Australia announced plans on Monday to reduce the number of immigrants entering the nation in an effort to quell a post-pandemic boom and allay voter ire over the country’s growing cost of living.
The country’s center-left Labor government unveiled a number of policies that would make it more difficult for anybody to enter, including higher income levels and stricter English language proficiency criteria for international students and low-skilled workers.
After years of border closures, some 500,000 temporary migrants arrived in the nation in the past year. This is known as the post-pandemic boom.
The government believes its reforms — along with short-term trends — will bring the number closer to 250,000 in 2024-2025.
“We are going to make sure that we bring numbers back under control,” said Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, sketching parts of a 100-page strategy seen by AFP.
Despite near-record employment rates, Australians are increasingly frustrated at soaring prices and an eye-watering real estate market.
Conservative think tank the Grattan Institute is among those who have linked high levels of immigration to rising rental and other costs.
O’Neil stressed that immigration was essential to Australia’s prosperity, describing foreign workers as the “special sauce” that had made Australia great.
“Virtually everything that we have done as a country that’s truly mattered has involved asking the best and brightest from around the world to come and try to help us,” she said.
But nodding to growing public unease, she also vowed to “build a better-planned system around essential things like housing”.
Her government said on Sunday that it will drastically raise the costs charged to foreigners who purchase homes only to abandon them.
Certain parts of Sydney and Melbourne have seen a 25% increase in rental costs in the past 12 months.
Immigration historian Rachel Stevens of Australian Catholic University stated that the changes to immigration were “as much about politics as policy”.
She told AFP that it was false and ran the risk of scapegoating the 2.2 million individuals who have temporary visas by associating the rising expense of living with migration.
“They are separate things entirely,” she said, citing the impact of rising interest rates and surging markets after Covid lockdowns, among other factors.
“Whenever there is a scarcity of a resource, whether it’s jobs or housing, it’s a very common reaction for people in many countries to blame immigrants.”
Stevens suggested that the Labor government may have one eye on the conservative opposition’s rising poll numbers and elections expected by 2025.
“It polls well”, she said, but “it’s really dangerous and quite reckless to put it all on migrants”.
