Record-breaking immigration for next 3 years

Migrants the ALP isn't game to crow about
May 16, 2008, the Australian:

AUSTRALIA is on the verge of a historical shift in immigration. We are about to enter a period of record-breaking levels in permanent and temporary immigration during the next three years. At the end of the 2007-08 financial year, Australia will have accepted more than 300,000 permanent and temporary migrants in an attempt to meet business demands for skilled workers.

After being Immigration Minister for just a few months, Chris Evans has become responsible for the greatest single expansion of Australia's immigration program, and there is much more to come.

Evans has built suddenly on the years of steady growth under the Howard government and it is certain that the number of temporary workers entering Australia will be well above 100,000 a year, and could be, if present growth rates continue, about 300,000 within three years ...

This expansion and its political and economic treatment is the great untold story of Labor's first budget in more than a decade ...

It's worth noting that Evans's action on TPVs is probably the largest automatic granting of residency in Australia to visa holders since Bob Hawke tearfully granted asylum to thousands of Chinese students after the Tiananmen Square massacre ...

In raw numbers and in percentage terms, that is the largest single increase in a year since at least 1977, and the skilled increase is the largest since the introduction of a managed migration program in 1947.

At the end of the four-year budget outlook it is estimated there will be an extra 150,000 permanent skilled workers in Australia on top of the expected annual intake of about 200,000 a year. That's almost one million new Australians, most skilled and working in the boom states, by 2011 and hundreds of thousands of temporary skilled workers based on demand ...

Meanwhile, on the other side of planet Earth ...

Devastating demolition of the case for mass immigration
Sir Andrew Green, 31st March 2008:

Today's report on immigration from the House of Lords Economic Committee strikes a devastating blow against years of blatant government propaganda. It rejects outright the Government's argument that a high level of immigration is of economic benefit to the UK.

This is exactly what we in Migrationwatch have been saying for at least three years in the teeth of opposition and, indeed, insults from the immigration lobby.

Now, at last, after the first major inquiry of its kind in this country, our view has been endorsed by the considered verdict of one of the most heavyweight committees of Parliament, including, as it does, two former Chancellors, a former Governor of the Bank of England, and several distinguished economists as well as captains of industry and finance ...

And what of the Government's argument that immigration is needed to fill job vacancies? Such claims, the committee judges with admirable restraint, are "analytically weak". Immigration, it continues, is unlikely to be an effective tool for reducing vacancies other than in the short term.

In fact the employment statistics prove the committee's point beyond doubt. It is some five years since the Government started to argue there were 600,000 vacancies that needed to be filled by immigration. In that time, we have had net foreign immigration into Britain of nearly one-and-a-half million and guess how many vacancies we still have - 600,000!

The reason, as the report points out, is that immigrants fill some vacancies but their extra demand for services and goods creates others. The Government's argument on job vacancies would, therefore, lead to a continuous cycle of immigration.

See also:
- Lords' report exposes Labour's lies on the 'benefits' of mass immigration

Via Oz Conservative