly that makes no sense. Yet those countries have experienced broadly similar post-pandemic migration patterns.

So this is not simply a story of one government “losing control”. It is a story of migration systems still working through the consequences of an extraordinary global shock.

Myth 2: changing NOM will fix the problem

The Coalition’s policy is also based on the premise that a much lower net overseas migration target will fix the situation.

Net Overseas Migration, or NOM, is a rough measure of overall migration, but it can be confusing because it’s calculated by subtracting departures from arrivals.

That means NOM can rise in two ways: because arrivals increase, or because departures decrease.

Most people assume Australia’s high NOM since the pandemic has primarily been caused by more people arriving.

That is misleading. The main contribution to unusually high NOM has instead been unusually low departures.

We have had low departures because, like other rich countries, Australia granted extensions and relaxations to temporary visas during the pandemic. The effects of those changes have not yet fully worked their way through the migration system. Some will take years to unwind.

These measures began under the Coalition and some were continued or extended under Labor. Finger-pointing doesn’t get us very far.

Under a NOM target, it doesn’t matter whether governments reduce arrivals or increase departures: either approach can bring the headline number down. The problem is that only one of those approaches directly addresses the current distortion.

If we cut arrivals to solve what is substantially a departures problem, we risk swallowing the spider to catch the fly. The solution may fail to fix the underlying problem while creating several new ones.

Read more:
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Myth 3: being tough on migration is good politics

The United Kingdom pursued a migration crackdown in the years leading up to the Brexit referendum.

Under David Cameron, the Conservatives promised to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands”.

They knew from their own modelling they would miss their own target. But politically, sounding tough on migration served an important purpose.

At the same time, British businesses and universities did not want severe migration caps.

The Conservatives therefore faced an internal contradiction: they needed tough rhetoric to satisfy the anti-globalisation wing of their party while remaining sufficiently open to migration to satisfy business.

There is an obvious parallel here with the tensions between sections of Australia’s business community and parties such as One Nation.

When the Conservatives repeatedly missed their promised migration targets, however, that failure contributed to a widespread perception government had “lost control” of migration.

That perception became central to the Brexit campaign’s promise to “take back control”.

Most Britons now say Brexit was a mistake. Would Brexit have happened without the politically convenient but misleading net migration targets Cameron adopted? We’ll never know.

But Australia should learn from the experience.

Myth 4: migration and housing have a simple relationship

The Coalition’s policy also rests on a dubious premise about the relationship between migration and housing.

It says it will “cap net overseas migration each year below the number of new homes completed”.

But what exactly does that mean?

It is certainly not the case that every new migrant requires one new house.

The housing needs of migrants depend on where they live, how long they stay, the purpose of their stay, their age and household composition, among many other things. Australia has hundreds of different visa categories and circumstances. Changing the composition of migration can therefore have very different effects from simply changing the headline number.

There is clearly a relationship between migration and housing. But it’s not the simplistic one-to-one relationship the Coalition’s policy implies.

Australia’s current housing crisis has many causes that have accumulated over decades. Migration is one piece of that puzzle, and it operates on both the demand and supply sides of the housing system.

Population growth creates demand for more housing. But Australia will also struggle to overcome its existing housing shortage without migration supplying workers throughout the construction and housing supply chain.

Recent movements in property prices also underline the danger of treating migration as the dominant explanation for everything happening in housing. Housing markets respond to tax settings, interest rates, credit conditions, construction costs, land supply and many other factors.

In a few years, the habit of lumping migration and the housing crisis together as though they were the same problem may look increasingly strange.

Myth 5: signing a ‘values statement’ will keep people safer

Other elements of the Coalition’s migration policy look more like political symbolism than serious migration policy. One example of this is the requirement that new arrivals sign a “values statement” as a binding condition to get a visa.

Requiring migrants to sign a values statement is rather like Facebook asking users to read its terms and conditions. Almost nobody reads such documents carefully, even when they fully intend to follow the rules.

Signing a statement is not what makes someone internalise Australian values. That happens through experience: by living in this country, through adapting to Australian institutions and social norms, and through developing a sense of connection and belonging to local communities.

That process is more likely to occur when newcomers experience a warm welcome, support while adapting and an eventual sense that they belong. It’s less likely when they experience hostility and exclusion.

Consider an example that Liberal leader Angus Taylor has repeatedly raised. Asking Sajid Akram to sign a values statement would not have prevented the Bondi massacre.

To understand acts of this kind, we need to examine what happened after arrival. We need to ask how someone who had lived in Australia for around a quarter of a century, and had an Australian child, could come to feel such violent hatred not only towards Jews but towards the Australian society in which he had built his life.

That is a much harder question than asking somebody to sign a piece of paper. And it’s exactly the kind of question serious migration and integration policy needs to confront.

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Alan Gamlen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.