Saying
immigration makes us all poorer sounds counterintuitive to many Australians for
several reasons. For one many Australians are immigrants or the children of
immigrants and we have one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Australia’s resources and inbuilt wealth were unlocked both by British
Colonialism and the ensuing British immigration to Australia in its early years
and this combination turned Australia from a primitive tribal based land into
one of the world’s leading per-capita economies. But even more so this is the case because Australians are constantly told that immigration will improve our
nation and that we are racist to think other otherwise. This is consistent in
the media and politics in Australia, any opposition to immigration is framed as
racism and a simple “backward hick” resistance to change.
But this is
wrong. Firstly comparing colonization to immigration is a mistake. There is a
very big difference between settling in a primitive country and developing it,
compared to immigrating to a fully developed society with an advanced culture. The
kind of people that do the former are rarely the same as those that do the
latter, and the kind of things they are looking for in the new society are very
different.
Plus immigration
is actually making us poorer and the data proves it. I will get to that in a
moment, but this is not hard to conceptualize theoretically. Immigration
suppresses wages by increasing competition for jobs and by importing people
from poorer countries with lower expectations of what they could or should be
earning. This is why the business sector and the centre right political parties
strongly lobby for high immigration, they love suppressing the cost of labour,
whether skilled or unskilled. Immigration then has the flow on effect of
increasing asset prices, especially for homes, which locks Australians into a
double negative effect, because our income potential is suppressed by the very
thing which is driving up the cost of buying or renting a home. We have less
and need to pay more for things that our parents had more and paid far less for.
Then there is the effect immigration has on infrastructure which cannot keep up
with Australia’s high rate of immigration, and therefore higher taxes are
needed for more infrastructure that will be behind the eight-ball even before
it is finished, because so many people are moving here. This has quality of
life impacts, because people already have to live far away from the major
centres of work because of the cost of housing, but now they have to deal with
getting to work on roads that cannot handle the traffic using them. We are
therefore becoming objectively poorer in multiple ways.
Then there
is the decline in productivity caused by importing people from vastly different
cultures. The resources which are required to teach new immigrants English, to retrain
them according to the Australian standards for their industry, and then deal
with all of the cultural issues in the workplace that stem from having a
multicultural workforce create a massive productivity drain on companies and
individuals. How can they not? Compare classroom school grades between schools
with a high proportion of multicultural immigrants to relatively monoculture
classrooms and you will see the same issues. Teachers must spend extra time
working with kids whose languages and cultures are highly diverse, it’s just a
reality. The only impact this can have on productivity is driving it down, because so many
resources which were once poured into making things, completing projects and
doing the work are now directed towards just getting the workforce into the
right shape to do the work. From multiple angles it is very easy to deduce the
negative impacts of immigration on the workforce and therefore on the economy.
And we have not covered all of them in this thought experiment, only some of
the most prominent.
Therefore,
we should not be surprised that the data bears this out, as Macrobusiness explains,
“Australia’s economic performance in the decade before the
pandemic was, on many measures, the worst in 60 years”, notes Minack.
“Per capita GDP growth was low, productivity growth tepid,
real wages were stagnant, and housing increasingly unaffordable. There were
many reasons for the mess, but the most important was a giant capital-to-labour
switch: Australia relied on increasing labour supply, rather than increasing
investment, to drive growth”.
“Australia’s population-led growth model was a demonstrable
failure in the 15 years prior to the pandemic. Remarkably, the country now
seems to be doubling down on the same strategy. The result, unsurprisingly, is
likely to be more of the same”, warns Minack.
Minack’s assessment mirrors many of the same arguments that I
have made about Australia’s mass immigration policy over the past decade (most
recently this month).
This policy is a key reason why Australia recorded the
world’s worst decline in real per capita household disposable income last
financial year, according to an analysis of OECD data by The AFR’s Michael
Read:…”[1]
I recommend
reading the whole article and examining the charts they share as well. Australia is leading the developed world in losing its standard of living. The key
to a successful economy is not how many workers you have, but how much your workers can make and how much what they make is worth and how this in turn
creates a growing cycle of investment in new businesses and wealth. Basing an economic
model on just increasing the work force is counterproductive, more workers does
not mean more work will get done. The quality and focus of your workforce is
far more important.
If you think
of the economy like a pie with a moderate rate of growth (that is the pie is
consistently getting larger by let’s say 1-3%) then what has been happening in
Australia is that we have been growing the amount of slices in the pie at a far
faster rate than the rate that the pie itself has been growing. And what is
worse is that the growth of the pie is mostly dependent on increasing those
slices anyway. So, you have a situation where the means of growth is actually
making the average Australian poorer, because their share of the pie is decreasing,
but the government is looking at all the extra slices and saying, “See! The pie is growing under our watch.” In other words, in real terms, as far as the average
Australian is concerned we have been declining economically, but the overall
size of the pie is larger, slightly, every year, so the politicians claim they
are successfully growing the economy.
It is a
Ponzi scheme. The person at the top of the pyramid keeps getting richer as long as new levels
are being added to the bottom. Yes, I know I just changed metaphors but this one
is just as apt. Because our economic system is based on the very same kind of Ponzi
scheme as a pyramid scheme: just keep adding people and the people higher up
will make the money. That's Australia's economic strategy. It's ridiculous.
The way that
the Australian government has managed the economy in the last several decades
is by growing the economy through the very means that is making most
Australians poorer and causing people to
increasingly start to tread water. It’s like living on a junk food diet,
you will grow, and be fed, but not in healthy or helpful ways and really you
are setting yourself up for the risks of various different cancers rather than
true and genuine health. This is all bound to collapse, when I cannot say, but
eventually this is going to break. Probably when the bi-furcation of the world
economy is complete, then Australia will become less attractive to immigrants
who side with the BRICS[2]
nations, but even then, it is possible our nation will eventually change sides
to Asia[3].
We will have to wait and see.
Australians
are getting poorer because of the very thing that the leaders of this country
believe is necessary to keep the economy growing, because they obviously don’t
have the will power or the knowledge to encourage economic growth in any other
way. I also think there are more nefarious reasons because our governments
always seem to jump onboard the various globalist agendas of the world elites.
There is also the fact that immigrants by nature want to transform their new
country to be like their old country, by bringing more of their kinsmen in and
transforming the laws of the new nation to better reflect their values, culture
and traditions. Many Australian residents are foreigners and there is
therefore a natural inclination on their behalf to want to reshape their new home. As I often
point out British settlers did not become indigenous Australians, they made
Australia like Britain but with nice beaches and a tan.
Either way,
no one can deny the negative impacts of immigration on our way of life and be honest about it. People
who would have disagreed with me once before, are now seeing the daily effects
of this when they seek to get a new rental or buy a home. This problem has a
simple solution, immigration needs to be paused as soon as possible. Until that
happens the trajectory is clear, we are heading towards serfdom under a
shrinking pool of national and foreign elites…which might actually be their
goal. For how many decades does the government have to do obviously damaging
policies before it becomes clear that they are doing precisely what they intend
to do?
List of
References
[1] Leith
van Onselen, 2023, https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2023/11/australia-plunges-down-developed-country-rankings/
[2]
The countries allied economically with Brazil, China, Russia, India, South
Africa and others.
[3]
Economically there is no reason why we should not be friendly with our largest
trading partner. Of course geo-politically Australia is being pulled by other
forces.
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