No, immigration isn’t 'out of control', grievance politics just needs a scapegoat

Grievance politics is having a real moment in Australia and around the world. There is no shortage of people happy to exploit others and sell them easy answers. And one of the most common scapegoats has always been foreigners.

We hear a constant drone of right-wing politicians and pundits, accompanied by a backing track from social media rage baiters about how ‘immigration is out of control’. But recently released data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) exposes this for the nonsense it is.

The pandemic had an extraordinary effect on Australia’s population. This wobble in the data is useful for people keen to pick up votes on the back of skewed statistics.

Grievance politics needs a villain. It needs a group to blame for all the problems people face. And it needs to be a group with very little political power, so they can’t fight back. Not for the first time, immigrants are the scapegoat.

The problem with scapegoating isn’t just that it hurts a group of people by blaming them for problems that they had nothing to do with; it also hurts everyone else. When falsely pinning blame on immigrants, politicians aren’t addressing the real cause of problems for everyday Australians. Even if you don’t care about the scapegoats, this will also hurt you.

To show why immigration is not the problem, let’s step back and look at what has been happening to the population over the last 12 years. This includes the disruption in the six years since the pandemic but also the six years before the pandemic.

The pandemic created one of the largest upheavals to population growth in living memory. Its effects on population growth had two distinct phases. When the pandemic began, the borders were shut, and migration and population growth came to a shuddering halt.

The shutdowns made work scarce and the government’s assistance packages did not support visa-holders. They couldn’t go to work, so they had no access to income, and they couldn’t access support. \

As a result, most visa holders choose to leave the country. The same occurred for international students. Classes went online and it no longer mattered if your university was around the corner or on the other side of the world. With so many people leaving the country, the Australian population fell in the second half of 2020. This was an almost unprecedented occurrence.

When the borders reopened this all reversed. Visa holders, including international students, came back to Australia and for a time the population grew at rates well above the long-run average.

Opportunists point to this rapid growth in population to claim that Australia’s migration system and population are out of control.

But what is really happening?

Let’s look at the annualised growth of the estimated residential population (ERP). The ERP is the ABS’s estimate for how many people live in Australia regardless of nationality, citizenship, or visa status. The only people excluded from this count who usually live in Australia are foreign diplomats. The growth rate of the ERP over the last 12 years shows both phases of the pandemic. It shows the initial crash in the growth rate in 2020 and the bounce back after the boarders were opened. The graph also shows the average growth rate for the six years before the pandemic. Over the last year, it appears that actual population growth has stabilised to the pre-pandemic rate.

But what many people will want to know is whether this upheaval had any long-term impact on total population. That is, did the drop in population growth match the subsequent boom? Or has the bounce back been even bigger, meaning Australia now has a larger population than it would have had if the pandemic hadn’t happened?

We can check this by looking at the average growth rate in the population for the six years before the pandemic and then calculate what the population would have been if it had continued to grow at that rate for the six years after 2020. The dotted orange line in the graph shows us what the population could have been if the pandemic had never happened. The blue line is the actual population.

We can see that before 2020, the actual population and the average growth population are almost identical because they are both growing at the same rate. After 2020, the actual population drops below the average growth population when the borders were shut. It then picks up after the borders open and almost catches up, before they both start increasing at about the same rate.

While the actual population is slightly below the average growth population, they are so close that it makes little difference. This means that the dip in the population caused by the pandemic has been offset by the bounce back after the pandemic.

This makes sense. There have been no major changes to Australia’s migration laws since before the pandemic that would have caused a massive change to our population. After the disruption of the pandemic, there is no reason why things would not revert to pre-pandemic rates.

We now know that there has been no long-term impact on Australia’s population because of the pandemic. But that is not the same as saying that the long-run growth rate is the right one. If you thought the population was growing too quickly before the pandemic, then you will probably think it is still growing too quickly now that it has settled back down to the old rate of growth.

Anyone who says that immigration is out of control is either misrepresenting the facts or has been deceived by others. Be particularly suspicious of people pointing to population increases in 2023, without giving the context of why they were so high.

Another common claim is to link immigration to housing affordability. But housing affordability was a problem long before the recent bounce back in population.

Immigration can’t be the cause of the housing affordability crisis because housing has been keeping up with population. Over the last 10 years, the population has increased by 16%, but the number of homes has increased by 19%. Homes are increasing faster than the population.

Australia does have big problems. People are genuinely hurting. But blaming scapegoats isn’t going to change that. They are just going to delay real solutions, and that will make things worse for everyone.

Matt Grudnoff is a senior economist at the Australia Institute