Conrad Liveris: Migrants aren’t the villains

Bring up migration at work, over a drink or at the shops and the mood changes fast.

It’s a bit like dropping the words AI or ChatGPT. Half the population think it’s going to take their jobs, the other half think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, and then there’s someone in the corner saying it’s doing their kid’s homework.

The migration debate in Australia is loud, emotional, and usually misses the bigger picture. Just as AI isn’t here to replace humans but to enhance how we work, migrants aren’t here to undercut Australians but to keep the whole system running.

Still, worries deserve respect. Wages not going far enough, high rents, and stretched hospitals are real pressures. It’s natural to link them to migration because the timing feels right and the faces are visible. But if you dig into the evidence, the villains aren’t the migrants but policy failures, housing bottlenecks, and dodgy actors. Migration isn’t stealing jobs, it’s helping us get more done.

The first fear is jobs. More people must mean fewer pay cheques, right? As if the economy is a game of musical chairs. But labour markets don’t work like that. They grow when more people join them.

OECD research shows migration increases employment for Australians across every age and skill group and has no negative effect on wages. In fact, wages are often higher in regions with more migration because productivity improves.

If a bakery hires a second baker then they suddenly have to sell more bread. They don’t sack the counter staff to do that, they bring in more. Migration doesn’t shrink the pie. It makes the whole thing rise.

Parents worry that skilled migrants block opportunities for young Australians. Why train an apprentice if you can bring in someone ready-made?

But every major trade in Australia is in shortage. Even if every school leaver signed up for an apprenticeship, we still wouldn’t have enough workers. Migrants aren’t stopping apprenticeships but keeping businesses alive so apprenticeships can exist.

It’s like a football club. You need experienced players to keep the team on the field while the juniors learn. Without the veterans, the club collapses before anyone gets a chance.

People talk about mass migration as if WA is being swamped. To be fair, WA’s population is growing. But only about 50 per cent of that is from overseas arrivals, about 41,000 people. It’s deceptive to blame migrants for a population boom, when it also involves interstaters moving here, people living and working longer, and children being born and coming of age.

The problem is less about how many people there are, it’s whether we can house them. WA alone is short about 15,000 tradies, and nationally the gap is 130,000. That is why rents are rising at twice the pace of wages.

The housing shortage has been years in the making. It’s not because of migration this year.

We need more housing and we simply cannot do that alone. Without migrants our housing crisis would be catastrophic.

It’s not just houses. Farms also rely on migrant labour. Every piece of fruit on the supermarket shelf carries their fingerprints. Without them, crops rot in the field, exports vanish, and families pay more for basics.

Hospitals are another flashpoint. Waiting lists are long, and it’s tempting to blame migration for the pressure. But the real story is staff.

About a third of doctors and a quarter of nurses in Australia trained overseas. Without them our system would collapse. Think closed wards, surgeries cancelled indefinitely, ambulance ramping as standard, and regional hospitals losing entire departments.

The biggest misconception is that migration slices the pie thinner. But don’t think of an economy like a cake, it’s closer to sourdough. Add the right ingredients and it expands.

Migrants are those ingredients. They are younger, working-age, and paying taxes that fund Medicare, schools, and pensions. Treasury’s Intergenerational Report shows 85 per cent of new migrants are under 40, meaning they’re net taxpayers for decades. Without them, the budget shrinks and the services we all rely on falter.

This isn’t an abstract debate. It’s happening in staff rooms and at Friday night drinks. Workers’ concerns are genuine. The cost of living is high, housing is tight and hospitals are stretched. But migrants aren’t to blame.

We all have a role to play, but managers and employers have a unique one to explain their decisions too. Migrants are the ones building homes, staffing hospitals, keeping mines and farms running, and making businesses competitive.

Facts rarely win arguments on their own. People remember stories: a cousin who missed out on a job, a neighbour whose rent spiked, a mate’s boss who underpaid overseas students. Psychologists call it availability bias, where a vivid story outweighs the big picture.

That’s why leaders need to handle it carefully. Acknowledge the story, admit it’s wrong, but point out it’s the exception. The bigger picture is that migrants strengthen the system, not weaken it.

For more than 200 years, Australia has been a migration nation with Irish labourers, Greek builders, Vietnamese bakers, Indian engineers. Each wave filled gaps, created jobs, and expanded opportunity.

The economic evidence is consistent that migrants don’t steal jobs, they create them. They don’t suppress wages, they lift productivity. They don’t strain hospitals, they staff them.

Concerns are real, but migrants aren’t economic villains. They’re the sidekicks. And without them, our economy — and your fortunes — would grind to a halt.

Conrad Liveris is one of Australia’s leading economists.