Campbell: Trumpian politics a certainty for Australia if we don’t get migration under control

The Left is always fretting about the threat of Trumpian politics landing in Australia. But if we don’t get our record migration under control, we’re asking for it.

By coincidence the day after Donald Trump made it clear his pitch to America’s voters doesn’t go much past “Immigration! Immigration Immigration!”, the ABS dropped the latest stats on migration to Australia.

Unsurprisingly the majority of the focus post-debate has been on the dog and cat thing but that was just the most lurid of his immigrant nightmares.

From his first answer – to a question about the economy – in which he warned “we have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums” it was like Trump was desperate to post a personal best for the most outrageous thing he could say about immigration.

Donald Trump has declared will be ‘Mr Border President’ if he wins the upcoming election. Picture: AFP

Other highlights included that the Biden administration has allowed in “many, many, millions of criminals” including “terrorists … common street criminals (and) drug dealers” which has “destroyed the fabric of our country”.

The point to be made here is not that Trump is a charlatan – though he is – it’s that the only reason he has even a remote chance of reclaiming the White House with such obvious lies is because illegal immigration in America really is out of hand.

Quite reasonably, since illegal entry as a percentage of the US population was at an all-time low under his administration, Trump wants to talk about the surge that has occurred under Biden.

According to persuasive analysis published by Bloomberg, annual illegal immigration has leapt from 0.127 per cent of the total US population in 2017 under Trump to 0.93 per cent last year.

But as high as this is, it’s probably about the same as it was 20 years ago and lower than it was in the 1990s.

What has given the issue salience is not just the Biden spike but the cumulative effect of decades of border protection failure.

America’s population grew by 0.53 per cent last, while Australia’s spiked by 2.5 per cent. Picture: iStock

In other words, what has voters pissed off is not so much how many illegal immigrants are arriving now, as how many migrants there are all together.

The most common estimate you read for the total number of illegal immigrants in the US is about 11 million, which must be rubbish given that’s more or less the number who have entered under Biden and in 2018 a Yale study estimated there were already 20 million.

What you might be wondering has this got to do with the Australian stats I mentioned earlier, which deal largely with legal rather than illegal migration?

Well, what if the conditions which have given rise to the potential return of Trump are not the American populace’s anger at illegal immigration but as I said, their frustration with the total number of migrants altogether.

Because if that is the case then we really are asking for trouble.

According to the ABS data released last week, net permanent and long-term arrivals in the first six months of this year was the highest on record at 333,160 and 5 per cent higher than the same period the year before.

It also showed net permanent and long-term arrivals in the 12 months to July 2024 were the highest on record at 463,150 and 16 per cent higher than the previous record set a year earlier.

This Thursday, the ABS will publish another tranche of data which will allow us to see the net overseas migration figure for three-quarters of the past financial year.

It will almost certainly show the government has almost no chance of meeting its target of 395,000.

The population of the UK jumped by 0.66 per cent last year. Picture: Getty Images

The government says its aim is to roughly halve the NOM from the 2022-23 high of around 540,000 to around 260,000, which will become the new normal.

It might achieve it, but on current trends it’s very unlikely.

The thing to understand however is that even if this happens, this will, by historical standards, be a very high migration number indeed – more than two-and-half times the number 20 years ago.

I’m not sure Australians really grasp how much of an outlier we have become with our rate of population growth largely driven by immigration.

If you believe the official statistics, America – where immigration is front and centre of politics – the population grew last year by 0.53 per cent, Canada by 0.84 per cent and the UK by 0.66 per cent.

In contrast our population – driven by that record migration – grew by 2.5 per cent.

The speed with which high migration is changing the make-up of the country is quite astounding.

Back when John Howard was elected in 1996, only 23 per cent of people living in Australia were born overseas.

At the end of last year this figure had reached 30.7 per cent, up from 29.5 per cent a year earlier.

In other words, in roughly 30 years we will have gone from fewer than one in four of us being born overseas to one in three.

In contrast, 16 per cent of the UK population was born overseas while in America it’s about 13 per cent.

The Left is always fretting about the threat of Trumpian politics landing in Australia but if we don’t get this under control we are asking for it.

Originally published as Campbell: Trumpian politics a certainty for Australia if we don’t get migration under control