The economic effects of migration
The most coherent, energetic and persistent anti-migrationists are the group around Robert Birrell and Katharine Betts at Monash University, who tend to make the ideological running for most other opponents of migration.
The really rabid xenophobes, such as Pauline Hanson, feed off their arguments. The Monash group has two quite contradictory lines in relation to the economic effects of migration.
One line of argument, which they share with people such as Ted Trainer, is a general, currently rather popular, polemic against the whole idea of economic growth. They argue that economic growth, which migration fuels, is bad for us.
Well, there’s a tiny element of truth in this line of argument. Some economic growth is bad and should be fought on a case by case basis. For instance, woodchipping of old growth forests is quite antipathetic to the interests of the human race and the environment. Much economic growth, however, while it should be made more civilised and reorganised in a rational way, is desirable from the point of view of most humans on the planet, who don’t yet have sufficient access to all kinds of material goods to make their life better.
The arguments of deep ecologists such as Ted Trainer against all economic growth are, in practice, hostile to the aspirations of most human beings for substantial improvements to their conditions of life. The use of this kind of argument by comfortable, affluent anti-migration academics in a rich, first-world country such as Australia is thoroughly repellant, and I’m fascinated that the Monash group has used that kind of argument in the six or seven books that I’ve collected of their published work, as far back as 1977.
The other main line of argument is more or less the opposite of the first one. It is that migration is bad for the economy because it diverts resources from unstated better uses to the construction of infrastructure for the migrants, and that much of this labour is used in a manufacturing economy that is being scaled down anyway because of globalisation and the destruction of tariff barriers (which the Monash group explicitly applauds).
They even argue that a bad feature of migration is that some resources are diverted to infrastructure for the new migrants, reducing the average productivity of labour. Nevertheless, interests such as the housing industry and manufacturing capitalists that want to sell their goods, are attacked for having a vested interest in migration.
Viewed in any sensible or even-handed way, these economic attacks on migration tend to undermine and contradict each other, but for these people anything goes in the war against migration. As one line of economic their argument after another is demolished by changing circumstances (almost none of their economic predictions in relation to migration have eventuated) the Birrell group works very hard to come up with a new economic angle against migration.
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There is now a fairly considerable body of concrete analysis and description of the economic effects of migration, the most recent example of which is the work of Bruce Chapman in Canberra. The general conclusion of almost all economists, conservative or left-wing, with a few exceptions, is that migration is either more or less neutral in relation to economic effects or, in most circumstances, a positive stimulus to economic development and a positive factor in reducing unemployment.
Empirically, this would certainly seem to be the case. Cities in Australia such as Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, which are hot-spots for migration, are also at the lower end of the unemployment statistics. Cities such as Melbourne, Newcastle, Adelaide and Hobart, which are stagnant as far as recent migration is concerned, are at the higher end of the unemployment statistics.
There is another subtle economic point about substantial, diverse migration. One of the factors that helped Australia get the Olympic Games was the presence in Australia of substantial migrant communities from almost everywhere on earth, and the Games will give Australia a considerable economic boost, both before and after, for obvious reasons.
A similar point applies to trade, particularly with Asia. The presence of energetic trading communities from different countries contributes to trade with those countries. Again, a number of firms trading mainly in Asia have chosen to use Sydney as a location for their call centres and card centres because Sydney has a large reservoir of skilled labour speaking and writing just about every language on earth.
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