According to The Australian, July17, 2017, p. 1, demographer Peter McDonald has argued at the Economic and Social Outlook Conference that migrants are not taking jobs away from the Australian-born population. Between 2011 and 2016, employment grew by 730,000 people, and 600,000 of this was migrants who came in the same period. The migrants, mainly young are not in the same labour market as the unemployed, because the unemployed are unskilled, but the migrants, mainly Asians are skilled.
On the contrary, what this means is that positions that could have gone to an Australian-born unemployed, through retraining, will just go to a migrant. We should live in a country where Australian-born get the cream of the jobs, not the crumbs falling from the migrants’ tables. The Australian population is thus becoming deskilled, with migration being taken as a magic solution for the capitalists to get short-term profits, at the expense of nation building. In other words, while McDonald may be from one perspective technically correct, his entire approach begs the question in favour of migration.
