Professor Fethi Mansouri: The immigration debate

360info

While most Australians have a favourable view of our multicultural society, anti-immigration voices are often the loudest and can dominate the political debate. Far from undermining the nation, immigration has been a cornerstone of Australia's economic prosperity and social fabric.  Professor Fethi Mansouri, a Deakin Distinguished Professor and founding Director of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, sat down wth 360info Commissioning Editor Tom Wharton to discuss the debate that surrounds immigration in Australia.

Transcript

00:00Fethi, the immigration debate feels highly polarised in Australia right now.

00:04Has it always been so?

00:05There's always interest in how many migrants we take.

00:09Are we taking too many?

00:10Are we taking too few?

00:11Do we have the right policy settings to welcome migrants?

00:15What kind of migrants?

00:16What kind of visa categories?

00:18Where are they coming from?

00:20Will they fit?

00:21Will they cause any undesired impacts on society, whether socially, economically, politically,

00:27even environmentally?

00:29Immigration, and rightly so, needs to be subject to public debate.

00:33Unfortunately, what tends to happen at times is that we don't debate immigration in a logical,

00:39considered manner.

00:40We tend to be debating it on the basis of a lot of disinformation, on the basis of a

00:44lot of myths about immigration.

00:47And therefore, people form opinions about immigration in ways that do not reflect facts.

00:52There's no such magical metric, if you like, in terms of numbers of migration.

00:57By and large, I think Australia has very much had the right formula.

01:02And if you look at the history of migrant intakes in Australia over many, many years,

01:06it has been fairly stable.

01:08The exception being the COVID years.

01:10We had a very significant downward decrease.

01:14And then following that, we had what many people refer to as a surge in migration, which

01:20again, is really misunderstood.

01:22People think of migration as simply people who come here on permanent visas to settle

01:27forever.

01:29But if you look at the data that we have, probably the largest component of our migration

01:33program is what we call temporary arrivals.

01:36So that's people who are either international students, or working holidaymakers, or sometimes

01:42seasoned workers.

01:44Populations grow as a result of two things, either natural births or immigration.

01:48In the last few years, immigration has become a contributor to that growth to the point

01:54of just under 54%, I think.

01:57Which shows you the importance of immigration, that if we stop having a proactive and a very

02:02carefully designed immigration program, then what will happen is our population will start

02:08to decline.

02:09There is already a huge crisis globally in terms of aging populations.

02:12You see that in Europe, countries like Italy, you see it in Asia, countries like Japan.

02:17And what happens there is that when your population is aging, you don't have enough

02:22in the labor market to support those aging citizens.

02:25You don't have enough taxpayers to generate the wealth that's required to provide those

02:30key services.

02:31So we must always have a population growth that is positive, and that is able to support

02:38the needs of the larger population.

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