One Nation Proposes Cutting Australia’s Temporary Migrant Population by 750,000

Australia’s One Nation has proposed cutting the country’s temporary migrant population by 750,000 over three years as part of a plan targeting international students, graduate visas and family visas attached to skilled workers.

The opposition party wants Australia to record net-negative migration for three years before imposing a longer-term net overseas migration ceiling of about 130,000 people annually.

Under the plan, student visa numbers would fall to just over 100,000 a year.

Unlawful non-citizens would also be offered a three-month window to leave Australia voluntarily before stronger enforcement measures were introduced.

The numbers make this considerably more than another argument about trimming migration at the margins.

One Nation is proposing deliberately shrinking part of Australia’s migrant population before allowing net migration to resume at a substantially lower level.

The party cannot implement the policy from opposition, and whether cuts on this scale would prove workable is already being fiercely contested.

Labor and business groups have warned that sharply reducing migration could create serious labour shortages across hospitals, aged care, construction, agriculture and regional economies.

Those warnings expose a second argument underneath the dispute over One Nation’s numbers.

Australia has built sectors of its economy around large and continuing inflows of overseas workers.

Reducing those inflows quickly would therefore test not only immigration policy but the workforce model developed alongside it.

The same tension is increasingly visible across Western economies.

High migration adds workers, consumers and economic activity. It can also increase demand for housing, transport, healthcare and other infrastructure, particularly when population growth outpaces new capacity.

Australia’s rapid population growth has made that trade-off increasingly difficult to ignore.

One Nation’s proposal represents one answer: accept the disruption required to reduce migration sharply and force employers and government to adjust.

Its opponents argue the disruption itself could damage essential services and industries already struggling to recruit enough workers.

That does not establish that One Nation’s proposed reduction of 750,000 is economically sustainable.

It does leave governments with an uncomfortable dependency to explain.

If hospitals, aged care, construction and agriculture cannot function without permanently high immigration, Australia has either discovered that mass migration is indispensable – or allowed essential sectors to become structurally dependent on continuously importing labour.

Sources

• ABC News – One Nation migration plan to cut students and migrant worker families
• The Guardian – One Nation’s plan to cut migration by 750,000