Outlook Conference: Let market control skilled migrants, say experts

The federal government should be less prescriptive about Australia’s skilled migration program, allowing it to be shaped by free-market forces rather than quotas, an immigration expert says.

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles told the conference the increased migration intake was a part of the government’s push to promote a larger share of permanent migrants. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

The federal government should be less prescriptive about Australia’s skilled migration program, allowing it to be shaped by free-market forces rather than quotas for specific professions, according to a key immigration expert.

Professor Roger Wilkins, Deputy Director of the Melbourne Institute, said the government should stop trying to “centrally-plan” skilled immigration outcomes by specifying the numbers of health, IT or infrastructure workers it wants.

“(We should) get rid of the skilled migration occupation list,” Professor Wilkins told The Australian-Melbourne Institute Outlook conference.

“This is really just the government trying to centrally-plan and we know how badly that works when governments try to centrally-plan things. We should just let markets work a lot more than we do.”

Professor Wilkins said the government’s skilled migration program should target educated young people and let them decide the professions after they arrive, a decision that would be naturally influenced by market conditions.

“I think here we just need to focus on general skills, so young, educated immigrants,” he said during a session on “A Bigger Australia”. “It is hard to identify and even define what a skill shortage is, never mind to identify what occupations,” he said. “You’ve got to remember that immigrants self-select, and, and so part of that is that they will fill in gaps where they are.” In the recent federal budget, the government lifted the permanent migration target for 2022-23 by 35,000 to a record 195,000, including specific allocations of an additional 4700 places for health care workers, 6100 places for the skills needed to build infrastructure and 6800 places for technology sector workers.

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles told the conference the increased migration intake was a part of the government’s push to promote a larger share of permanent migrants rather than a transient and temporary foreign work-force. “The former government cut the permanent program by 120,000 over four years, and deliberately ramped up the use of temporary visas which are essentially uncapped,” he said. “The Albanese government has taken a different approach, starting to bring forward an increase in permanent migration. This is the most important decision that the government can take in relation to the long-term rate of population growth for Australia and in respect of its composition to whether we continue to drift towards the guest worker society or we rebuild sure pathways to permanency.”

Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott said the migration program needed better management and planning to allay any community concerns over increased migration. Ms Westacott, a strong supporter of a generous migration program, said the best way to win public support for such a policy was to tackle infrastructure and other issues in order to win public support for migration.

“I think we’ve got to take the community’s concerns seriously,” she told the conference. “I think though, there are legitimate concerns that people raise and I think they have to be treated respectfully, and we have to try and build the community’s confidence.”