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Don't demonise foreign workers with spurious statistics.
Carla Wilshire, CEO of the Migration Council of Australia has accused Monash University professor Dr Bob Birrell of misguiding the Australian public on the immigration debate by touting “incomplete and mistaken’ analysis based on “spurious numbers”
Bob Birrell, who unfortunately is regularly quoted as an expert on immigration policy by the tabloids has in effect made simplistic assertions based on wrong numbers which in effect misguides the immigration debate by pointing to migrants as a key cause of Australia’s unemployment woes.
‘Work such as Dr Birrell’s – a rejection of immigration based on spurious numbers – crowds out space for the questions we should be asking on immigration policy. How does this global agenda relate to Australia? How does immigration and inequality interact here in Australia? What role can Australian immigration play in global development? These questions will define Australia’s immigration policies of the 21st century. It’s time to start thinking seriously about them,” Carla Wilshre wrote in The Age.
“Birrell’s analysis ignores the effect of migrants and Australians who leave the labour market. By taking apples from oranges, Birrell’s research overestimates the number of new migrants in new jobs. Indeed at a rough estimate, around 50 per cent of new arrivals will end up in newly created jobs, not the 95 per cent he claims.” writes Carla Wilshire in The Age.
“More troubling, Birrell chooses to ignore the dynamic effects of the labour market. The assumption that there are only so many jobs to go around has been roundly rejected. Labour economists have long known the number of jobs is not fixed. According to Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, this lump of labour fallacy “encourages fatalism” and “feeds protectionism”. The trouble with promoting such notions is that policy-makers stop thinking about ways to create jobs. Australia’s immigration system is one of the few programs in the developed world that accounts for this. Our skilled migration program is increasingly driven by employers and not hand-picked by government.” writes Ms Wilshire.
Ms Wilshire notes that the OECD research suggests migrants to Australia raise the wages of low-skilled jobs (nber.org/papers/w16646). At the margins, this helps mitigate the pernicious effects of income inequality. Today, as shown by ANU economics professor Bob Gregory, non-English speaking migrants begin their interaction in the labour market via part-time work instead of unemployment, as occurred in the 1980s (iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers/viewAbstract?dp_id=8061).
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