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Saturday, 6 September 2025

Immigration Destroys Productivity.

 

One of the most common arguments made for immigration is that, “Yes, there are cultural issues that we need to deal with, but we are all better off in the long run, so stop criticising it you racist …” Or something along those lines. Effectively we are told that immigration is good for the economy, so it is worth the downsides that people observe like crime, cultural integration and other issues.

However, this argument is false and has long known to be false.

For instance MacroBusiness[1] notes that even though Australia’s immigration rate is one of the highest in the world, this has been devastating for our economy rather than good for it,

Source: MacroBusiness.

Immigration was supposed to boost productivity, but it has absolutely destroyed it.

What our immigration system actually does is ever so slightly increase the size of the economic pie (the overall size of the economy) whilst at the same time decreasing everyone’s share of the economic pie. Hence, the economy grows on paper, but Australian’s are worse off per capita. Real income or prosperity effects are in the negative.

Source: Grappysoapbox.

Australian’s are getting poorer and we can all feel it. We are eating out less, going to less places, putting away more money, cutting back on vacations. And so what the government does to stimulate spending is increase the amount of people coming in, which slowly increases the size of the economy, while shrinking everybody’s share in the economy.

It does this for a variety of reasons, but one is because of the actual cost on the economy of having foreigners on the roads and doing jobs that require some degree of local language knowledge, and other cultural knowledge which makes those jobs run as smoothly as possible.

Take this example that Vox Day[2] shared on his blog,

“Today rolled through Nebraska and counted no fewer than 107 CMV accidents between Omaha and Big Springs. I did not get picture of all of them. In fact I didn’t start keeping track until halfway through the state.

“I reached out to Nebraska State Police and they said they responded to 211 CMV accidents in 3 Days, this includes today. I asked them for the crash ratio of foreign to American drivers involved in the accidents and they say that the At Fault percentage for the 3 days are 97% foreign and 3% American… they did not give me nationality of the drivers.

I asked what is the reason for the crash and surprisingly it isn’t speed., it’s the simple fact that many of these drivers are INCAPABLE of driving on snow and ice, don’t leave enough stoping distance, are following too closely and plain panic during minor road scenarios. I am a firm believer that the FMCSA needs to restrict foreigners from being allowed to operate during inclement weather such as snow or ice.

According to the National Insurance Institute, 98% of at fault crashes in a CMV during inclement weather are the fault of a person not from the United States…let that sink in….giving people CDL’s, who are from countries where it doesn’t snow, who have little to no traffic laws & enforcement does not translate to them being safe drivers in America.”[3]

Just something as simple as importing people from arid countries or warmer climates and giving them trucking jobs in a place like Nebraska slows down productivity, because they bring with them a driving style that is unsuitable to their new situation. Then society needs to expend resources on retraining, on accidents, on new workplace health and safety standards, and on cultural awareness training so that employers and emergency responders are aware that they should not talk about this publicly so that the population can be made away of what is happening. This all slows down productivity. 

Consider how many resources are needed in any business that hires people from say 5 different cultural backgrounds all with different languages as their first language. What does this do team dynamics and workplace culture? It adds massive complexity. 

As Vox goes on to say,

“Mass immigration is not “good for the economy” as advertised, much less “necessary for the economy”. To the contrary, it is an absolute nightmare for the economy as well as for the society, as it reduces wages, reduces productivity, and produces a much lower-quality labor force.”[4]

If you can find a public school teacher who will honestly talk about the issue, ask them the difference between teaching a multicultural class with kids from 10 to 20 different countries of origin, and a predominantly Anglo-Celtic class room with kids whose parents have been here for two, three, four or more generations. I have done this. The honest teachers will speak about how much our dropping academic standards are a result of multicultural immigration policies. However, you will struggle to get them to do this publicly.

Economists are well aware of the productivity issues our immigration system causes. To be sure, immigration does not need to cause lower productivity. British settlement of Australia massively increased the economic productivity of this country. Though it severely limited the ability for indigenous Australians to practice their way of life, so it depends on which angle you come from right? But still the way we do immigration destroys productivity. As the e61 Institute notes,

 “At the aggregate level, the research finds:

  • Migrant workers in Australia are more likely to work in lower productivity industries than non-migrant workers.
  • Within industries, migrant workers are more likely to work at lower productivity firms.
  • These patterns have become more prevalent over the course of the 2020s, and do not appear to be offset by an improvement in the link between migrant employment and productivity within firms.”[5]

Immigrants are more likely to work in low productivity roles, and this is getting worse. Have you noticed the explosion in the number of rideshare products and food delivery products being offered? This is because of a massive amount of recent immigration that has produced large amounts of people to take on roles in these fields. This is not a high productivity area of the economy, in fact, these products were mostly stuff we did not even use not that long ago, but suddenly they are everywhere and this has helped to create a massive rise in low productivity jobs. This does not move an economy forward, it simply create low skilled busy work. 

The economists at e61 also note that migrants on special targeted visas do work in higher productivity firms. But this is the minority. The trends are moving in the other direction. Immigration is not increasing Australia’s prosperity. We have not even included the billions of dollars a year that immigrant workers send to their homes countries in our discussion.[6]

As our reliance on immigration increases Australia’s productivity and wealth per person get worse,

A graph of a business AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: MacroBusiness.

This is a decades old problem now,

“Australia’s dependence on population growth to keep economic growth positive has been increasing consistently over the 30 years between 1990 and the last pre-pandemic financial year (2019):

  • From 1990 to 1999, population growth contributed approximately one-third of total economic growth.
  • From 2000 to 2009, population growth contributed approximately one-half of total economic growth.
  • From 2010 to 2019, population growth contributed approximately two-thirds of total economic growth.”[7]

At some point in the nineties governments worked out that instead of having to invest in infrastructure, business and other areas of productivity, they could simply open up the borders and bring in more people to make their economic figures look good, and that is what they have been doing ever since. They are addicted to this policy position. Only, like any addict the effect of their drug is getting less effective with each hit and so they have to keep upping to dose. But as they do this the share of the economic pie gets worse for everyone else, including new immigrants. I’ve personally ministered to homeless people who barely speak English and just got here, and I don’t mean backpackers. We are importing welfare issues every day. 

Immigration does not need to have this effect. A very low and very targeted immigration policy that brings in only necessary skills and talents can have a positive effect on the economy. However, the problem with such a policy is that if some of a thing is good, our politicians think more of a think must be better and that has gotten us to where we are now. A complete reversal of immigration policy is necessary to get Australia out of this economic rut.

Who benefits from our immigration policies? The real estate industry benefits from constant upward pressure on house prices because of high demand. The building industry appears to benefit because of higher wages for builders. However, these higher wages flow on through the economy and make every single job you need a tradesmen for much, much more expensive, driving inflation in many parts of our economy. Home investors benefit, because they have long gotten used to making money from just sitting in the unproductive housing market. This is money that could have been invested in industry or technology. Politicians benefit because the left get their voters and the conservatives keep wages suppressed for the business sector. But everyone else is worse off on average.

What is good though is that there is a growing movement against Australia’s high immigration. People are literally marching in the streets because of it. Which means that more and more Australians are aware of what a con this is. Hopefully information like this can help them be more effective in getting policy changed.  

 

List of References 

[2] For those unaware Vax Day is a trained economist, and is published on the issue.

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