The Size of the Migrant Issue

The number of boats filled with asylum seekers has hit a new high this year, but it's just a small part of the refugee issue. And it shouldn't influence the debate about population and what it means for our economy.
Five or six thousand people arriving by boat seeking asylum seems like a large number. The highest number before 2010 was 4,175, back in 1999. Howard's solution stopped the arrivals in their tracks, with only 82 arrivals in three years in the early part of the decade.

My hairdresser arrived by boat. Originally from Iran, he paid a people smuggler and made the final crossing overnight from Indonesia (a transit-lounge with a very small refugee intake, incidentally). But boat arrivals are still only a proportion of the total number who seek asylum in this country. According to UNHCR figures 22,500 sought asylum in Australia last year.

"That's too many" is the common catch-cry from people and politicians who are concerned about an overcrowded country and the right to choose who comes here. Yet in the scheme of things, it's a small number. Last year there were 3.7 million people from Afghanistan and Iraq recognised as refugees by the UNHCR. The vast majority from Afghanistan sought asylum in Iran and Pakistan, the Iraqis went to Syria and Jordan. Less than 0.3 percent of refugees from these countries sought asylum in Australia. Four times as many went to the UK, and even more to Germany.

In terms of refugees in relation to the population of the country in which they seek asylum, Australia is well down the pecking order. Sweden, for example, has almost four times the number of refugees with less than half the population.

Data source: UNHCR Global Trends & CIA World Factbook

The Real Debate The real debate issue is how quickly we want Australia to grow. There were 158,000 settler arrivals in 2008/9 --- a figure that had grown less than 3 percent over five years, but which was growing steadily in the Howard years. It's almost twice the level of the late '80s.

Last year, folks from the Middle East made up 7 percent of the migrant intake, up marginally on a decade ago. The biggest increases have been in migrants from India (3 percent in 1999 and 11 percent in 2009) and China (from 7 percent to 10 percent). Kiwis have fallen from 22 percent of all new settlers at the turn of the century to 13 percent, although there are many more poms coming down here --- from 10 percent to 14 per cent over the 10 years.

So, is it all a storm in a teacup? Migration hasn't been blowing out. There's no significant shift in the make-up of our migrant intake, and concern about number of refugees is surely nothing more than a diversion from the main debate.

Stopping Migration If we didn't take in any migrants, and no Australians moved overseas (and tens of thousands do), our natural growth rate would be around 40,000 per year. But our ageing population would mean the workforce would shrink markedly. So, we do need people just to sustain our workforce. The question then is "can we grow the economy just on productivity increases or do we need a bigger Australia?"

One things for sure, we won't be getting any hard migration targets out of our politicians, at least until the election is well out of the way.

Data sources:
Dept of Immigration & Citizenship - Immigration Arrivals 2008-9 (pdf)

Parliamentary Library - Boat Arrivals Since 1976
UNHCR - 2009 Global Trends: Refugees, Asylum-seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons